No abstract

The work reported in this paper presents the assessment of environmental performances of selected branded apparel T-Shirt products made by Bangladesh. The study is based on a standard evaluation tool named Higg Index which is basically used widely to measure the environmental sustainability of various apparel products. Higg Index is an internal self-assessment tool created by the outdoor apparel industry and Nike’s apparel environmental design tool which aims to aggregate information on the environmental performance of products. The Index considers performance across the full life-cycle of a product, including impacts from “input materials, manufacturing, packaging, transportation, use, and end-of-life.” Selected apparel branded T-Shirt products from S. Oliver, BUTex-Innovation, PUMA, Esprit, Aarong, and Yellow were taken into consideration. The results indicate that newly developed ecofriendly T-shirt and foreign branded products named S. Oliver, PUMA, and Esprit gained higher score but local branded product like Aarong and Yellow gained lower score in terms of environmental sustainability based on Higg Index assessment tool. Moreover, many weaknesses and opportunities for improvement of both local and foreign branded T-Shirt products have been identified and suggested which would eventually lead the fashion designer, apparel manufacturer, stakeholder, and consumer towards greener apparel products.

Washing of Denim garment with pumic stone combined with bleaching powder was investigated to preserve the quality and to create more distress worn-look fashionable Denim garment. For this, regular Denim trouser (twill 3/1 weave, composition 100 % cotton) was selected for the present investigation. The Denim trouser has been processed by stone-bleach washing technique, using various concentrations of pumice stone (10 to 70%) (owg) with 10 g/L bleaching powder at 40 o C for 20 min. In order to evaluate the influence of pumice stone on physicomechanical properties like tensile strength, elongation at break, fabric weight, colour change, the dimensional characteristics (shrinkage/ extensibility), stiffness and water absorption has been determined. Fabric surface was also examined by scanning electron microscope (SEM). It can be concluded that pumice stone made the influence on Denim properties, whereas in producing durable and distressed worn look Denim garment the optimised washing condition for the best value is determined.

No abstract

The reactivity of lingocellulosic jute fiber to sunlight (UV) and atmospheric gases and chemicals was reduced by grafting jute with acrylate monomers, such as ethyl acrylate (EA) and 2-hydroxy ethyl methacrylate (HEMA). The grafting reaction sufficiently blocked the reactive groups of jute and thus, physically- and chemically-bound cellulosic units and on the fiber surface. The grafting gave additional strength, higher thermal stability and improved surface smoothness. Though the modified fibers showed better color fastness properties in sunlight, the dyeability of the modified fibers somewhat decreased. Grafting reaction and other characteristics of modified fibers were investigated with FT-IR, tensile tester, thermogravimeric analyser, and grey scale respectively. The change of surface morphology of the jute fiber on modification was also observed with a scanning electron microscopy. Modification of bleached jute and alkali-activated bleached jute with HEMA gave higher graft yield (26.6, 29.4 %) than that of EA modification (22.5, 24.7 %). Due to the different chemical features, HEMA-modified fiber exhibited better chemical, thermal and physical properties.