Comparing the Climate Change Impact of Different Textile Wet Finishing Systems in Indonesia

Fact Sheet - published as part of the project EnaTex

Authors: Hanna Karg, Sven Gärtner, Guido Reinhardt

One of the aims of the joint project "Energy and Sustainability in the Textile Industry - Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energies in Partnership for Climate Protection" (EnaTex), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) from 2021 to 2025, is to support the Indonesian textile industry towards a sustainable future. As part of this project, the ifeu - Institute for Energy and Environmental Research Heidelberg gGmbH (ifeu) leads the environmental assessment of current processes in the Indonesian textile industry and selected measures to enhance sustainability. These include process optimization, technology substitution and the comparison of textile products. The topics to be assessed were defined by the project participants.
One of these topics was defined by the Indonesian company Harapan Kurnia Textile Indonesia, Bandung, and deals with wet finishing, a processing step in the overall textile production process. The topic is relevant be-cause wet finishing can have a significant environmental impact and can be carried out using different tech-nologies: exhaust, semi-continuous and continuous processes. From an environmental point of view, the main difference between these processes is the amount of energy and water used per kilogramme of textile fabric.

The aim of this study is therefore to determine the environmental impacts of different wet finishing technologies that are established in the Indonesian textile industry.