Organic Leather

After organic fabric and dyes, now it is the trend of organic leather. Organic does not mean 100% environment-friendly, but it is made up without using any synthetic material. These organic materials are known as eco-friendly materials. The volume of people using organic leather is rising day by day. According to the Organic Trade Association, an industry group based in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in the year 2005, consumer sales of organic fiber for fabrics and other things was $160 million and was up by 44% than the previous year.

Demand is still rising and reaching to a higher scale. The Organic Trade Association has standards for textiles and it has banned the used of toxic dyes in fabric, but it is not necessary that the cotton dyed with organic dyes is never processed by inorganic fertilizers and pesticides.

In January 2007, the Organic Trade Association adopted new standards for textile processing. It is also developing a special logo for organic textiles. According to the standards, the processing of chemicals and heavy metals is not allowed, but synthetic sewing thread is allowed.

Dyes and dyeing methods

In the field of textile dyes, one of the latest innovations is conductive ink. This conductive ink can be produced by adding Copper (Cu), Carbon (C), Nickel (Ni), Silver (Ag) and Gold (Au) in conventional printing inks. This ink has the capability of electricity conductance.

Another new innovation is eco-friendly dyes or natural dyes and they do not contain any material which is harmful to nature or human beings.

One more recent innovation is bale dyeing. This involves the fibers in the form of raw bales as they are directly obtained from the suppliers. Then these bales are put into a cage which is specially designed for this. Every cage has a capacity of four bales. The cage is then placed in the dye kier as usual and the dyeing takes place as in the conventional method. In this process, the bales are hydro-extracted or vacuum-extracted to remove the extra moisture. This is a very economical method and very useful when the product range is limited.

Technology

Change is always the trend in the field of textile machinery and techniques. A new evolution came in the textile industry when Rotors took the place of spindles in spinning and shuttleless looms took the place of conventional looms in weaving. It changed the shape of the whole textile industry. Better quality yarn was produced by Rotors and better quality fabric by shuttleless looms. Day by day, technology adds more with computer programming to robot.

The recent innovation in the field of textile machinery is new AEROpeicing technology on the R 40 rotor spinning machine. This improves the end products manufactured. The new AEROpiecing technology was developed three years ago by Rieter for its R 40 automatic rotor spinning machine. These machines are equipped with robots which are with updated software to get high precision in spinning. The yarn produced by this technology has no faults and high visible impact even through the end-product. AEROpeicing technology is different from conventional piecing methods.

This technology opens up new possibilities for the process ability of materials and adds quality advantage also.

Nanotechnology

As the world expands more macroscopically, science is doing innovations more microscopically. Nanotechnology is one of them. �Nano� stands for one billionth metre and is a prefix.

1nm=10^-9 m

Nanotechnology is used for all the developments where the size can be counted in nanometers. Thus, nanomaterials are those in which one dimension can measure in nano range. Nanotechnology is used in textiles also.