Two eco-design allies : Dope Dyed and Biton
At Quechua, we mainly use two processes to minimise water use in the dyeing of our products.
Focus on Dope Dyed and Biton and go behind the scenes of some of our products!
1. The use of dope dyed
To dye a fabric, it must be soaked in large quantities of water, we talk about "dye baths". And it generates a large quantity of waste 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. When the yarn comes out, it is already coloured and ready to use in our product designs. And we avoid dye baths!
At Quechua, when we use this process, we claim the product is eco-designed when over 50% of its weight is made up of dope dyed fabric.
How dope dyed works
To create the yarn required for textile manufacture, polyester in paste form is placed in a kind of tube. Powdered colour pigments are inserted at the same time.
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. Once stretched and rolled, this dyed yarn is ready to be used to design our products.
2. The use of biton
Now that you know everything about the dope dyed process, let we present you its partner: the biton process. This weaving technique only uses one dyed yarn out of every two to create the finished fabric. And the dyed yarn are created thanks to the dope dyed process. We delete the dye baths stage that needs a lot of water, and we avoid consuming energy to dye half of the material.
At Quechua, when we use this process, we claim the product is eco-designed when over 50% of its weight is made up of biton fabric.
How biton works
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. The dyed yarn is coloured using the dope dyed process.
Thanks to this process, we get an on-trend mottled colour fabric.
Using the dope dyed and biton processes on a fabric cuts water consumption by around 30-40% compared to conventional dyeing. In other words, we save around 15 liters of water per kg of component.
