Recycling of textile waste for environment protection - An overview of some practical cases in the textile industry

Environment protection could be achieved by adopting state-of-the-art technologies to minimize waste generation, effective treatment of effluent so that the effluent discharge conforms to the expected norms, and recycling the waste several times before discharge. The present paper, with the help of typical case studies, such as wool scour liquor disposal, utilization of leftover yarn in spinning and weaving departments, recycling of size, conservation of heat and water in disperse dyeing, recovery and utilization of salt in reactive dyeing, recycling of rags and used garments, and recycling of water in chemical processing, illustrates that the effective way for environment protection is to recycle waste as many times as may be practically feasible. However, the recycling methodology adopted must be economical.