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