Sustainable Wet Processing—An Alternative Source for Detoxifying Supply Chain in Textiles

Abstract

This chapter discusses the sustainable wet processing techniques and their environmental impacts in the textile industries. Wet processing is a main sector in textile industries, which affects the end product and their quality of textiles. Large amount of water, chemicals and energy are required for various stages of wet processing operation. In this wet processing, Water is used as the solvent for the chemicals and dyes, because of its low price and availability. But, during the process, water gets polluted with chemicals and unspent dye stuffs and gives an end product as effluent. The toxic effluent is not easy to treat or biodegrade and is harmful to humans and animals. This kind of contamination and health problems arises normally in the conventional method of wet processing. So, the alternative methods are necessary to improve the sustainability of the textile wet processing. In the recent time, the new eco-friendly methods have been developed and are preferred mostly instead of conventional methods. Plasma, ultrasonic, laser, biotechnology digital inkjet printing are the new innovated eco-friendly technologies, which provide more advantages to wet processing. In these methods, there are no any harmful chemical, wastewater and mechanical hazards to textiles, etc. This study also clearly discusses the various stages of wet processing operations such as desizing, scouring, bleaching, mercerizing, dyeing, finishing and printing with a new innovated trend and their eco-friendly procedures and technologies on the wet processing.