Process-integrated Resource Management-An Efficient Instrument for environmentally Friendly Textile Finishing

Environmental awareness has long ceased to be the preserve of production plants in Europe. In the so-called developing countries, authorities are focussing increasingly on big polluters. Unfortunately, in this context textile wet finishing has an extremely bad reputation all around the world. However, there is some hope that a new, integrated environmental concept from Swiss textile machinery manufacturer Benninger, which can run without producing any waste water at all, may well make this bad reputation a thing of the past in the next few years render this negative reputation a thing of the past

Worldwide, only around 10% of total water consumption is accounted for by direct human needs .The lion's share of 70% is used in agriculture, and the remaining 20% is used in industry. Regional variations give an indication of the degree of industrialisation of the different national economies. For example, China uses 80% of its water to irrigate fields, whereas in Europe half of the water is pumped into factories. All this is in stark contrast to the geographical distribution of the resource "water". While China is home to around 20% of the world's population, it only has access to around 5% of world's freshwater supplies. Conflicts in this area are already (pre-) programmed.

A large amount of our drinking water is already used during the production of food. For example, it takes 5,000 litres of water to produce just one kilogram of meat for human consumption. But also vegetarians have an impact: The production of both one kilogram of bread or one litre of orange juice entails the use of 1000 litres of water. In the light of this, the remaining consumption of an average household in Switzerland seems to be rather modest, which adds up in a daily water consumption of approximately 162 litres per head (a Swiss household needs for example: showers/washing 32 l, toilet flushing 48 l, washing machine 30 l, cooking, drinking, washing up etc. 20 l).

Water and energy always have been the two main components in the production of textile fabrics .The majority of it goes into the production of the natural fibres: Regardless of whether cotton, wool or linen is concerned, the plants need to be watered throughout their entire lifecycle, and the sheep need to be fed and watered. In the case of cotton, this can sum up to as much as 20,000 litres of water per kilogram (in Sudan as much as 29,000 l). Against the background of increasing shortages of global resources, these are alarming figures, albeit ones which can be dramatically reduced with the aid of innovative irrigation techniques (plantation cultivation / "drip irrigation"). With these new techniques, the production of one kilogram of cotton still requires between 7,000 and 9,000 litres of water, but the downward trend at least gives some cause for hope.

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Stephan Kehry is associated with Benninger AG, Switzerland "www.benningergroup.com"