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Denim Reimagined: A New, More Eco-Friendly Way to Think About Denim

We all love our blue jeans. They are comfortable, often stylish, but what about their impact on the environment? What if you could have a pair of jeans with an almost indistinguishable look on the outside, but silky soft on the inside, with a 97% water footprint reduction? Sound impossible? With new fabric printing technologies, it’s totally achievable. Read what Dalton Cheng of Intech has to say on this subject and more.

Monday, March 16, 2020

The next time you put on that great pair of jeans, it is worth taking time to consider what their environmental impact is, from the approximately 1,500 gallons of water it takes to grow the 1.5 pounds of cotton required to make a pair of jeans, to the massive amount of water (an average of 900 to 1,000 gallons) required in the dyeing and washing process to get them looking and feeling just right, to the pollution caused by deposition of the dyestuffs and the subsequent laundry process. 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 as they worked to develop their pigment inks and printers for digital textile printing.

According to Dalton Cheng, Head of Technology at Intech Digital Limited, which was founded in 2001 and was focused producing inks for the sign and display graphics industry, “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. 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.”


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About Cary Sherburne

Cary Sherburne is a well-known author, journalist and marketing consultant whose practice is focused on marketing communications strategies for the printing and publishing industries.

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