Industrial textile dyeing technology is water intensive and produces large quantity of wastewater charged with contaminants. Particularly for cotton dyeing, it is highly desirable to reduce the use of salt and alkali that are indispensable to increase the utilization of reactive dye. We report a sustainable dyeing technology with nanocellulosic (NC) fibers that will decrease the amount of salt and alkali used in cotton dyeing by an order of magnitude. NC hydrogel produced by high-pressure homogenization is mixed with reactive dye molecules and dye auxiliaries, and the coloration of textile is completed by printing of NC-dye mixture onto cotton fabric followed by thermal curing. NC-based dyeing exhibits comparable dyeing and colorfastness properties to conventional exhaust dyeing with the reduction of the use of salt and alkali by a factor of 10, which leads to the decrease in its eutrophication emission by a factor of 6 by a gate-to-gate life-cycle assessment.  The large surface area (430 m&lt;sup zoompage-fontsize="13"&gt;2</sup>/g) of NC fibers and their strong affinity to cotton fibers enable the described sustainable dyeing technology, which presents a potential of NC hydrogel as a versatile coating and a finishing material in textile applications.

Environmentally sound textile dyeing technology with nanofibrillated cellulose

255th National Meeting (2018)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.