A process-level water conservation and pollution control performance evaluation tool of cleaner production technology in textile industry

Industrial manufacturers are required to adopt water conservation and pollution control technologies because of increasingly serious water scarcity and water pollution, especially in textile industry. An effective performance evaluation tool for these technologies is greatly needed for textile manufacturers. However, the existing tools for textile industry can only evaluate on plant level and ignore pollution effect of water consumption. In order to help textile manufacturers know about water conservation and pollution control performance of technologies more systematically and comprehensively, we developed a process-level water conservation and pollution control performance evaluation tool of cleaner production technology in textile industry. The new tool includes three indicators: water withdrawal reduction, water consumption reduction and water assimilation reduction. Comparison between the new tool and old ones by evaluating the low-pollution-concentration effluent reuse technology in a polyester flannel fabric dyeing and printing plant demonstrates that the new tool can help textile manufacturers to not only understand operation mechanism of a technology on specific processes and then take specific improvement measures on different processes to optimize water conservation and pollution control performance, but also find out indiscoverable disadvantages of a technology and then adopt complementary technologies to reduce negative effect of the technology. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.