Natural dyes and antimicrobials for green treatment of textiles

Increasing studies on extraction, purification and modification processes of natural dyes and antimicrobials, and their subsequent application on textiles demonstrate the revival of natural dyeing and finishing. Natural dyes have been widely used in textile coloration since ancient times. But, with advent of man-made synthetic dyes in the mid-nineteenth century, the dye market has been captured due to a variety of competitive properties of synthetic dyes against natural ones such as lower cost, higher fastness, color variety, ability to dye synthetic fibers and availability in large industrial scale. However, most of the synthetic dyes raise some serious problems in human health and cause environmental risks. Due to these drawbacks along with the growing awareness about cleaner surroundings and healthy lifestyle, there has been recently a worldwide interest in the production and application of dyes from two natural sources, plants and microorganisms. Most of these natural dyes have also inherently antimicrobial properties and could consequently possess high medicinal activity. They are extracted from different types of microorganisms as well as various parts of the plants that contain coloring materials such as tannin, flavonoids and quinonoids. Here we review the latest scientific researches on extraction and application of natural dyes/antimicrobials on textiles as effective coloring and antibacterial agents. First, different methods of extraction of natural dyes/antimicrobials will be discussed, and then, current methods of textile treatments and examples of early applications of these dyes on textile processing, properties achieved and the results obtained will be presented.