Eco-friendly printing paste replacing urea-based formulations in cotton printing

Abstract

In textile printing, hydrotropic components are usually added to print paste formulations promoting the hydration of textile fabrics by disrupting the hydrogen bonding network between water molecules. For this purpose, urea is commonly used but nevertheless, its presence causes water eutrophication and their reduction or replacement by more environmentally-friendly products is required. In the present work, we have studied an alternative hydrotropic product (polyethylene glycol, PEG) to replace urea. A factorial design of experiments has been carried out to identify the factors that optimize several variables of interest such as viscosity of the printing paste and fabric colour strength. The results showed that a reduction of 70 wt% of urea was achieved by using PEG 400, while preserving the performance of printing formulation. The viscosity of these eco-friendly printing paste formulations was similar to that of the original urea-based formulations and, more interestingly, fabrics showed similar colour strength and fastness to those of fabrics printed by the conventional method.

Keywords:

• Cotton
• reactive dyes
• urea-free printing
• experimental design

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to the European Regional Development Fund, which provides support to government programs. Viscosity determination of print pastes has been performed by the Nanostructured Liquid Characterization Unit, located at the Institute of Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC), belonging to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and affiliated to the NANBIOSIS ICTS of the Biomedical Networking Center (CIBER-BBN).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge financial support from EEA-Grants Program (grant no. 20140916). The authors also greatly acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grant no. CTQ2017-84998-P) and support from Generalitat de Catalunya (grant nos. 2017SGR1778 and TECCIT15-1-0009).