Development of sustainable and cost efficient textile foam-finishing and its comparison with conventional padding

Conventional padding is a non-sustainable textile processing technique, which consumes excessive water, chemicals and energy. To support the survival of the textile processing industry, researchers have identified the foam technology for application of dyes and finishes. Foam technology is more ecofriendly than the conventional padding. However, the successful foam generation for different finishes is a challenging task. In addition, it is more difficult and complicated task to effectively apply the foam on the fabrics and get the results which should be comparable with the conventional padding. This paper compares the pad-finishing with foam-finishing on the basis of sustainability, cost, productivity, and performance using 11 different non-toxic and sustainable finishes including cross-linkers, oil and water repellents, softeners, and fire retardant on the cotton fabric samples. Cost, productivity, performance and sustainability were estimated through the specific methods. The paper organizes the problem as analytic hierarchy process model and solves the model using super decisions software. The results reveal that the foam-finishing technique is more preferable in terms of cost, productivity and sustainability, if optimized properly. In addition, the successful foam-finishing recipes have been generated and the performance of foam-finishing has been comparable with pad-finishing. For instance, if all the criteria were given the same priority, the foam-finishing recipe with less quantity of chemical was 84.61% better than the pad-finishing. The optimized foam-finishing recipe was 84.55% better than the pad-finishing. In addition, the optimized foam-finishing recipe indicated better finishing performance in term of some important tests as compared to padding.