“The current norms for water use in the textile and leather industry, are too generalised. They do not address the complexity of operations which have to be taken into account when trying to set benchmarks for the industry.
“We are going to look at different processes, materials and inefficiencies that affect how much water is needed. Textile and leather production is not a simple process – there are variables that need to be factored in.”
Pant revealed the guidelines would have water use targets at different levels — foundational, progressive and aspirational — to help companies continuously improve their water efficiency.
“Our philosophy at ZDHC is always to offer a journey of improvement for suppliers so they always have something to aim for,” he said.
ZDHC will also monitor how well its stakeholders are meeting these water use guideline limits through its platform, ensuring that the industry is moving toward more sustainable practices.
We asked Pant whether suppliers would submit their own data on water use or whether this would be assessed externally – which Ecotextile News believes should be the short to medium term goal.
“I can’t say that right now, because that is part of the implementation plan that we will make. The first step is to arrive at benchmarks or standards that would be accepted by our ZDHC community and then work out how best to implement them,” he said.
ZDHC sees targeting water use as directly relevant to the Wastewater Guidelines – part of its Roadmap to Zero Programme.
“Water use is related to the quality of wastewater,” explained Pant. “We monitor the quality of wastewater in terms of concentration limits.
“You can dilute it to meet those concentration limits but by connecting water use to the wastewater quality, we can move towards load-based parameters that link the amount of pollutant in your wastewater with the production volume and your water use efficiency.
“Chemical dosage in textile processing is usually done as grammes per litre of water used in the process. So if you were using 10 litres of water per kilo of fabric for dyeing, and you reduce that to five litres of water, then you will be using less chemicals. So that’s why we feel that water use is integral to our programme.
We all know that the textile industry uses huge amounts of water
“Of course, the other objective is that water is a scarce resource. We all know that the textile industry uses huge amounts of water, and there are production countries where the ground water levels have gone down to such a low level that there is no more water left available for industry.”
Water also impacts on climate change. Water used in textile production generally needs to be heated, so using less water means reducing energy use. Energy is also expended on treating wastewater in effluent treatment plants.
“So a more water efficient process will require less energy and thereby reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” explained Pant. “That’s why we’re already seeing a move towards waterless textile dyeing, through developments such as supercritical CO2. People are trying to avoid the use of water to transfer dye stuffs to textile substrates.”
Pant added: “Ourselves, Aii, Textile Exchange and Cascale are all part of the Apparel Alliance and we’re having discussions to see where we can align and where we can leverage each other’s expertise in specific fields to reduce duplication.
“Aii is focused on the climate change part, whereas our expertise in water and chemicals. So these projects definitely complement each other for the good of the industry.”
