Denim Reimagined

The next time you put on that great pair of jeans, it is worth taking time to consider what their environmental impact is.

It takes approximately 1,500 gallons of water to grow the 1.5 pounds of cotton required to make a pair of jeans. The massive amount of water (an average of 900 to 1,000 gallons) required in the dyeing and washing process gets them looking and feeling just right. The pollution caused by deposition of the dyestuffs and the subsequent laundry process is also factored.

But what if you could have a truly eco-friendly pair of jeans that look great and are even more comfortable than the pair you love? That’s one of the projects undertaken by the Intech Group, founded in 2001, as they worked to develop their pigment inks and printers for digital textile printing.

“Back in 2010 to 2014, the company was looking at two different expansion markets where water-based inks for digital printing could add value and deliver a reduced environmental impact: ceramic inks for ceramic tiles and pigment inks for fabric," said Dalton Cheng, head of technology at Intech Digital Limited. "There were players already in production of ceramic inks, so we decided to pursue pigment inks for textiles in roll-to-roll printing. No one really understood at that time what that would truly mean. It seemed like an intriguing idea, and we decided to pursue pigment inks for textiles since we wanted to be an early adopter.”

Cheng, who had been working for Behr Paints, quit his job in 2014 to join the effort and spent more than two years developing the formulation and process.

“We started commercially printing for designers, brands and fabric mills in 2016,” he said.

The development process required not only development of the inks, which are created from organic materials rather than using rare earth minerals that have a huge negative environmental impact; it also required development of a printing system that could handle the inks and deliver the requisite quality.

A model wearing the ZERO-D digitally printed dress at the COTTON USA booth. The fabric is 100% cotton poplin, and the entire dress, from the black background to the red roses, is all pigment.

Today, the Intech Digital 190T printer, equipped with eight Ricoh Gen 5E printheads, does just that with its ZERO-D technology (zero discharge, reflecting its waterless digital printing approach). The downside today, according to Cheng, is the speed, which is at 25 to 40 linear yards per hour. Intech currently has five of these printers printing direct to fabric in its Chinese factory.

“We’ve been looking for partners that want to also achieve the quality and eco-friendliness our printers deliver,” Cheng said, “but that has been somewhat difficult due to the amount of misinformation out there about pigment inks for textile printing, and so many missteps and even misrepresentation from some of the manufacturers. There is still a huge education need to get the word out about the potential for pigment inks in textiles.”

Intech Digital 190T printer.

Recreating the denim look was one area of focus for the company.

“Essentially, you scan a pair of jeans using a flatbed scanner and adjust the image digitally to capture weave effects, contrast, wash effects, etc., and you have a digital representation of that pair of jeans that can be printed on just about any bleached white fabric," Cheng said. "The resulting effect is almost indistinguishable from twill weave denim but with much, much less environmental impact. The benefit with our system is all the design work is done digitally, and the normal multi-step process of dyeing, washing/laundry, and processing to make a pair of finished jeans is now reduced to one waterless printing step. With this digital representation, you can digitally add different wash effects, adjust colors and do other things that would normally be performed on a finished pair of jeans.”

Digitally printed denim special effects for children’s jeans.

Embroidery simulated with digital printing.

Cheng noted that with conventional denim dyeing processes, not only is there the vast consumption of water and the associated pollution, but "you can’t really change the color. The only thing you can do is change the shade of color by removing the color through different washes or with laser technology. With digital printing and Photoshop, you can do just about anything, which opens up all sorts of new fashion possibilities for denim. You can make the jeans any color you want using our CMYK inks. Different wash effects can be produced digitally. Switching from indigo blue to red can be done very quickly in Photoshop. We can add placement prints on the jeans through panel printing, have them wrap around the leg, making them customized. Perhaps if you travel a lot, you might want to print family photos on the inside of your garments so you can keep your family close while traveling, seeing their images when you dress and undress.”

Jeans in any color, made with cotton, linen, Tencel, viscose, even silk!

Intech can also print on soft manmade natural materials like Tencel.

“We can go with 97% Tencel, 3% Spandex,” Cheng said. “You can’t do that with conventional denim manufacturing because the Tencel fibers are damaged in the indigo dyeing process. But with Tencel + ZERO-D, you have a total water footprint (fabric + pigment) that is a maximum of 3% that of cotton denim (75 gallons vs. 2,500 gallons per pair). That is an amazing figure.”

The idea of changing the fabric for jeans is significant.

“One of the technical problems with skinny jeans, for example, is they get loose around the hips and knees after some amount of wear," he said. "If you change the construction of the fabric to something like a panama weave, that problem can be alleviated. But traditional denim manufacturers can’t do that; they are stuck with a twill weave. Manufacturers also use massive amounts of water in the wash/laundry process to make the jeans softer and more comfortable to wear for consumers immediately after purchase. However, to resolve the water consumption and pollution issues in the denim industry, this wash process needs to be eliminated. This is where changing the fabric can also come into play. There are so many bottom-weight fabrics out there that are naturally soft and comfortable to wear. They could be made from fibers like viscose, modal, linen, even silk. For example, we can print the denim patterns on 100% crepe-back-satin viscose or silk. In this way, on the outside, they look and feel just like jeans, but on the inside, against your skin, it’s an amazing soft silky feeling. All of this is part of our concept of ‘Denim Reimagined,’ with new denim fashion and designs on a diverse variety of fabrics, delivering style, fashion, comfort and ultra-sustainability all at once.”

Close-up of digitally printed fabric on textured dobby weave.

Creating a denim look with heat transfer dye sublimation is very difficult.

“It requires 50–60 milliliters of ink per square meter to achieve the right shade of blue/indigo,” Cheng said. “You can’t transfer that much dye accurately from heat transfer paper. The dyes bleed/migrate and create a blurry, blotchy mess. The same thing happens with reactive dye digital printing. With our pigment inks, given the photographic fidelity of our printing, you can’t tell the difference between conventional denim and our denim look unless you look at the back of the fabric.”

The Intech printing process uses minimal water. The fabric is pretreated, dried in a baking tunnel, printed, dried again, post-treated, dried again and finally softened with a final drying stage. There is no need for a post-print washing cycle. The fabric is ready to cut, sew and wear. Pre- and post-treatment solutions are determined by the type of fabric to be printed; in most cases, the post-treatment is a polymeric solution to bring up the dry and wet crock to apparel standards (dry 4, wet 3, at least). A standard fabric softener is used in the softening process.

Another advantage of Intech’s pigment printing process is that the ink is actually absorbed into the fabric yet still delivers fantastic color; in other pigment printing processes, he says, the pigments lay on top of the fabric as a coating, much like DTG and screen printing, to deliver the required color gamut. However, this significantly impacts the fabric hand to give it a rubbery or cardboard feel, and the print cracks and peels with use like regular DTG and screen prints.

Denim Reimagined: An example of changing colors, adding colors and different placement prints to create new, fashionable denim.

In terms of cost for denim production, fabric printed with this methodology carries a cost of $4.00 to $5.00 per linear yard, for the entire process. Intech inks sell at a pretty standard market prices of about $30 per liter. If an organization wanted to purchase the production system, Cheng said it starts at a sub $250,000 investment.

“We recommend purchase of two printers, both for redundancy and to increase throughput," he said. "That gives you 50 to 80 linear yards per hour for less than $500,000, and the system is extremely reliable. It’s like the Energizer Bunny, it just keeps going and going.”

The system uses ErgoSoft RIP software and works with Pantone color matching.

The quality, reliability and reduced waste are important in the ROI calculation.

“You have to consider the total cost of ownership—the total lifecycle cost across the supply chain. Being able to produce on-demand, producing the designs that sell, and quickly cutting out the ones that do not do well to minimize risk are important considerations.

Intech pigment printing produces high quality color, fine details.

Today, Intech is producing apparel created from digitally printed fabric using its pigment-based inks for a number of well-known brands, not restricted to denim. The company also works with cut-and-sew operations in China to deliver finished garments. Over time, as the industry becomes more eco-sensitive, Cheng hopes to be able to not only grow the printing business but also sell printers and ink.

“We believe we’ll get there,” he said. “When we attend industry shows, like MAGIC and the denim-focused Kingpins event, attendees are stunned by the apparel quality. But it will take a little more time and education to gain the kind of traction we hope to see.”

So the next time you put on those jeans, think about their environmental impact, consider what it would be like to have them produced with your favorite fabric and in your favorite color, and stay tuned with developments as this technology becomes, as Cheng hopes, more widespread and available.

Karin Malmstrom of COTTON USA with Dalton Cheng. The mannequin and Cheng are in pigment printed apparel, top and bottom. Cheng’s shirt is printed silk charmeuse.