At Quechua, we mainly use two processes to minimise water use in the production of our products and we’ll explain how that works!
Focus on Dope Dyed and Biton and go behind the scenes of some of our products!
To dye a fabric, it must be soaked in large quantities of water.
To avoid this abundant use of water, we use the dope dyed technique.
It's a process that involves adding the colour pigments when the yarn itself is produced.
At Quechua, we claim a product is eco-designed when over 50% of its weight is made up of Dope Dyed fabric.
To create the yarn required for textile manufacture, polyester in paste form is placed in a kind of tube.
With a very thin hole at the end, an endless screw (called an extrusion screw) pushes the material out of this tube in a thin filament.
At the same time as the polyester paste, powdered colour pigments are inserted.
So when the yarn comes out, it is coloured and ready to use in our product designs.
Dyeing textiles requires a lot of water but also produces waste water from the dye baths.
To reduce the impact of water use and waste water, we only use one dyed yarn out of every two, therefore reducing our water consumption and impact.
At Quechua, we claim a product is eco-designed when over 50% of its weight is made up of Biton fabric.
A biton fabric only has one dyed yarn out of every two.
During its weave, the dyed yarn is placed horizontally and the undyed yarn vertically.
Thanks to this process, we get an on-trend mottled colour fabric and it reduces the environmental impact.
Moreover, the dyed yarn is coloured using a process that itself is less impactful (coloured using the dope dyed technique).