Samenvatting

The aim of this graduation thesis is to investigate the possible future replacement of colouring technology to reduce the environmental impact of selected non-operational workwear clothing used by employees of the Dutch Ministry of Defence. Recently, companies started implementing circular materials into their product range. However, these materials will undergo through the same harmful practises, such as pre-treatment, dyeing and finishing. Therefore, it is necessary to look for possible replacement technologies to achieve responsible consumption and production.
For this purpose, qualitative and quantitative research methods are used to answer the question: “Which alternative textile dyeing technologies can improve the environmental impact of non-operational workwear?”. Firstly, document analysis was executed to obtain colourfastness requirements for the selected workwear. Secondly, expert interviews were conducted to get a better understanding of novel dyeing technologies and their opportunities and challenges to implementation. Also, an industry perspective was sought to get insights from workwear, corporate fashion, and textile manufacturing supplier specialists. Furthermore, several alternatively dyed samples were collected and tested for colour resistance in the Saxion Textile Lab. These alternatives include natural dyeing, supercritical carbon dioxide (ScCO2) dyeing, dope dyeing, digital spray dyeing, and powder pigment dyeing derived from textile waste. Lastly, the alternative samples that met the colourfastness requirements were analysed in the MODINT Ecotool and compared to the traditional dyeing processing.
To conclude, dope dyeing proved its excellent colourfastness performance. None of the other tested alternatives met the ministry requirements. Further, dope dyeing is a prominent resource-efficient technique since it eliminates the environmental impact during the dyeing stage. In spite of this, dope dyeing can be used as a replacement only for the polyester content of the selected garments. In contrast, renewable dyes such as natural, bacterial, and waste textile resources were found to be irrelevant alternatives for garments mainly due to the limited colourfastness performance and non-commercial viability at the moment. Also, the environmental benefits of natural dyes were insignificant. On the other hand, spray dyeing and ScCO2 dyeing needs some technological improvement to be applied as a replacement for the current dyeing technology.