Comprehensive Assessment of the Chemical Footprint of Yarn Dyed Fabric

Abstract

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.

Toxicity Impact Assessment of Nitrogen Oxide and Sulfur Dioxide Emissions in China’s Textile Industry With Chemical Footprint Method

“…Subsequent studies on water pollutants and impacts on aquatic ecosystems in the textile industry have been gradually conducted. [25][26][27] Qian et al 28 first applied ChF to the environmental impact assessment of gaseous pollutants in the textile industry to quantify and assess the ChF of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in polyester fabric production. Guo et al 29 proposed a new method to solve the missing characteristic factors (CFs), and constructed a ChF model that can effectively assess the environmental impact of NO X and SO 2 emissions in the textile industry.…”