After more than 20 years at the intersection between the textile industry and influential retail brands, and some recent soul-searching, he tells host Mike Schragger that he’s had an epiphany.
During this episode of Big Closets Small Planet, Patterson outlines why we need to move from the current single use, linear buy-use-dump model for chemical use to a circular model, and explains what this should entail.
“Over 100 million tonnes of textile fibres are produced annually and the vast majority of these are dyed or printed. This requires tens of millions of tonnes of chemicals which can and do find their way into the environment,” Patterson tells Schragger.
“We can argue whether the textile industry is the worst, the second worst of the third worst, where it comes in the pollution heirarchy nobody really knows the answer to that conclusively, but what we do know is it’s a big contributor.
“We really should be asking ourselves if it’s OK to use chemicals for our own financial gain and then dump them in the environment for society to share the negative consequences, and I think we should be agreeing that the answer to that question is no.”
Although some improvements in recent years had reduced the amount of harmful chemicals used and improved waster water discharge, the industry was still employing a buy-use-dump model for chemicals, he argues.
Patterson said the answer was to switch to a circular model with each stage of the manufacturing process responsible for the chemicals they use and for removing them from the product before they passed it onto the next stage.
Currently, he explained, each stage of the chain added chemicals and passed them down the chain, so that dyers and printers received product already coated with chemicals. They needed more chemicals to remove these, and then more still to apply dyes and finishing.
“At the end of that process, we’ve got this chemical soup of all of the chemicals that have been used in all of the processes in the textile manufacturing process going into a wastewater treatment plant,” Patterson said.
“If every individual chemical user took responsibility to send a clean chemical product down the chain, we would see spinners removing their spinning oil before passing on to knitters and weavers. We’d see weavers removing weaving size so that dyers and printers didn’t have to do the job for them.”
Patterson argues that if each part of the production process had to remove the chemicals they used, they’d look to reuse them – rather than dump or treat them – meaning fewer chemicals were needed and fewer chemicals would make their way into the environment.
To hear more on his expert views on circularity in textiles chemical management, listen to the full podcast by CLICKING HERE.
