Natural Dyes Extraction Intended for Coloring Process in Fashion Indutries

Abstract

Recently, small scale fashion industries are growing quite rapidly in Indonesia. This is due to the continuous encouragement and facilitation by the Government of Indonesia to improve workforce in creative industry. As fashion industries depend on the availability of dyes as one of their resource, it is very important to develop a new and sustainable supply of dyes for dyeing process in fashion industries. Hence, research on the extraction of dyes from sustainable and natural resources for fashion industries are considered very important and urgent. Dyes for fashion and textile are naturally occurred in plants or parts of plants. The extraction of dyes from these sources can be conducted by using simple mixing between solvent and the plants inside a soxhlet extractor or reflux apparatus. In this study, the extraction processes of natural dyes from two materials, i.e. sappanwood, and mango leaf employing combination of maceration, soxhlet and reflux techniques were reported. The experiments were conducted to analyse the effects of extraction time and solvent to materials ratios on the yield of dyes. The experimental results showed that for all materials the optimum ratio of material and solvent was 1 : 6. In addition, the reflux followed by maceration could produce dyes that can be utilised for fabric coloring that suits the industrial needs.