Together with today's technological developments, factors such as rapid population growth and globalization cause permanent environmental problems day by day. It is clear that these problems not only lead to the deterioration of the ecological balance of environment and the depletion of limited natural resources, but also cause serious health problems to human health.
Considering that the level of water use in the textile sector that is extremely high, the areas where this consumption is prevalent comes to the fore as the raw material production, fabric dyeing and finishing processes. At this point, the “Body Dyeing Project with Natural Dyes - Colors Of Life”, developed by the Yeşim R&D Center as an environmentally-friendly project, stands out with its half the number of baths provided compared to the dye house processes in the market and savings at around 40-50 percent in water-energy consumption.
Yeşim Group Fabric Operations VP Kerim Bayram stated that they used plant resources as an alternate material to chemical dyes within the scope of the project, and noted that among the other important outputs of the project, turning wastes into raw materials for several industries that formed after dyeing process and developing new circular value chains were important.
Bayram, while giving information about the project that started under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Recep Karadağ in cooperation with the İstanbul Aydın Üniversitesi in the last quarter of 2021, said that the project has been carried out by the Yeşim R&D Manager Filiz Emiroğlu and Expert Engineer Sena Mestanlı and shared the folllowing, ‘’Prof. Dr. Karadağ, project consultant, completed education in the field of high chemistry and textile technologies, carrying out works in natural dyeing, dye analysis from historical and archaeological objects, and natural organic pigments for 33 years, and who has expertise in the plants and chemical structure of the plants, has given us very invaluable support.’’
Sustainable and Environmentally Friendly Process
Bayram continued as follows, “Within the scope of the project, the unused parts of the plants grown in Turkey that are used as raw materials are only grinded without any chemical treatment and are used in the body dyeing process developed. Compared to the processes in which natural dyes supplied from Asian countries are applied, the project has many advantages such as the amount of water consumed, the use of auxiliary chemicals that do not contain heavy metal ions, a wide color scale, having good fastness values, and the plants that used to be convertible into natural waste after dyeing. With the project, which was developed with a sustainable and environmentally friendly process, it is aimed to gain importance in body dyeing activities, which is a new area within the organization for the national and international market. Revitalizing and cultivating historically important natural dye plants, obtaining natural dyes from food industry wastes and by-products, developing alternative natural dyeing methods, developing new natural heavy metal ion-free auxiliary chemicals as an alternative to chemicals containing heavy metal ions, and several needs such as the development of new, ecological and economical dyeing systems that eliminate its disadvantages, paved the way for this project.”
