Ökologische Auswirkungen der Textilveredelung von zwei ausgewählten Warentypen aus Baumwolle und Viskose

Published as part of the project EnaTex

Authors: Hanna Karg, Sven Gärtner, Guido Reinhardt

The joint project ‘Energy and Sustainability in the Textile Industry: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energies in Partnership for Climate Protection’, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) from 2021 to 2025, aims, among other things, to support the Indonesian textile industry on its path to a sustainable future. As part of this project, ifeu is responsible for the ecological assessment of current processes in the Indonesian textile industry and measures to increase sustainability. This includes, among other things, the optimisation of processes, the substitution of technologies and the comparison of textile products. The questions included in the ecological assessment were defined by the project partners.

One of these questions was formulated by the Department of Textile and Clothing Technology at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and deals with the proportion of the overall ecological impact of textile finishing that is attributable to the individual process steps along the textile finishing chain under Indonesian conditions. One of the reasons for this is that textile finishing, which involves chemical, mechanical and thermal processing of textile surfaces before they are further processed into final textile products, is considered to be particularly harmful to the environment. Two different textile goods were selected for this purpose, which require different finishing steps due to their fibre type and construction: a cotton knit and a viscose fabric. The aim is, on the one hand, to identify the significance of the individual process steps along the textile finishing chain and not to calculate the environmental impact of the individual process steps of specific company processes to the nearest decimal point. On the other hand, the findings should highlight potential for optimisation through technological innovations in process management or the use of dyes and chemicals.

The aim of this study is therefore to determine the contribution of the individual process steps in textile finishing to the overall ecological footprint and to identify processes that contribute particularly significantly to the overall ecological impact within the system boundaries under consideration.