What is Green Manufacturing?
Green manufacturing is the renewal of our production process and its where we have established environmentally friendly operations within our business. Essentially, it is the “greening” of manufacturing, in which our staff use fewer natural resources, reduce pollution and waste, recycle and reuse materials, and moderate emissions in their processes.
At Resource Link we are constantly looking for solutions that work best in textile manufacturing and believe that practising and promoting sustainability through green manufacturing is one of the key principles to minimize the environmental impact from technical textiles.
The manufacturer and processing of textiles is traditional water intensive. With climate change Sub-Saharan Africa is fast becoming a dry region and water is a scare resource. Water wise water management is key to our pursuit of Green Manaufacturing. During the wet processing of our textiles, we have designed a water reticulation system whereby we reuse between 30 - 40% of our water, thereby significantly reducing our water consumption and more importantly reducing the amount of effluent we create.
The processing and manufacture of technical textiles generate large quantities of heat. The heat would normally be extracted and released into the atmosphere, thus wasting the available energy from the heat and heating up the immediate environment. We have created a heat exchanger where we pump water that needs to be heated for our manufacturing processes through the heat exchanger to transfer the heat from the hot air to the water. The heat exchange allows us to heat water from room temperature to 60°C and thus saving a significant amount of energy for the heating process.
The weaving operation has a significant amount of polyester waste that is generally dumped at a landfill. We have partnered with different organisations that is able to turn our waste into new products. Most of our polyester waste is recycled back into fibre and processed into non-woven. Some of our more creative partners repurpose our waste into School bags, beds for the homeless and hand-woven rugs. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our processes to be greener.
All our offcuts are repurposed by local vendors to various products such as bags and traditional artwork. This helps us reduce the amount of our waste that in dumped into our landfill’s.
The textile industry is a mature industry and over the years many harmful raw materials have indiscriminately been supplied for the processing and finishing of Technical textiles.
We evaluate every raw material and its impact on both humans and the environment and choose the more environmentally friendly option without compromising the efficacy of the product.
Some of our recent successes include the removal of chlorinated raw materials from our acrylic coatings, use of greener surfactants through the elimination of APEO’s and moving to safer fluorocarbon technology (C10 to C6). Ultimately to the inclusion of fluoro-free dendritic polymers as an alternative.