7 - 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.