Environmental Profile Study of Ozone Decolorization of Reactive Dyed Cotton Textiles by Utilizing Life Cycle Assessment

Research approaches on the use of ecotechnologies like ozone assisted processes for the decolorization of textiles are being explored as against the conventional alkaline reductive process for the color stripping of the cotton textiles. The evaluation of these ecotechnologies must be performed to assess the environmental impacts. Partial "gate to gate" Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was implemented to study the ozone based decolorization process of the reactive dyed cotton textiles. Experiments were performed to determine input and output data flows for decolorization treatment of reactive dyed cotton textile using the ozonation process. The functional unit was defined as "treatment of 40 g of reactive dyed cotton fabric to achieve more than 94% color stripping". Generic and specific data bases were also used to determine flows, and International Life Cycle Data system (ILCD) method was selected to convert all flows into environmental impacts. The impact category "Water resource depletion" is the highest for all the ozonation processes as it has the greatest relative value after normalization amongst all the impact indicators. Electricity and Oxygen formation were found to be the major contributors to the environmental impacts. New experimental conditions have been studied to optimize the impacts.