Textile finishing

Clothing should look new as long as possible, retain a great deal of colour brilliance and authenticity, neither shrink nor crease, yet remain easy to care for and be washable at a temperature of at least 40 degrees. To meet these requirements, a variety of chemicals and artificial substances is used throughout the manufacturing process which help improve the properties of the products.

During production, cotton fabrics are subjected to up to twenty different treatment stages from bleaching to impregnation. The industry uses approximately 6,700 chemical additives and textures in addition to approximately 4,000 different dyes . The German textile industry has an annual consumption of approximately 100,000 tonnes of textile additives, 13,000 tonnes of dyes, and 200,000 tonnes of basic chemicals such as soda and sodium hydroxide solution. Among these are chemicals which may cause allergies or cancer.

The majority of the substances used remains in the fibres and can enter the human organism through the skin. Europe has, therefore, established strict regulations and limits for the use of chemicals. Since more than 90 per cent of the clothes sold in Germany are produced in foreign countries in which limits for chemicals are lenient or non-existent and where the use of substances that are banned in this country is commonplace, it is difficult to assess how many harmful chemicals are actually contained in the clothes we import.

These substances pose a significant threat to the ecological system when they have been worn down and become unsightly enough to be discarded. At that time, their harmful substances may enter the cycle of nature where the small quantities contained in each individual product add up to large amount of hazardous materials. Since nature is incapable of breaking down these artificial substances, they remain in the ecological system where they cause permanent damage to plants, animals, soils, bodies of water and, thereby, also have a negative impact on humans.