Living in the Pearl River Delta region, most SZU-China team members are quite impressed by the river polluted by jeans. During our brainstorming, we watched a documentary that traced how a pair of jeans were produced. The scene in Xintang Village, Guangzhou City in the documentary shocked us - blue sewage was discharged directly from the factory to the river, blue flocculence was scattered all around the working area.
The dyeing and worn-out process of jeans produce the most pollution, so SZU-China 2020 hopes to provide a solution to change the situation. The previous solutions, such as the laser method and natural dye extraction, are expensive, difficult to recycle, and unsustainable. Therefore, we hope to create a sustainable scheme for blue jeans and the world.
We take the sustainable scheme as the central idea and run through the entire project design process. We communicated with ifferent stakeholders in the jeans industry and fnally created our solution based on a sustainable approach.
The name of the BLUEism project originated from Greenism.
We hope that not only "green" is eco- friendly, but "blue" is also eco- friendly.
Analyzing the value chain is an essential tool that helps us analyze every part of the jeans industry, and it is also a guide for us to find the stakeholders for interviews and surveys.
1. Production of dyes:
The first link of the Value Chain is the production of dyes. The dye production chemical company use phenylglycine as the raw materials, fuse it with mixed alkali of sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide, and then oxidizes it to produce indigo. After synthesis, these factories sell their indigo to dyeing factories.
In 2017, the global indigo industry had a production capacity of 105,000 tons and an output of 83,500 tons. From the perspective of the global market, well-known manufacturers of indigo mainly distributed in China, Germany and other countries, including BASF in Germany and Jiangsu Taifeng Chemical Co., Ltd. in China.
2.Dyeing of denim
After being sold to the dyeing factory, indigo will be used to give denim its distinctive blue color. The indigo dye needs to go through three steps.
Indigo have a special way for dying. Firstly, the insoluble indigo have to be reduced to soluble leuco-indigo for dying. And leuco-indigo will absorbs into fabric while dipping. Finally, leucoindigo will rapidly be oxidized to crystal indigo after aeration. The steps of oxidation and dipping needs to be repeated for many times.
Firstly, the dissolved dye (invisible indigo) is reduced, with the denim dying in a reduction bath. Finally, the invisible indigo on the denim oxidized to blue indigo in the air. However, due to the poor affinity of indigo dye to cotton fabrics, the oxidation and dyeing part needs to be repeated many times.
3. Tailoring
The dyed denim will then come to the textile factory, where a large piece of denim is cut into the shape of jeans by the weavers and made into a pair of unprocessed jeans. And most of the jeans required by the sellers require subsequent processing.
4. Fraying and washed processing
Unprocessed jeans are processed in a washing plant to form jeans of different styles. In the traditional jeans washing process, manual processing methods are wildly used, including abrasion with sandpaper by bare hands, spraying with strong oxidant potassium permanganate, chlorine washing, etc. And in these manual work, poor workers wind up ingesting a grave amount of toxic chemicals that leads to their irretrievable harm.
5. Government quality inspection
Before getting into the market, jeans will go through a quality inspections from the government.
The inspections include fibre content, colorfastness, pH, decomposable aromatic amine dyes, fillers, combustion performance, formaldehyde content, phthalic acid Ester, heavy metals, peculiar smell, fibre content identification, fiber quantitative analysis, textile fibre identification, the sharpness of textile accessories, fibre content deviation rate, appearance quality, etc.
In addition, the government will also supervise their sewage disposal for illegal emission.
6. Market
The Pearl River Delta in Guangdong, Changzhou in Jiangsu, and Zibo in Shandong are the three major jeans production bases in China. Among them, the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong is also the country's largest jeans base, forming a cluster from production to selling.
In China, with the rapid development of e-commerce networks, traditional offline stores are shrinking, but extending their business into online shopping platform, such as Taobao, JD and Amazon, to gain a broader market.
7. Consumer
Consumers are the last link in the value chain. They pay for the distressed blue jeans and appreciate their distinctive worn-out look. Jeans are a fashion way for people to express their own personalities.
Before we actually start our project design and the experiment, there are still some questions we need to answer. How do the factory actually make a pair of jeans? What impact will those process bring to people and nature?
In order to answer these questions, we had the honor to go to the jeans washing factory in Zhongshan city, Guangdong province, one of the largest jeans production bases in China.
We had a detailed conversation with the workers and leaders of the factory there. For different steps, we communicated with the workers in charge of that part:
Miss Tang is responsible for the manual abrasion on the surface of the jeans. She uses a machine similar to an electric drill to generate special worn-out patterns. The microfibers generated while abrasion pervaded the whole work. They can get into workers' lung via inhalation and lead to their pneumoconiosis. However, Miss Tang had been insensitive of the dust and neglect their horrific impacts.
Mr. Wu is responsible for polishing the surface of the jeans with sandpaper to facilitate subsequent chemical corrosion. His job is to repeatedly rub the surface of jeans with sandpaper to break the surface fibres.
The next step is chemical corrosion. What shocked us was that workers did not do much protection when they came into contact with such toxic and hazardous chemical materials. In our communication, we asked him whether he took special measures to protect his exposed skin. He told us that he did not take special measures to protect himself. If chemical reagents are splashed on the skin, he can only temporarily rinse off with water. We are deeply worried about his lack of awareness of self-protection.
In the washing step, the workers have relatively little work, but the sewage generated by the washing is directly discharged to the ground of the factory. Due to the hot weather in Guangdong, many workers wear slippers, which worries us very much.
Through our communication, we learned that the sewage containing toxic substances are directly discharged into the surroundings, posing a horrendous and imaginable threat to the environment and public health. We summarize the problem as:
For Workers,
Long-term use of manual and chemical corrosion methods for FRAYING has caused irreversible effects on the health of workers.
For the environment,
The sewage produced during the indigo DYEING process contains many toxic substances, which are harmful to the environment.
The stakeholders who communicate with us all hope that there will be a new type of process or method that can help them solve related problems.
After we understood the weak links in the jeans industry, we began to conceive our sustainable scheme. After the discussion, we decided to focus on dyeing and fraying.
Click the button below to learn more about our design.
We encountered some problems during the designing process, we consulted an academic consultant, click to view our problems and solutions.
Professor Liu is an expert in the field of cellulase, and he is also very familiar with the field of genetic engineering. We discussed our entire project design together.
In the production of Gardenia Blue, Prof. Liu suggested that we connect with the manufacturers and discuss the cost issue in detail. If the cost can be kept low, our project will be very competitive.
We need to purify the gardenia blue pigment we produce from the reaction solution to make a finished product and show it to them. And they can use this gardenia blue to compare it with ordinary chemical indigo dyeing.
In terms of distressing, our innovation is not high, and there are already fermentation washing methods, which are very similar to our fraying process. Prof. Liu suggested that we need to purify the two enzymes later and judge which one is better than the enzyme activity.
Simply use the endo-glucanase as the solely enzyme for digesting fibers to form worn-look, it's probably not enough. Prof. Liu suggested that we should combine endo-glucosidase with exo-glucosidase and β-glucosidase. The effect may be impressive. It is also possible to combine CL34 and IARI-SP-2.
We hope that our products can finally be put into the market and serve the public, truly meeting the need.
For this reason, we set off again to the original jeans factory, and we had a long conversation with Deng and Tang, the managers of the factory. We invited them to do a systematic evaluation of BLUEism.
At the same time, the person in charge pointed out that although our project is reasonable, there are still some problems in the practical application of our product in the industry.
Workers do not know how to use our pigments or cellulase.
We have developed hardware that integrate our gardenia blue and cellulase for dyeing and fraying. Using this hardware, people can get a pair of personalized jeans automatically. More about it.
The actual needs of customers are changeable, such as depth of color, extent of fraying and specific requirements of production.
We have introduced color ratings and rating standards. At the same time, we use the BP neural network system to predict the output of specific combination of the variables in the industrial process. More about it.
How do we raise our production for large scale manufacturing demand?
We contacted experts in the field of fermentation. We raised our concerns about large-scale fermentation to the experts in the fermentation plant, but the fermentation efficiency far exceeded our expectations. According to our process, we first transferred the gene into E.coli, then inoculated the recombinant E. coli, added IPTG for induction, and finally smashed the E. coli to obtain β-glucosidase. The fermentation plant not only can incubate E.coli for rapid reproduction in fermenter but also disrupt cells with breaker. The equipment conditions of the fermentation plant perfectly meet all our requirements for improving production, and it also greatly reduces time and improves efficiency. At the same time, we discussed the cost issue with the teacher of the fermentation factory. He reminded us that when our production volume is large enough, which means the net profit far exceeds the cost, the impact of the cost will be relatively reduced, which means what we should focus on is to improve The amount of enzyme expression.
Does BLUEism comply with local laws and regulations?
We consulted relevant laws and regulations.The Guangdong Provincial Government is making efforts to promote the development of cleaner industries, including the textile industry, with lower low energy consumption, low pollution and high output, and to achieve the unity of economic, social and environmental benefits. This will be a good opportunity. As our project meets the needs of the government. Once our project is implemented, we will apply for government support. We inquired about Discharge standards of water pollutions for dyeing and finishing of textile industry (GB4287-2012), which stipulated the maximum allowable discharge concentration and discharge volume of water pollution in the textile dyeing and finishing industry. The indicators involve pollutants such as pH, suspended solids, color, ammonia, nitrogen, phosphorus, chlorine, sulfides and anilines. We will ensure that our projects comply with relevant laws and regulations.
You Sheng Textile Technology (Shenzhen)Co., Ltd.
We communicated with You Sheng Textile Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., a local textile dye company dedicated to environmental protection.
The person in charge of the company, Sunny, said that the company process 1,000 tons of wastewater every day, with a recovery rate of 50%, which means that 500 tons can be recycled, but it costs nearly 10,000 RMB to treat wastewater every month, which is a very high price.
If reducing pollution from the source will be the best solution, BLUEism will be a sustainable way.
They believe that in terms of environmental protection, cost should not be the first priority. We should be responsible for the environment around us. Besides, improving the performance of dyes and fabrics is also a critical part. The person in charge invited us to add BLUEism to their list of environmentally friendly dyes.
We also experienced various natural dyes and human-friendly fabrics developed by the company. They have an entire science popularization experience base and a complete dye science popularization system. Here we have learned lots about dyes.
This inspired us to organize a popular science event on dyes produced by synthetic biology.
iDYE Workshop
Before preparing for the event, we conducted a questionnaire to investigate the situation of our audience. Most of the respondents were young people aged 18-20. Unsurprisingly, denim clothing was widely welcomed among them, but they did not know much about the jeans industry. This made our team realize that the environmental issues in the jeans industry did not attract everyone's attention, and we need to conduct popular science on this.
At the same time, they have a certain, but not a deep understanding of synthetic biology. In view of this, we believe that before explaining our project, we still need to explain synthetic biology.And our Gardenia Blue dye, which comes from pure edible Gardenia Blue, is absolutely safe. And students will wear gloves to protect their hands.
To collect more dyes produced by synthetic biology, we cooperated with Shanghai_SFLS_SPBS, which team decided to produce diverse biological dyes for hair dyeing. Shanghai_SFLS_SPBS provided us with dyes of various colors as a display, but considering safety issues, we did not directly use the dyes.
In the iDYE workshop, we introduced synthetic biology to everyone and described a series of problems in the jeans production process.
Basing on BLUEism, we promoted Gardenia Blue as an environmental friendly pigment via inviting more people to experience the advantages of Gardenia Blue. And we also want to test the dyeing efficiency of the product in the actual situation, to improve our project design.
What’s more, with the help of their rich imagination and creativity, synthetic biology is combined with art more closely.
