Seeking new solutions to the environmental impact and high costs associated with wastewater treatment, Fashion for Good corporate partners Arvind Limited, BestSeller, C&A and PVH Corp provided business support, development funding and expertise to the pioneering pilot project.

As a global leader in apparel manufacturing and with a focus on textiles, advanced materials, and environmental solutions, Arvind Limited provided access to its Effluent Treatment Plant near Gujarat, India, one the world’s largest textile manufacturing operations, to conduct a field evaluation. The SeaChange system was implemented over a period of three months to test and evaluate the feasibility of widescale implementation of the system. 

"A conventional wastewater treatment process is very complex, involving multiple different steps, cleaning the wastewater further with each technique. SeaChange's technology is able to plug into several existing points of the conventional system. The pilot provided an opportunity to test SeaChange's technology in multiple different waste streams. The waste streams tested included sludge, dyeing concentrates and combined effluent, Reverse Osmosis reject and Mother Liquor. All waste streams were successfully treated by the SeaChange system and reduced to minerals in a single pass, demonstrating the technical viability of the technology to process wastewater. Sludge was selected as the most viable application for SeaChange, given its hefty environmental impact and cost of disposal," Fashion for Good said in a media release.

SeaChange Technologies has developed an innovative mechanical system where wastewater or sludge is heated,?pressurised and injected as an aerosol into a cyclonic separator. This single-step process uses the cyclonic separation technique to draw out unwanted materials, microplastics and other non-biodegradable components from the water itself. Due to the heat and presence of oxygen in the air, these organic compounds then undergo thermal oxidisation causing them to degrade to CO₂.? 

This is done by generating near-critical water conditions, where about 5-10 per cent of the water mass becomes ionised. When water ionises, it creates free radicals that can destroy most organic material. By using heat from the organic oxidation process, energy use in maintaining this near-critical environment is incredibly efficient, using only about 60 per cent of what would otherwise be required for water vapourisation. The process enables treatment of wastewater while eliminating the production of sludge and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions; the CO₂ generated is just a small fraction of the greenhouse gasses generated by conventional processes.

It is estimated that a typical dyehouse generates one to three tonnes of sludge per day from wastewater treatment, costing over $200,000 annually for its disposal and generating over 5,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year. Across thousands of suppliers and/or dyehouses, these costs are tremendous and only increasing as options for its safe disposal become more limited under public pressure to improve sustainability. Implementing the SeaChange system into their treatment facility will effectively eliminate such costs as well as the associated environmental impacts.  

In the coming year, SeaChange will be pursuing funding and strategic partnerships in order to implement the commercial application of its system on a wide scale.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RKS)