Nike backs waterless fabric dyeing process

Athletic wear giant Nike Inc has teamed up with a Dutch textile machinery company that has developed a way to dye fabrics without using water — and says it hopes to boost the technology’s uptake throughout the apparel industry.

The strategic partnership is with DyeCoo Textile Systems BV, which has developed and built what are claimed to be the first commercially available waterless textile dyeing machines that use recycled carbon dioxide instead of water in the dyeing process.

“We believe this technology has the potential to revolutionise textile manufacturing, and we want to collaborate with progressive dye houses, textile manufacturers and consumer apparel brands to scale this technology and push it throughout the industry,” says Eric Sprunk, Nike’s vice president of merchandising and product.

Nike has been exploring this technology for the past eight years and expects to showcase apparel using textiles dyed without water at events later this year. It also wants to scale up the technology for larger production volumes.

As well as using no water, the system is said to reduce energy use, requires no auxiliary chemicals or drying — and is twice as fast as conventional processes.

“The technology can also improve the quality of the dyed fabric, allows for greater control over the dyeing process, enables new dye capabilities and transforms fabric dyeing so that it can take place just about anywhere,” adds Reinier Mommaal, CEO of DyeCoo.

Nike was one of several firms that jumped on board the so-called Detox challenge set out last year by environmental pressure group Greenpeace to eliminate the discharge of hazardous chemicals from their supply chains by 2020.

One of the issues they highlighted in a joint ‘roadmap’ of the steps they intend to take to achieve the goal was the vast volume of water used in dyeing/finishing and other processes — and the fact that wastewater treatment varies from facility to facility.

Indeed, conventional textile dyeing requires substantial amounts of water. On average, an estimated 100-150 liters of water is needed to process one kg of textile materials today — and industry analysts estimate that more than 39 million tons of polyester will be dyed annually by 2015.

Nike says it expects DyeCoo’s supercritical fluid carbon dioxide, or “SCF” CO2 dyeing technology, to have a particularly positive impact in Asia, where much of the world’s textile dyeing occurs.

As this technology is brought to scale, large amounts of water used in conventional textile dyeing will no longer be needed, nor will the commensurate use of fossil fuel-generated energy be required to heat such large sums of water.

The removal of water from the textile dyeing process also eliminates the risk of effluent discharge, a known environmental hazard. The CO2 used in DyeCoo’s dyeing process is also reclaimed and reused.

The waterless dyeing process is currently limited to polyester fabric, but research is underway to extend its application to other natural and synthetic fabrics.

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