A frugal way of reusing wastewater in textile pre-treatment process

Abstract

A grey fabric undergoes pre-treatment processes like desizing, scouring and bleaching before it gets dyed and requires a huge amount of chemicals and water. Scouring and bleaching of fabric is done by using alkali and oxidising agent respectively; and wastewater will contain the unexhausted chemicals from both the processes. Efforts have been made to utilise these unexhausted chemicals to desize a new grey fabric. The study is also extended to check the effect of filtration (90–0.2μm) for reuse of wastewater on fabric properties such as Tegewa rating, absorbency and whiteness Index. The results show that, there is an improvement in the fabric properties as compared to conventional process after reusing the wastewater; they also exhibit comparable dyeing and fastness properties when further dyed with CBFIX Navy Blue HER and CBFIX Yellow HE6G. The economical impact of the process is about 50% and 19% reduction in intake of fresh water and chemicals respectively; and an overall saving of 40% on the processing cost of the fabric.