BAGSVAERD – Danish bioinnovation company Novozymes has developed Terminox Supreme, a new bleach clean-up enzyme treatment for fabrics that is said to require far less water and energy than conventional methods.

In order to get consistent batch-to-batch dyeing reproducibility, it is essential to have the same starting point. This is achieved by bleaching the fabric in advance, and equally important, by removing all residual hydrogen peroxide in a bleach clean-up process afterwards.As well as ensuring consistent bleach clean-up, Terminox Supreme is said to be very robust under high pH conditions, high temperatures, and high hydrogen peroxide levels. It even removes residual hydrogen peroxide at 1,000 ppm.

As an alternative to hot water rinsing and reducing agents, Terminox Supreme also offers considerable reductions of water and energy. Where traditional bleach clean-up processes use sizeable amounts of water for rinsing and high amounts of energy for heating and pumping the water, enzymes simply split H2O2 into H2O and O2 and make further rinses unnecessary before dyeing.

Novozymes says that water savings with enzymatic bleach clean-up can be as high as 20,000 litres of water per ton of textile.

(Source: www.ecotextile.com )