Indigo Juice® is a revolutionary and sustainable technology developed by Candiani Denim to optimize the dyeing process and reduce the textile industry’s environmental impact. Indigo Juice® keeps the dye superficial on yarns, drastically decreasing the energy, water, and chemicals consumption while treating the garment in the laundry.
The fabric dyeing process pollutes the environment
The fabric dyeing process is one of the most polluting in the textile industry. Color is one of the first features of a garment we notice, but it often has a massive impact on our planet.
According to Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the fashion industry employs about 93 billion cubic meters of water annually. A single pair of jeans, from growing raw materials to finishing the product, requires, according to a 2015 assessment made by Levi’s, about 3,000 liters of water. To color denim, the yarn or fabric is usually dunked many times in giant vats of the synthetic color dye. It is later treated with more chemicals to give it the desired aesthetics.
20% of water pollution is caused by 72 toxic substances used to dye
According to the European Parliament, the dyeing and finishing processes in the textile industry are responsible for about 20% of global water pollution. Once companies are done with these operations, indeed, the easiest way to dispose of wastewater is to dump it into rivers and lakes.
72 toxic substances damaging our ecosystem but commonly used to dye our clothes and later released into the environment have been identified by the World Bank. Some harmful heavy materials are also usually employed during the dyeing process and enter our food chain through crop irrigation.
Indigo Juice® by Candiani Denim allows energy and water consumption reduction
Indigo Juice®, developed by Candiani Denim, is an easy-fade dyeing technology engineered to create premium vintage aesthetics while reducing the consumption of water, energy, and chemicals required to produce them. It makes the fading process in the laundry easier as the dye is kept more superficial on the yarn, and therefore it can be washed down with only a fraction of the conventionally used water, energy, and chemicals. It is studied for best performance with laser and ozone treatments.
The use of Indigo Juice® in the dyeing process already allows a 15% reduction of the energy and water used to make the fabric. Still, the main benefits of this technology are seen during the treatments in the laundry. Since sustainability is one of our most important values, we do not think only about our own production processes; we also consider what happens once the fabric leaves the mill, is turned into a garment, and then washed in a laundry. Even though the wash process is not our core business, we engineered a technology that allows to reduce the resources needed to treat the garment and, at the same time, improves the aesthetic results of the process.
The combination of our technologies, Indigo Juice® and Kitotex®, reduces the environmental impact even further: comparing two jeans with a commonly found aesthetic in the market of which one is made using conventional denim and laundry processes, and the other one is made using Indigo Juice® and Kitotex® and eco-friendly laundry processes, we can achieve up to 75% reduction of the water and a 65% reduction of the chemicals used in the entire production process of the jeans. The comparison below shows that the most significant savings happen during the wash process: for this specific wash -83% of water and -60% of the chemicals have been used to wash down the jeans thanks to our sustainable dyeing technologies.
