Sustainable and eco-friendly dyeing of traditional grass cloth with a reactive dye in palm oil medium

Lina Lin; Lexin Xiao; Le Li; Cong Zhang; Md Nahid Pervez; Vincenzo Naddeo; Youqing Zhang; Md Shahinoor Islam; Yingjie Cai; Mohammad Mahbubul Hassan

doi:10.1039/d2ra05736k

Sustainable and eco-friendly dyeing of traditional grass cloth with a reactive dye in palm oil medium

RSC Adv. 2022 Oct 18;12(46):29767-29776. doi: 10.1039/d2ra05736k. eCollection 2022 Oct 17.

Authors

Lina Lin^{1

2}, Lexin Xiao^{1

2}, Le Li^{1

2}, Cong Zhang^{1

2}, Md Nahid Pervez³, Vincenzo Naddeo³, Youqing Zhang⁴, Md Shahinoor Islam⁵, Yingjie Cai^{1

2}, Mohammad Mahbubul Hassan⁶

Affiliations

¹ Hubei Provincial Engineering Laboratory for Clean Production and High Value Utilization of Bio-based Textile Materials, Wuhan Textile University Wuhan 430200 China yingjiecai@wtu.edu.cn.
² Hubei Key Laboratory of Biomass Fibers and Eco-Dyeing & Finishing, Wuhan Textile University Wuhan 430200 China.
³ Sanitary Environmental Engineering Division (SEED), Department of Civil Engineering, University of Salerno Fisciano 84084 Italy.
⁴ Guangzhou Jacky Textile & Technology Co. Ltd Guangzhou 511338 China.
⁵ Department of Chemical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Dhaka 1000 Bangladesh.
⁶ Fashion, Textiles and Technology Institute (FTTI), University of the Arts London London W1G 0BJ UK mahbubul.hassan@arts.ac.uk.

Abstract

Traditional grass cloth has been used in China for a long time for the manufacturing of various household furnishing textiles and ladieswear. However, traditionally the grass cloth is dyed with reactive dyes in an aqueous medium, but the dyeing process is not sustainable because of high energy and water usage and the production of coloured effluent. In this work, the possibility of palm oil/water dual-phase dyeing of traditional grass cloth with a reactive dye, C.I. Reactive Blue 194 (Reactive Blue 194), was explored. The grass cloth soaked in an alkaline solution with 80-140% pick-up was dyed in a palm oil dyebath containing dye powder dispersed in a palm oil medium. The initial study confirmed that the pre-treatment of the fabric with an alkaline solution with 140% pick-up was beneficial for the uniform distribution of the dye in the fibres. The dyeing process parameters (e.g., fixation temperature, solution pH, and fixation time) for the grass cloth dyeing with the Reactive Blue 194 were optimised by using the Taguchi method. The pH of the alkali pre-treatment solution was found to be the most influential factor, as confirmed by the analysis of variance in terms of the percentage of contribution (94.41%), which was statistically significant (P < 0.05). The confirmation tests were carried out under optimal settings, and a higher K/S (24.06) was found compared with the initial condition (21.51). X-ray diffraction analysis indicated that the dyeing process did not affect the crystallinity of the grass cloth fibres. Furthermore, the recovery of palm oil from the spent dyebath was around 99%, and up to five times recycling and reuse of palm oil were studied for the dyeing of grass cloth. The colour strength of the grass cloths dyed in the palm oil recycled up to five times was similar to the cloth dyed in fresh palm oil. The results show that palm oil can be used as a dyeing medium for the sustainable dyeing of grass cloth with effluent reduction, which can be extended to the dyeing of other textile fibres.