Using less water for a brighter future

Coats prides itself on the ability to provide high quality threads that meet the specific needs of customers. This includes the color. As anyone working in the textile industry knows, color plays a crucial role in a product’s success. From designer clothing to home furnishings to automotive, the latest trends can be defined as much by color as by brand or product material. In 2018, we dyed over 174,000 different colors in nearly four million production batches.

Dyeing is one of the most important parts of the manufacturing process as we transform processed polyester, cotton and other materials from a functional material into one that enhances and completes our customer’s final product. This process alone accounts for around 60% of our total water consumption.

Coats has long been a leader in dyeing technology in the textile industry, constantly driving innovation to improve quality and efficiency, including, recently, through the introduction of low liquor ratio dyeing machines at some sites. Traditionally dyeing uses around 40-80 liters of water per kilo of product, resulting in the use of huge volumes of water. Our new machines have reduced this ratio to around 20-40 liters per kilo – up to a 50% reduction in water usage.

We are seeking to improve this even further, embracing developments in digital technology to enable our processes to be more specific and tailored to our customer’s needs in the future, in a sustainable manner. By using digital printing technology, we aspire to be able to produce exact lengths and colors of thread, whenever or wherever they are needed. The Twine technology, in which we recently invested $5 million, is based on waterless dyeing and will feature inbuilt color software integrated with Coats ColourStitch.

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