Fashion industry certainly colourful, but is it green? EU-funded project helps it clean up its act
By the time a new fashion season comes round, a flood of new fabrics in a seemingly endless amount of colours fills the catwalks and fashion blogs: a bona fide feast for the fashion hungry. But amid all this ocular pleasure, the reality is that producing these multi-coloured textiles comes at a prime cost to the environment as heavy polluting dyes find their way into the textile industry's wastewater. However, a new water clean-up technology developed as part of an EU-funded project could help the fashion industry clean up its act. Developed as part of the project INNOWATECH ('Innovative and integrated technologies for the treatment of industrial wastewater'), which received EUR 2,750,000 of funding under the 'Sustainable Development, Global Change and Ecosystems' Thematic area of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), the new Sequencing Batch Biofilter Granular Reactor (SBBGR) helps remove the most polluting textile dyes components - so-called recalcitrant organic compounds - by breaking them down using ozone treatment before applying an innovative wastewater bio-filtering technique. INNOWATECH, which ran from 2006 until 2010, brought together researchers from 17 partner institutes across Australia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Benefits of the SBBGR are that it integrates biological treatment with a chemical oxidation treatment, based on ozone, while physically separating these two steps. As Claudio Di Iaconi, from the Water Research Institute (WRI) of the Italian National Research Council explains: 'The innovation is to get together biological degradation and chemical oxidation, two processes used with completely different goals and timings in conventional systems.' Unlike traditional biological systems, this novel biological treatment filter relies on microorganisms growing in aggregates and is separated from the basin containing ozone and the waste. The wastewater is poured over the microorganisms, which process pollutants, and each aggregate holds up to 10 times more microorganisms than conventional technologies. Di Iaconi emphasises that this new system produces 80% less sludge than traditional biological ones. Sludge is reduced because microorganisms only just survive in these conditions without being able to reproduce. Professor Joan Mata from the University of Barcelona in Spain comments: 'This biological process has competitors, among others, the well-established membrane bioreactors, which also can produce less sludge than the standard activated-sludge system.' However, there are some negative aspects to the new technology which need to be investigated further; firstly it is quite expensive to run and secondly it consumes a lot of electricity. One of its main positive attributes when faced with competing available wastewater treatment technologies is its ability to be scaled up. 'To be really convincing you need to show something that is already working at real scale because as the system gets bigger problems tend to surge,' says Adrián Garrido, from the Department of Land and Water of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Canberra, Australia. 'These might range from the system not being able to absorb peaks, to high energy consumption levels and maintenance related problems, especially since this system implies a lot of aeration and pumping that make it easier for something to get damaged.'For more information, please visit: Water Research Institute (WRI) of the Italian National Research Council: http://www.cnr.it/sitocnr/Englishversion/Englishversion.html(opens in new window)
Countries
Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom