Development of a digital printing technology demonstrator for the additive manufacturing of textiles

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The production of textiles usually involves applying colour, decoration or coating. Theseprocesses currently use wet chemistry methods that generate huge waste during manufacture.In 2008 global textile production was estimated at 60BN Kg of fabric. This equated to1,074BN kWh of electricity used or 132 million cubic metres of coal and between 6 – 9trillion litres of water.In addition, the fashion industry creates tremendous amounts of waste in fabrics and clothingthat go “out-of-fashion” rapidly. This results in financial losses for retailers and manufacturersin unsold fashion items as well as mountains of waste in unwanted textile goods.What’s needed is a low-cost, reliable method of decorating fabrics that can be used toeconomically manufacture the right quantity of fashion goods, closer to point-of-sale –without the huge environmental costs of current methods.In our prototype development project we plan to develop a digital additive method to disruptthe market - enabling process speeds close to current production methods at comparable cost.The business opportunity for us is to move digital printing from niche to mainstreamtechnology for textile production lines for dyeing, decorating and coating using traditionalmaterials.If successful, this will create an industrial printing system that enables the inkjet printerindustry to respond to tremendous demand in the fashion industry. Today, less than 1% ofglobal textile output is printed using digital processes. By achieving process speedscomparable to conventional methods, but without the tremendous waste and environmentalcosts, we expect our innovation to make a major step change to a market for hardware and inksales for inkjet colour continuous feed textile printers growing to over £1Bn in value by 2018– while positioning the UK at the forefront of digital textile printing technology.