Chapter 5 — full chapter
5.2 Process and Resource Efficiency
Process and resource efficiency focuses on reducing the water, energy and chemical inputs required to manufacture textile products while maintaining the required quality and performance.
Building on the material-efficiency strategies introduced in Chapter 4, this section focuses on three resource-intensive areas of textile manufacturing. Dyeing, washing, finishing and other wet-processing operations can require substantial amounts of water, heat, electricity and chemicals, and their resource profiles vary considerably depending on the process, machinery, fibre type and production conditions (Holkar et al., 2016; Kır et al., 2024).
Improving efficiency therefore requires looking at individual processes rather than treating the factory as a single resource consumer. Research on textile manufacturing shows that process-level monitoring can identify significant opportunities to reduce electricity, steam, water and other resource inputs, particularly in wet-processing operations (Kır et al., 2024).
Three areas are examined in this section:
- water efficiency and closed-loop water systems
- energy efficiency and renewable energy
- chemicals management and restricted substances
The objective is to reduce unnecessary resource use first and then improve how the remaining inputs and outputs are managed. This includes reducing freshwater demand, improving energy efficiency, increasing the use of lower-impact energy sources and preventing hazardous substances from entering production where possible (Farhana et al., 2022; Patra & Pariti, 2022).