Analysis of water consumption and potential savings in a cotton textile dye house in Denizli, Turkey

Abstract

Denizli is one of the major textile and clothing manufacturing centers in Turkey, where a cotton-based home textile manufacturing cluster has been built up during the last 40years on top of the ancient and historic textile manufacturing traditions and handcrafts. In this study, a large cotton textile manufacturing dye house is investigated to capture the amount of water, chemical additives, energy, and salt consumption during the manufacturing stages. The gathered data are examined to determine possible improvements to maintain decreased fresh water consumption and consequently sustainable production applications. Primarily, a water consumption map of the plant is analyzed and the departments consuming the greatest amounts of fresh water are elaborated by Pareto analysis. Departments employing wet processes, especially high-temperature (HT) fabric rope dyeing and cone dyeing, are found to be high water consumers in the plant. Then the best available methods, applications, and recipes were investigated to improve the production methods to save water, chemical additives, salt, and energy. After evaluating the appropriate water saving possibilities in the plant, the use of drop-fill rinsing instead of overflow rinsing, using neutral enzymes instead of acidic enzymes, reducing salt consumption, and reducing processing time and energy applications were implemented. As a result of the intensive examination, analysis, and process improvement work, an average value of 62% of fresh water saving and 20.5% energy saving in total were obtained. Process optimization in the plant was incrementally applied to replace the overflow rinsing steps with the neutral enzyme utilized drop-fill process, possible without any loss of quality. Promising results that are gathered as water, energy, salt, and time savings show that spreading these approaches would help to reduce the environmental influence of the traditional cotton dyeing process in general. In this chapter, there are literature reviews about previous studies, analyses of reactive dyeing processes, a discussion of water, energy, and chemical consumption, and a description of the implementation of the drop/fill method and general findings. This study can be regarded as an example of sustainable and environmentally friendly production with concrete economic and environmental achievements in the Turkish textile industry. The results of the study show that the wide adoption of the proposed sustainable production measures will create effective change in the Turkish textile industry. Moreover, economic returns will also help the Turkish textile industry to face the tough challenges of high-quality, low-cost, and environmentally-friendly production in the global textile market. This study and similar case studies will be able to provide an environmental benefit, not only in Turkey, but all over the world. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.