As global brands demand stricter environmental accountability, the textile industry faces mounting pressure to rethink how it consumes and cleans water. Robert Antoshak, Managing Partner, Gherzi Americas, in this exclusive interaction with Divya Shetty, cuts through the noise, discussing the true hurdles of wastewater treatment, the pragmatic limits of Zero Liquid Discharge, and why future business success depends on reducing water consumption right at the production source.
What are the biggest water and wastewater management challenges facing the textile industry today?
The industry uses too much water in places that can’t spare it. Dyeing, washing, bleaching, printing and finishing all run wet, and most of that capacity sits in regions where farms and cities already compete for the same supply. Price used to be the worry. In some regions the worry now is whether the water shows up at all.
Wastewater is the harder problem. Effluent carries dyes, salts, surfactants, oils, metals and suspended solids, and the mix shifts with every production run. Treatment that worked on Tuesday struggles on Thursday. Microfibres have regulators paying closer attention too.
Then there’s execution. Plenty of factories own treatment plants. Running them well every day is another matter. Without trained operators and steady maintenance, the equipment is expensive scenery. And the leftovers, mostly sludge and brine, still need somewhere to go.
How are water recycling, reuse and Zero Liquid Discharge helping textile manufacturers improve sustainability and reduce water consumption?
Recycling and reuse break the habit of treating water as a one-and-done input. Treated water can go back into washing and cooling, sometimes into dyeing. Rinse water from late stages can feed earlier ones. Cleaner streams can be split off from the filthy ones instead of running everything through the same expensive plant.
Not every gallon needs treatment to the same standard. A mill that matches water quality to the job cuts freshwater use without building a system more complicated than it needs to be.
ZLD takes recovery to the extreme. It can slash freshwater demand and end routine liquid discharge, which makes sense where water is scarce or regulators are strict. It’s also expensive and hard to run, and it burns a lot of energy. What’s left behind, concentrated salts and solids, still requires disposal.
So ZLD has its place. In many mills, though, aggressive recycling and reuse will get you most of the benefit without the price tag or the headaches.
What is one practical step textile manufacturers can take today to improve water efficiency without making major changes to their operations?
Measure water use by machine, process and shift.
Most factories know the monthly water bill. Far fewer know where the water went. A handful of flow meters and a basic water balance will expose the obvious waste: overfilled machines, rinse cycles running long, water flowing while equipment sits idle, leaks nobody spotted, big gaps between lines making the same product.
A few meters and some attention, that’s the whole investment. Once a mill tracks liters per kilogram of production, bad performance has nowhere to hide.
How do you see water management in the textile industry evolving over the next five years, and what role will innovation play?
Water management will move out of the sustainability office and onto the production floor. Factories will be expected to track water use, chemical loads, salt levels and wastewater quality by product, machine and batch. Annual totals won’t cut it.
Brands will want data, and they’ll have less patience for vague claims. Suppliers will need to show where reductions came from, whether treatment systems actually work and what happens to the sludge and brine afterward. Water performance will start deciding who gets the orders.
Innovation will matter, but nobody should wait around for a miracle technology. Progress will come from better sensors, automated dosing, low-liquor-ratio machines, improved membranes and stronger biological treatment. Shared treatment and recycling facilities will also gain ground in textile clusters where smaller mills can’t fund the investment alone.
The winners will be the factories that use less water before treatment ever starts. Building the biggest wastewater plant misses the point. Make less wastewater.