Green fashion: Why dyeing clothes has a big environmental impact

The start-up Alchemie Technology is in the final stages of launching a venture it claims will destroy the world clothing business and reduce its carbon footprints in a small corner of rural Taiwan, set amongst other colour houses and small factories.

With the country’s second modern dyeing process, the UK-based start-up has targeted one of the dirtiest areas of the clothing business: dyeing fabric.

” Traditionally, you soak a piece of fabric in waters at 135 degrees Fahrenheit for about four hours, accumulating liters and a lot of water. For instance, to colour one bit of nylon, you’re generating 30 lots of poisonous wastewater”, Alchemie leader Dr Alan Hudd tells me.

He points out that the same method was developed 175 years earlier in the northwest of England, in the Lancashire cotton mill and the Yorkshire cotton mill, and that we exported it, first to the US and then to the companies in Asia.

The apparel industry uses an estimated five trillion litres of water each year to simply dye fabric, according to the World Resources Institute, a US-based non-profit research centre.

The industry is, in turn, responsible for 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution, while also using up vital resources like groundwater in some countries. It also releases a massive carbon footprint from start to finish – or around 10% of annual global emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

Alchemie claims its tech can assist in resolving that issue.

Called Endeavour, its system is compress cloth coloring, drying, and fixing into a considerably shorter and water-saving process.

According to the company, Endeavour uses the same concept as inkjet printers to quickly and precisely fire colour onto and through the material. The computer’s 2, 800 dispensers flames about 1.2 billion droplets per straight meter of fabric.

” What we’re really doing is registering and putting a very small cut, a really small fall, precisely and accurately onto the fabric,” the company said. And we can change these falls on and off, just like a mild switch”, says Dr Hudd.

Alchemie claims that the process produces significant savings, working three to five times as quickly as traditional processes, and reducing water consumption by 95 %, energy consumption, and energy consumption by 85 %.

Developed first in Cambridge, the business is now in Taiwan to see how Endeavour works in a real-world setting.

” The UK, they’re actually strong in R&amp, D tasks, they’re actually strong in inventing new things, but surely if you want to shift to commercialism you need to go to the actual companies”, says Ryan Chen, the new chief of operations at Alchemie, who has a background in cotton production in Taiwan.

Other businesses are making attempts to produce nearly waterless dye.

There’s the China-based textile company NTX, which has developed a heatless dye process that can cut down water use by 90 % and dye by 40 %, according to their website, and the Swedish start-up Imogo, which also uses a “digital spray application” with similar environmental benefits.

NTX and Imogo did not reply to the BBC’s interview request.

The solutions provided by these companies “look quite promising,” according to Kirsi Niinimäki, a professor in design who studies the future of textiles at Finland’s Aalto University. However, she says she would like to see more detailed information about issues like the fixing process and long-term studies on fabric durability.

But even though it’s early days, Ms Niinimäki says companies like Alchemie could bring real changes to the industry.

” All these kinds of new technologies, I think that they are improvements. If you’re able to use less water, for example, that of course means less energy, and perhaps even less chemicals – so that of course is a huge improvement”.

There are still some issues to be resolved in Taiwan, such as how to operate the Endeavour machine in a hotter, humid climate than the UK.

Matthew Avis, the service manager for Endeavour, discovered that the machine needed to operate in an air-conditioned environment, which is a significant lesson given how much apparel manufacturing occurs in southern Asia.

The business also has ambitious objectives in 2025. Alchemie is now traveling next to South Asia and Portugal to test its machines and try it out on cotton after its test run with polyester in Taiwan.

Additionally, they will need to determine how to expand Endeavour.

Big fashion companies like Inditex, the owner of Zara, work with thousands of factories. Its suppliers would require hundreds of Endeavours to work together to meet the fabric dyeing industry’s demand.

And that’s just one company- there will be many, many more in need.