Textiles industrial water footprint: methodology and study

The concept of water footprint (WF) is an important breakthrough in the evolving of methodologies, approaches and indicators for measuring freshwater appropriation and assessing the wastewater discharge. Industrial water footprint (IWF) methodology, which concentrates on the industrial production stages, can present a clear graphic of freshwater consumption and impacts caused by wastewater discharge at both product and technology level. In this paper, IWFs of seven kinds of knitted fabrics were calculated through field survey and referred to published literatures. These case studies revealed that the majority of the IWFs were caused by grey industrial water footprints, the volume of water required to dilute pollutants. Dyeing, bleaching and washing were freshwater intensive technologies. Generally this may be one of the typical features of dyed and finished fabrics. It is meaningful to reduce the freshwater consumption of the hot-spots through the improvement of freshwater management pattern and production techniques. Specific recommendations for further research in this field were also proposed in this study accordingly.