Speaker 1: Welcome to brainstuffe A production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren bobabam here. Whatever color your clothes are, the process
Speaker 1: to make them that way is probably pretty toxic. According
Speaker 1: to the United Nations Environment Assembly, textile dying is the
Speaker 1: second largest water polluter in the world, and not only
Speaker 1: is the dyeing process rife with harmful chemicals, it's very
Speaker 1: water intensive. Your average pair of jeans takes up to
Speaker 1: twenty six gallons. That's a hundred liters of water to
Speaker 1: die in. These days of fast fashion, our hunger for
Speaker 1: trendy clothes is directly harming us and a lot of
Speaker 1: other organisms and ecosystems all over the world. The denim
Speaker 1: industry alone uses over forty five thousand tons of synthetic
Speaker 1: indigo a year, more than eighty four thousand tons of
Speaker 1: sodium hydro sulfite and fifty three thousand tons of lie.
Speaker 1: According to scientists at the University of Georgia, this adds
Speaker 1: up to a big environmental problem. However, a research team
Speaker 1: at that university has worked out a solution that eliminates
Speaker 1: noxious chemicals from the denim dyeing process while using a
Speaker 1: fraction of the water, but let's back up a step back.
Speaker 1: In the seventeen hundreds, indigo, the plant that historically gave
Speaker 1: denim that iconic blue color, was a major export of
Speaker 1: the American colonies. These days, however, we die our blue
Speaker 1: jeans with synthetic indigo pigment, which is why you can
Speaker 1: buy a pair of jeans for fifteen bucks. But no
Speaker 1: matter whether the indigo is natural or synthetic, the process
Speaker 1: of dying denom requires a strong reducing agent to make
Speaker 1: the dye dissolve in water. For the article of this
Speaker 1: episode is based on how Stuff Works. Spoke with Sergei Minko,
Speaker 1: a co author of the study and a professor in
Speaker 1: the College of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University
Speaker 1: of Georgia. He said, the commercial technology for dyeing textiles
Speaker 1: uses aggressive chemicals. For denim, a strong toxic reducing agent,
Speaker 1: old sodium hydrosulfite is used to make it soluble. Some
Speaker 1: amount of this reducing agent is used in each stage
Speaker 1: of a repeating process anywhere from five to ten times
Speaker 1: if they want to get an intense shade. And as
Speaker 1: we said, this process uses a huge amount of water.
Speaker 1: A pair of genes can take up to two thousand
Speaker 1: gallons to produce, and that's about once you consider the
Speaker 1: water it takes to grow the cotton, dye the fabric,
Speaker 1: and manufacture the pants. Not only that, but many of
Speaker 1: the chemicals involved in denim dyeing don't degrade in the environment.
Speaker 1: While the technology does exist to filter the toxic chemicals
Speaker 1: out of the water before it hits a river or
Speaker 1: a stream, many of the places in the world where
Speaker 1: garment production happens at China and Bangladesh, for instance, don't
Speaker 1: require the infrastructure to remove the chemicals from the water
Speaker 1: before it contaminates waterways and ends up poisoning wildlife people
Speaker 1: in crops. Minko said. Some of the environments where they
Speaker 1: die text ills, everything is artificially colored in different shades.
Speaker 1: Of course, the major damage doesn't come from the dyes themselves,
Speaker 1: but high salt concentrations and these reducing agents, which can
Speaker 1: be very aggressive in ecosystems. So let's talk about the
Speaker 1: new denom dying method that the researchers came up with.
Speaker 1: This process mixes cellulose nanoparticles called kitisen that are made
Speaker 1: from wood pulp with natural indigo dye. Although the researchers
Speaker 1: believe synthetic dies could also be used. This mixture creates
Speaker 1: a sort of gel that can be applied to the
Speaker 1: fabric a single time to yield an intense indigo color,
Speaker 1: compared with the multiple dip process of conventional dyeing that
Speaker 1: requires up to ten applications of dye to yield a
Speaker 1: dark shade. The kitisen essentially glues the pigment in place
Speaker 1: after the fabric dries, creating a sort of matrix of
Speaker 1: dye that coats the fibers of the denom. Because this
Speaker 1: process doesn't involve dissolving the indigo dye, and no reducing
Speaker 1: agents are necessary, thus cutting the amount of water used
Speaker 1: in conventional dyeing methods by about nine Not only that,
Speaker 1: but the process is non toxic, the drying time for
Speaker 1: the kitis and dye is shorter, and the new technique
Speaker 1: yields fabric of the same weight, thickness, and overall feel
Speaker 1: as traditionally died denim. Here's hoping that more research can
Speaker 1: bring this new fabric technology out of the lab and
Speaker 1: into practice. Today's episode is based on the article A
Speaker 1: New Green Solution for dyeing blue denim on how to
Speaker 1: works dot Com, written by Jesslin Shields. Brain Stuff is
Speaker 1: production of iHeart Radio in partnership with how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang. For more
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