TEXTILES ─ Faux Denim
DENIM REIMAGINED A new, more eco-friendly way to think about denim By Cary Sherburne
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he next time you put on that great pair of jeans, it is worth taking time to consider what their environmental impact is. It takes approximately 1,500 gallons of water to grow the 1.5 pounds of cotton required to make a pair of jeans. The massive amount of water (an average of 900 to 1,000 gallons) required in the dyeing and washing process gets them looking and feeling just right. The pollution caused by deposition of the dyestuffs and the subsequent laundry process is also factored. But what if you could have a truly eco-friendly pair of jeans that look great and are even more comfortable than the pair you love? That’s one of the projects undertaken by the Intech Group, founded in 2001, as they worked to develop their pigment inks and printers for digital textile printing. “Back in 2010 to 2014, the company was looking at two different expansion markets where water-based inks for digital printing could add value and deliver a reduced environmental impact: ceramic inks for ceramic tiles and pigment inks for fabric,” said Dalton Cheng, head of technology at Intech
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Digital Limited. “There were players already in production of ceramic inks, so we decided to pursue pigment inks for textiles in roll-to-roll printing. No one really understood at that time what that would truly mean. It seemed like an intriguing idea, and we decided to pursue pigment inks for textiles since we wanted to be an early adopter.” Cheng, who had been working for Behr Paints, quit his job in 2014 to join the effort and spent more than two years developing the formulation and process. “We started commercially printing for designers, brands and fabric mills in 2016,” he said. The development process required not only development of the inks, which are created from organic materials rather than using rare earth minerals that have a huge negative environmental impact; it also required development of a printing system that could handle the inks and deliver the requisite quality. Today, the Intech Digital 190T printer, equipped with eight Ricoh Gen 5E printheads, does just that with its ZERO-D
WhatTheyThink - Wide-Format&Signage | May 2020
(Inset Photo) Dalton Cheng (Above) A model wearing the ZERO-D digitally printed dress at the COTTON USA booth. The fabric is 100% cotton poplin, and the entire dress, from the black background to the red roses, is all pigment.
technology (zero discharge, reflecting its waterless digital printing approach). The downside today, according to Cheng, is the speed, which is at 25 to 40 linear yards per hour. Intech currently has five of these printers printing direct to fabric in its Chinese factory. “We’ve been looking for partners that want to also achieve the quality and eco-friendliness our printers deliver,” Cheng said, “but that has been somewhat difficult due to the amount of misinformation out there about pigment inks for textile printing, and so many missteps and even misrepresentation from some of the manufacturers. There is still a huge education need to get the word out about the potential for
