Report on ISU Technical Innovation Professional Committee 2019

Mr. Guido Tettamanti

Secretary-general of Italian Silk Office

Ladies and Gentleman,

Good morning to you all.

Giuseppe Bianchi, the Director of the “Technical Innovation Professional Committee”, unfortunately has not been able to attend this Assembly, today. He has asked me to take the floor and to describe some topics that could be properly developed in this Committee, in a way useful for the fiber that we all want to promote.

1. Silk is facing several challenges, maybe too many challenges.

I do not pretend to consider them all. I just want to introduce my views about the “magic” word that is becoming more and more important nowadays, that is SUSTAINABILITY. As a matter of fact, it is a megatrend which is basically driven by consumers and which will promote, more and more, fundamental consequences on business.

It is a set of changes that are enormous in their impact and they will have a strong influence on markets, worldwide, more than perhaps today we can imagine. Right now we see just the tip of the iceberg, but not the rest of it… It will affect manufacturing as a whole and, of course, it will also affect our textile world.

Last November the “New York Times” wrote an article which emphasized how clothing and footwear industry is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. “Nobody speaks about it and public opinion must become aware”. Magazine “Forbes” is full of reports quoting textile and apparel industry as the most polluting in the world, just after petrochemical industry. If we care about the future of silk, we must especially beware of this megatrend and we must act accordingly.

2. Sustainability has three main aspects that I will introduce just in a few words.

The first aspect is the environmental impact.

We refer to the consumption of energy, to the production of waste and to direct CO2 emissions, in particular linked to transport, that come out of the textile and clothing pipeline. There are several techniques to evaluate environmental impact.

The most significant is Life Cycle Assessment(LCA), which was promoted by the European Commission and which today is a common point of reference worldwide.

I am not going at all to describe the way it works. I just say that, with Life Cycle Assessment, first of all, you collect fixed data about the consumption of energy and water you use in the pipeline, the waste you produce, CO2 emissions. On the basis of precise parameters, LCA will provide you with precise description of the environmental impact of your production. What does this mean for silk? I leave the question open.

The second aspect of Sustainability is circular economy.

It regards the fact that we must reduce the exploitation of the limited resources that we have in the world. How may we extend the life cycle of a product as much as we can? How may we give value again to the waste that we are producing in our manufacturing? Circular economy means waste recycling and reuse.

 Circular economy means ecodesign, to conceive from the beginning products in a way that they will be easily recycled, at the end of their life. Silk is a precious fiber, we are traditionally used to avoid any waste with silk, on the contrary we give value to the fiber, to sericine, etc. As International Silk Union we should take care of promoting the image of silk as a resource very well exploited, from the point of view of circular economy.

The third aspect is consumer safety.

In the European Union, industrial use of substances which may affect the health of consumers is severely forbidden. For this reason, in the past assemblies of ISU we spoke several times about the necessity to ban totally the use of nonylphenol and nonylphenol ethoxylates in the silk chain.

3. My point now is to describe what we have been doing, in Italy, about silk sustainability.

Scientific community focuses on environmental impact of several fibers and of their textile chains. We have noticed that information for silk is very poor and it is also misleading. This is very dangerous for our fiber. For this reason we have developed a very detailed study about the Life Cycle Assessment of Silk. We have asked Mr. Faragò to promote it.

The research has been complex and demanding. Just lately the study has been completed. The study describes the consumption of energy, the consumption of water, the use of chemicals which are necessary for producing yarn dyed fabrics, piece dyed fabrics and printed fabrics.

It is an act of “environmental responsibility”, which is very well considered in scientific community and in public opinion. It will be on the website soon, and it is at disposal of all our silk friends of ISU. It has given us precious information about some priorities that we must consider in order to take the silk industry to be more and more sustainable.

4. On the basis of this information, we have promoted some important projects.

In the industrial district of Como a large number of medium and small size textile factories consume large quantities of fresh water. Wastewater from industrial processes is generally discharged into the public sewer systems and after mixing with domestic sewage, it is collected and treated at centralised treatment plants.

At the beginning of the ’70s, in order to face water pollution, local public Authorities and the Como Industrial Association signed an agreement for the construction and the managements of the wastewater system. At the end of the 70s the plants were ready to treat the domestic and industrial wastewater.

During the 90s and 2000s plant upgrades to improve environmental and energy performance and to satisfy more restrictive discharge limits. Sustainability today, imposes us to make additional efforts on purification treatments.

5. A first project concerns the presence of the so-called emerging micro-pollutants coming out of the textile chain and entering the wastewater purification treatments.

Our companies in Italy must be able to open up to the increasing demand for a greater environmental and socio-economic sustainability. The presence, even in low concentrations, of some substances will probably be a critical issue in the short and medium term, in order to ensure compliance with future discharge limits.

We consider specific textile pollutants which are present in very low concentrations, but with a possible significant effect on the environment and on human health. Just as an example, aromatic amines, perfluorinated compounds, phthalates.

Purification plants play a fundamental role in the control of environmental pollution, but they are not designed to remove such complex substances, so different from each other and at such low concentrations. Many of these substances are not degraded and removed and remain in treated waste water, pouring and accumulating in the environment.

The activity of Centro Tessile Serico concerns the upstream part of the process, thus investigating the presence of micropollutants in industrial wastewater. Detection of such substances needs the most recent analytical techniques and chemical methodologies. In the second part of the project Centro Tessile Serico will search, jointly with the companies, for the possible sources of substances along the whole textile supply chain, so up to textile fibers and fabrics, dyes and chemical auxiliaries.

6. A second project regards Digital Textile Printing, which has drastically changed the way textiles are printed, and everything happened in the last ten years.

Digital textile printing has caused the emergence of new problems arising from pollution related to the printing process. Compared to conventional printing processes, digital printing produces lower volumes of wastewater with lower COD and colour load, but with higher N concentration (urea and ammonium) - particularly for printing with acid and reactive dyes.

For technical reasons Digital Textile Printing is responsible of an increase of more than 200% of Nitrogen content in wastewater. Digital Textile Printing requires the fabric to be fully pre-treated using urea in order to let the ink properly penetrate. Urea is then completely washed-out and the resulting wastewater is extremely rich in nitrogen, remarkably overloading the existing wastewater treatment plants.

Nowadays, in the Como textile district more than 65% of the production volume is processed using Digital Textile Printing.

The project LIFe DeNTreat stems from the need to develop sustainable solutions to deal with the problem of increasing nitrogen concentrations in industrial discharges of digital textile printing. The project has been prepared by a long-term experimental activity at Politecnico di Milano, with the support of Como based waste water treatment plants and Confindustria Como. It is developing properly and future results seem to look very promising.

7. I am going to the end of my speech. Silk is something we all want to promote and it is not property of someone. We are in the same boat and we all must move towards more sustainable patterns for silk.

We just wanted to show what we are all doing for silk sustainability in Como. Maybe someone else can take inspiration from our way. Maybe you can have different ideas, different proposals, different experiences that we are ready to listen to. It is important to share opinions and to go this same way.

Thank you for your kind attention.