Question

I would like to write a grant proposal related to textile and clothing industry environmental issues, and I'm going to use

Environmental Education (EE) Grants program to write the proposal.

I need topics about environmental issues related to textile and clothing industry to develop a curriculum and workshops for textile and clothing college students.

Thank you

Answer 1

Ans. Textile and Clothing industry deals with various types of pollution. The European Union has accounted the contribution of textile industries to ecological footprint by about 6 %. The chief raw material is usually cotton, the production of which itself requires huge amount of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, which have huge impact on both the land and water pollution. Run off leads to contamination of the receiving water bodies. Another raw material is silk, which is procured from silk worms and also requires pesticides. The degumming process leads to huge waste generation, and requires huge amount of water, thus sustainability is not a part of this industry. Polyester is non biodegradable and the byproducts of the clothing industry contain polyesters which are thus a problem for disposal. It has been studied that about 700000 microplastic fibers are released from a single load of polyester laundry. These produce pollutants which are toxic to the environment like antimony. Rayon is another widely used raw material which is manufactured using caustic soda and sulfuric acid. Moreover, rayon, viscose are acquired from trees and plants, so the demand for clothing leads to deforestation as well

Textile industry makes use of dyes to color the garments which are chemicals like acid based dyes, sulfur based dyes, reactive dyes, azoic, solvent etc., specially for synthetic dyes. Natural dyes are also used but they require mordants which are made up of chromites and dichromites. Dyes also contain cadmium. All these chemicals are found in the textiles effluents. These wastes pollute the surface waters and the toxic metals and metalloids present in the effluents are toxic for the aquatic ecosystem in the water body. It leads to the death of aquatic animals, and they also undergo biomagnification upon being transferred to the successive trophic levels. The bleaching process uses chlorine compounds, thus the effluent contains organochlorines and chlorine dioxides. The water required to prepare just one piece of cloth is enormous.

Air quality also gets affected by emissions from textile industries. The energy production process where the boiler produces considerable amount of nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur oxides (SOx) along with particulate matter. The coating, drying and curing processes release volatile organic compounds. The sizing process uses gums and polyvinyl alcohols, which release NOx, SOx and carbon monoxide. The dyeing process leads to release of aniline, hydrogen sulfide. Printing process releases ammonia and hydrocarbons. The hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides take part in smog formation.