**2.1 Applications of the best available techniques (BAT)**

Alkaya and Demirer studied environmental performance evaluation and sustainable production applications in a woven fabric manufacturing mill in Turkey [26]. The aim of the study was to decrease water consumption, wastewater generation, energy consumption and resulting greenhouse gas emissions, and sodium salt consumption. Baseline data were collected for 8 months. The amount of water consumed per kilogram of product was found as 138.9 L. Additional 4 months spent on implementation and 12 months for monitoring the sustainable production applications. Environmental benchmarking was done by collecting specific resource consumption and waste generation data, which are known as Environmental Performance Indicators (EPIs). As a result of investigation of the process by using BAT, five applications were applied on the process: use of drop-fill washing instead of overflow, reuse of stender cooling water, reuse of singeing cooling water, renovation of water softening system, and renovation of valves and fittings. As a result, amount of wastewater of the process was reduced by 43.4% and CO2 emission, which is mainly originated from energy consumption, was decreased by 20.2%. Total water consumption was also reduced by 40.2%. Additionally, total energy consumption was decreased by 17.1%.

Ozturk and coworkers investigated a cotton and polyester knitting-weaving fabric and subsequent finishing-dyeing mill in Turkey in terms of BAT applications [5]. The mill with two main production lines had bleaching and dyeing capacities of 2412 and 6682 tons/year, respectively. Freshwater consumed each day was almost 3100 tons before the modification. After the data for 3 years were analyzed, 14 BAT including good management practices, water minimization, and chemical minimization/substitution were chosen from 92 suitable improvements considering mainly their priority, techno-availability, and potential benefits. Some of them are reuse/recovery of washing/rinsing and softening wastewater, reuse of suitable dye bath, caustic recovery from mercerization process wastewaters using membrane process, chemical substitution, and so on. The mill was consuming 95–102 L water per kg product, 9–10 g dyestuff/ kg product, and 347–383 g/kg product. After the implementation of selected BATs, the probable reduction in the consumption of water and chemicals was estimated as 43–51 and 16–39%, respectively. The wastewater flow rate was expected to be reduced by 45–52%. Payback period of the implementation was calculated as 26 months at most.

Kocabas and coworkers [6] carried out BAT on a denim manufacturing mill in Turkey. First, they gathered information about the sources of wastewater and their type, quantity and composition as in the BAT reference document (ref BREF).

The consumption of water and energy was recorded from the beginning till the end of the study. Seven operations were evaluated as installing the flowmeters, semi-countercurrent rinsing, reusing the wastewater after treatment, recovering and reusing the wash water from mercerization, reusing the concentrate stream of reverse osmosis plant in sanitary, minimizing the water consumption during regeneration of ion exchangers used in water softening, and reusing the cooling waters in the production process. After implementation of the BAT actions, total water and energy consumption per kg fabric were reduced by 29.5 and 9%, respectively. As a result, saving from the expenses was roughly estimated as EUR 987,000 annually, while total amount of investment was EUR 45,000. There is no information given about the reduction of the amount of wastewater as a result of improvement.

Yukseler and coworkers [27] tried to implement cleaner production to denim manufacturing textile mill in Turkey. The BAT methodology was followed to reduce the amount of consumed water and wastewater generation through the characterization of the wastewater and selection of the wastewater streams to reuse in the process. Selected BAT actions were reusing of wastewaters in the dyeing process after the treatment, recovering of caustic from alkaline finishing wastewaters, reusing of biologically treated composite mill effluent after membrane process, minimizing the wash water consumption in the water softening plant, reusing the concentrate stream from reverse osmosis plant, and reducing water consumption by countercurrent washing in dyeing and finishing processes. As a result, the reduction in the total specific water consumption was evaluated as 30%.

Ozturk and coworkers studied on the improvement of a wool and acrylic fiber production mill in Turkey to a cleaner production by using BAT measures [28]. Suggested BAT actions were reuse of wastewaters from wool yarn softening, LP-VP printing machines and acrylic yarn washing, machinery modifications, reuse of steam condensate, and good management practices. Additionally, replacement of 12 toxic chemicals with biodegradable ones and installing an automatic dosage system were suggested in order to reduce the chemical load in the wastewaters. Energy saving precautions were determined as the implementation of energy recovery systems for high-temperature wastewater flows and flue gas streams, process monitoring control, and various machinery optimizations. After the mass balance calculations, it was estimated that all of the implementations could reduce total water consumption by 35–65%, total energy consumption by 70%, chemical load by 31%, and waste generation by 5–10%. The payback period of the installations was estimated as 4 years.

Kalliala and Talvenmaa investigated the major six textile manufacturers in Finland considering environmental effect of wet processing and suggested appropriate actions of BAT [29]. The study was found especially important since all the industrial manufacturers discharge their wastewater to municipal sewage treatment plants under a strict control in Finland. Energy, water, and chemical consumption data of the processes were collected from the process statistics of the companies. Energy consumption was evaluated between 55 and 152 MJ/kg product, while water consumption was between 144 and 380 L/kg product, and the CO2 emission was found between 3484 and 8937 g/ kg product. A detailed chemical consumption table was also prepared for the study. As a result, suggested BAT actions were planned as the application of automatic dosing of chemicals and dyes, effective use of equipment capacity, recycling and monitoring of process water and energy used, recovery and purification of process liquor, monitoring of wastewater with toxicity analyses, and monitoring of flue gas emissions.

A LIFE funded project BATTLE (05 ENV/IT/000846) was proposed to evaluate the applicability of BAT such as those described in the textile reference documents (BREFs) for the implementation of the European Directive IPPC 96/91/CE to small-medium enterprises (SMEs) in terms of technical and economical feasibility of water recycling for European textile sector [30]. In the project, a prototype

**5**

*Sustainable Production Methods in Textile Industry DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.84316*

total recovered water was determined as 7691 m3

**2.2 Metaheuristics**

*2.2.1 Developed hybrid algorithms*

wastewater were not reported in this study.

**Mill/Process Wastewater** 

Cotton and polyester fabric/ Finishing and dyeing

Denim/Dyeing and finishing

cooling, and utilities

Woven fabric/Dyeing, finishing,

Wool and acrylic fiber/Dyeing

processes

and finishing

**Table 1.**

*generation.*

application was included for cleaner production in a textile dyeing and printing company. After the environmental impact and process data were evaluated, the process was modified to recover and reuse the process water. As a result, the amount of

The reduced values in the water consumption, energy consumption, wastewater, and greenhouse gas generation given in the literature are tabulated in **Table 1**.

Using nonconventional optimization methods in the textile industry by considering both the delivery date and environmental issues is a quiet new area in the literature. Although the major part of these studies is accumulated on the scheduling of the dyeing process, novel optimization and decision-making algorithms (AI—Artificial Intelligence) have a huge potential in a large area of textile production such as cotton grading, yarn CPS (count strength product) prediction, yarn grading, fabric colorfastness grading, fabric comfort, and fabric inspection [31]. The studies on the nonconventional optimization methods can be classified into two groups: studies on the development of hybrid metaheuristic algorithms and the

Huynh and Chien [4] worked on the parallel batch processing machine schedul-

In another study on the textile dyeing process [20], parallel machine scheduling problem with environmental requirements and tardiness were solved by generating a multi-objective genetic algorithm with tabu-enhanced local search (MOGA-TIG). Three objective functions were defined to obtain a sustainable schedule: the number

**Reduction in**

**Flue gas (%)**

45–52 49–55v — — [5]

— 29.5 — 9 [6]

43.4 40.2 20.2 17.1 [26]

— 35–65 25–65 70 [28]

**Total energy consumption (%)** **Ref.**

**Total water consumption (%)**

Denim/Waste-water treatment — 30 — — [27]

*The reduction values in the water consumption, energy consumption, wastewater, and greenhouse gas* 

ing with sequence-dependent setup, arbitrary job size, different due date, and incompatible job family. They proposed a multi-subpopulation genetic algorithm with heuristics embedded (MSGA-H) to improve batching and scheduling simultaneously. The validity of the algorithm was tested by an empirical study with data supplied from a textile dyeing manufacturing in Taiwan. The results have shown the practical viability of the proposed MSGA-H. The reduction of used water and

studies on the application of the genetic algorithm in real processes.

**(%)**

/month with an appropriate quality.

*Sustainable Production Methods in Textile Industry DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.84316*

application was included for cleaner production in a textile dyeing and printing company. After the environmental impact and process data were evaluated, the process was modified to recover and reuse the process water. As a result, the amount of total recovered water was determined as 7691 m3 /month with an appropriate quality. The reduced values in the water consumption, energy consumption, wastewater, and greenhouse gas generation given in the literature are tabulated in **Table 1**.
