Environmental assessment of fabric wet processing from gate-to-gate perspective: Comparative study of weaving and materials

Abstract

Textile industry has yet to be developed beyond low efficiency, high resources consumption, and toxic emissions, with wet processing process a dominant contributor to resources consumption and pollution emissions. Recognition of the environmental impact of the representative wet processing is essential to achieve eco-friendly development of textile industry. Using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), this study addressed the environmental impacts of wet processing of woven/knitted cotton and polyester fabrics from 4 textile enterprises in China by deploying gate to gate system boundary. One ton of grey cloth was chosen as the functional unit. Eighteen midpoint impact categories and three endpoint impact categories were assessed via ReCiPe 2016 v1.1 (H) method. The results indicated “dyeing unit” as the dominant unit for all the impact categories at the midpoint, which was mainly derived from electricity consumed by cotton wet processing and detergents used in polyester wet processing. Among 4 different fabric wet processing, woven polyester wet processing exhibited the highest impact, while the least impact was assigned to knitted cotton. In the midpoint categories of water use, dyeing unit was also the major contributor in wet processing of knitted cotton (41.20 m3) and knitted polyester (44.70 m3). Pretreatment accounted for an overwhelming percentage of water use in woven cotton (48.00 %) and woven polyester (56.00 %). Woven polyester wet processing was also the most energy-intensive and resource-consuming industry among all scenarios, with a 3.37-fold higher fossil resource scarcity per ton of fabric compared with woven cotton. The results recommend measures for cleaner production in the wet processing.