Help for the Industrial Fabric
Consortium links expertise of academiawith industry.
By Lincoln Bates
Industrial effluent in Georgia's waterways is nothing new, nor are increasingly stringent regulations designed to keep pollutants in line. But new approaches to mitigate the problem at the source have shown promise, and a university-industry partnership in Georgia is leading the way.
photo by Stanley Leary
Dr. Jim Mulholland, left,
an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and
Environmental Engineering, and graduate student Ravindra Bissram,
participated in a CCACTI effort to help industry record air emissions
data for the Environmental Protection Agency.
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In 1994, the state Environmental Protection Division told Springs Industries in Griffin, Ga., that it must meet strict metals and toxicity limits to continue discharging effluent — up to 2 million gallons daily — from a towel-making operation and a yarn-dyeing plant into the headwaters of Cabin Creek.
Researchers from the Consortium on Competitiveness for the Apparel, Carpet and Textile Industries (CCACTI) worked with the Griffin plant. They suggested a closed-loop treatment system that completely reuses process water, with the goal of reducing wastewater volume to as near zero as possible.
For Dr. Fred Cook, head of Georgia Tech's School of Textile and Fiber Engineering, the project exemplifies what CCACTI is all about — applying university-based knowledge to assist one of Georgia's largest industries.
Funded by state government and textile-based firms, CCACTI is a logical collaboration given Georgia's 100 years of involvement with the textile industry. Not only are textiles omnipresent — from the cotton in your shirt to the nylon in the carpet to composites in your car to carbon fabric in the space shuttle — but the $13 billion industry itself is woven into the state's economy. As many as 140 of the state's 159 counties house some sort of textile-related business, Cook says. In parts of rural Georgia those companies are the major employer, indeed have been since the late 19th century when northern textile manufacturers moved south to be closer to their cotton supply and to cheaper labor.
CCACTI is a necessary mechanism, Cook says, one that provides direct technical assistance and technology transfer. Considerable research takes place under the auspices of the National Textile Center (NTC) and other organizations. But CCACTI "closes the loop" by making academia's expertise available to companies, an aspect especially useful to firms lacking technical staff, he says. Projects are cooperative, and participating plants agree to be beta test sites.
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CCACTI (Consortium on Competitiveness for the Apparel, Carpet and Textile
Industries): Susan Shows at 404/894-6113 or via e-mail
at "The idea is to find niches where the University System can make the biggest impact," " says Georgia Tech's Susan Shows, manager of CCACTI. Also, the entire industry can learn from the results of each individual project, she adds. In fact, one of the funding selection criteria is how pervasive the issue is.
Beyond that, CCACTI is a model of intercollegiate cooperation, with most projects involving researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia as well as other colleges and universities.
But it's by no means an academic exercise or ivory tower experiment. CCACTI has an active industry advisory board, and industry partners define needs, select research projects and monitor their progress. To date, CCACTI has supported more than 30 such efforts. Among them are:
development of a non-formaldehyde,
wrinkle-free finish for garments. Researchers successfully formulated a
new polycarboxylic acid-based finish with better wrinkle resistance and
strength retention than the currently used, and environmentally
unfavorable, formaldehyde-based system. (Earlier this year,
Georgia-based Callaway Chemicals licensed the technology and began
marketing it internationally.)
compilation of an Internet-based source of
information for recycling textile/carpet/apparel waste. This database
lists more than 200 waste dealers and material recyclers, businesses
that conceivably can reroute some of the industry's solid waste from
landfills to useful products.
investigation of the feasibility of fibers
for reinforcing concrete and roadbeds. To alleviate landfilling of the
industry's annual 150 million pounds of solid waste, researchers are
exploring the addition of textile wastes to structural concrete and to
soils of new roads and highways to gain more strength and stability.
Many of CCACTI's projects claim an environmental component, appropriately enough, Cook says, in this emerging era of sustainable textile manufacturing and industrial ecology.
At Springs Industries, CCACTI's initial efforts focused on reducing effluent at the towel-making facility. By modifying the plant's water-based manufacturing processes and installing more efficient washing equipment, researchers and company engineers cut the plant's total daily effluent from some 1.8 million gallons to 900,000 gallons.
In the yarn-dyeing plant, researchers found that overflow rinses could be replaced with more efficient types and that some rinses could be completely eliminated without damaging the quality of the yarn. These changes reduced the second plant's effluent by 25 percent.
"It is apparent that environmental compliance issues are best approached initially through source reduction efforts," says plant manager Dave Lamb. "Source reduction serves to reduce both chemical and utility consumption. CCACTI provided us opportunities to explore innovative ways to improve our process efficiency while maintaining cost and quality standards."
Project leader Cook says in practice the company's volume of effluent was cut by half, and the technology exists to achieve additional benefits. Also, the results can be readily applied to other textile-related operations, he adds.
Another CCACTI project with significant environmental ramifications entails air emissions from carpet mills. Amendments to the federal Clean Air Act will require carpet manufacturers to have air permits by 2000. These permits will address volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and hazardous air pollutants (HAPS), about which there is limited information in carpet making. Accurate estimates of hourly emission rates will help determine a company's permitted operating capacity or application of control technologies or both.
Project leader Dr. Jim Mulholland, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asked industry to provide emissions data, and that's where CCACTI came in. Instead of using calculations based on chemical inventory records and material safety data sheets, CCACTI investigators decided on a more accurate method — collecting and analyzing emissions directly from the factory stacks. The approach was a snapshot, says Mulholland. In the lab researchers were subsequently able to reproduce the types of emissions observed in the field and study in a cost-effective manner how these emissions are formed and controlled.
Dalton-area industry participants included Mohawk Industries, Carriage Industries, and World Carpets, and CCACTI researchers worked closely with environmental teams from the plants. "They were very cooperative, and it has been a fruitful collaboration," Mulholland says.
The initial phase entailed collecting more than 400 air emission samples from 22 stacks at two continuous dye plants and two latex coating plants. Later, researchers gathered a similar number of samples from two batch dye plants and two yarn heat-setting facilities.
The major results are in identifying and quantifying emissions and in gaining a better understanding of how emissions depend on various chemicals and processes, Mulholland says. Companies relying on calculated emissions have overestimated their total emissions while failing to characterize the distribution of chemical compounds found in the stacks. "We're finding that the emissions for single plants would not put them in a 'major source category' under existing regulations," says Mulholland, adding that the CCACTI information may go to EPA this fall.
The analysis may allow EPA to identify carpet manufacturing processes of greatest concern, Mulholland suggests, and possibly enable suppliers to target chemicals for reformulation to achieve maximum emission reduction. Another benefit is that state environmental officials can add valuable data to existing air emission inventories. "A lot is known about air emission sources such as cars and power plants, but not much about many industrial sources such as carpet manufacturers," he says.
Some CCACTI projects have been completed, but others are ongoing — for example, an examination of bioconversion to further reduce the quantity of landfilled solid wastes. Another is looking into the optimum level of chemicals in denim manufacture, with the idea of reducing chemical costs by at least 30 percent. One new project will respond to consumer concerns related to mold and mildew growth associated with carpets, Shows says.
One measure of success is the response from industry. Roy Bowen, president of the Georgia Textile Manufacturers Association, says, "The key to CCACTI's success is that industry wants to be involved in these projects. Our companies and researchers are working together to solve problems that directly impact industry's bottom-line performance. That's how CCACTI is making Georgia's textile industry more competitive today."
For more information, you may contact Susan Shows, Economic Development Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0390. (Telephone: 404/894-6113) (E-mail: susan.shows@edi.gatech.edu)
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