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The chemical footprint (ChF) can identify the harmful effects of discharged chemical pollutants, helping producers to select environmentally friendly chemicals to reduce their negative environmental impact. This paper quantified and evaluated the ChF of the wet processing of cotton fabric with data collected from a dyeing enterprise. The results showed that the discharged sodium hydroxide caused the most severe impact in terms of both human toxicity and ecotoxicity due to the extensive usage and its high toxicity. The discharged sodium carbonate and dimethyl silicone oil also had a greater environmental impact. Comprehensive evaluation of human toxicity and ecotoxicity with a multi-objective grey target decision-making model indicated that the pretreatment process had the most significant impact, followed by the finishing process and dyeing process. More attention should be paid to the pretreatment process, such as the selection of environmentally friendly textile chemicals, in order to reduce the native impacts of the wet processing of cotton fabric.

The production of colorful yarn dyed fabrics consumes a lot of dyes, auxiliaries, and water. It generates a plethora of chemical pollutants and will cause potential environmental problems. Defining the chemical footprint can transform the environmental risk caused by human activities into an intuitive form of toxicity measurement. Based on the chemical footprint methodology, this article calculated and evaluated the chemical footprints of a kind of yarn dyed fabric with the USEtox model. The results revealed that sodium hydroxide caused the most severe human toxicity, and di(hydrogenated tallow) alkyl dimethyl ammonium chloride caused the most severe ecotoxicity. The comprehensive evaluation of human toxicity and ecotoxicity with life cycle assessment polygon method showed that the preshrinking process had the largest environmental load. Selecting environmentally friendly softeners in the preshrinking process can alleviate the environmental impacts caused by the production of yarn dyed fabrics.

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