Waste is something that is unusable. Waste or wastage has a bigger impact on the profit percentage of the textile and garments business. Wastage will hit your bottom line directly. It will destroy your whole effort, investment, and time by reducing profit rather than increasing it. You can save thousands of dollars by decreasing or reducing wastage in the textile and apparel manufacturing. This article is about the details of Waste in Textile and Apparel Industry: Types of Waste in Textile and Apparel Industry, Waste Categories, and Causes of waste in Textile and Apparel Industry.
The Textile and apparel business is becoming more competitive, and customers expect higher quality for lower prices. To survive and perform in this business scenario, manufacturing companies have to reduce costs in different ways. It should be noted here that one of the largest costs involved in most of the manufacturing operations is wastage which is unavoidable.
Particularly in the apparel manufacturing industry, the wastage percentage is high due to the integrated process sequence and also the interaction the men and machines is more, which also leads to a certain percentage increase in wastage. What is Waste in the Textile and Apparel Industry? Types of Waste in Textile and Apparel Industry, Waste Categories, and Causes of Waste in Textile and Apparel Industry are discussed in the following:
What is Waste or Wastage in Textile and Apparel?
Wastage is a redundant material that cannot be used anymore or is worthless. In most of the manufacturing process, wastage is inevitable. It is the difference between the amount of input and the amount of output expressed in a percentage. When an input material passes through several stages of different processes before being converted into a finished output.
Some wastage of materials takes place due to different reasons like trial run, machine breakdown, poor quality raw material, inferior workmanship, shrinkage, evaporation, etc. Wastage may be in the form of leftover raw materials, scraps, rejections, test runs, etc. Due to these wastages, the amount of output will be less than the amount of input.
Types of Waste in the Textile and Apparel Industry
Waste in the textile and apparel industry can be broadly categorized into two types: normal waste and abnormal waste.
1. Normal Waste:
Normal waste refers to the unavoidable loss of materials that occurs during standard manufacturing processes, even under efficient and well-managed operations. This type of waste arises due to factors such as:
- Inability to measure certain materials precisely.
- Discrepancies between the units of purchase and units of usage.
- Natural processes like evaporation, shrinkage, or cutting losses.
Since normal waste is an expected part of production, its cost is factored into the overall manufacturing expenses.
2. Abnormal Waste:
Abnormal waste refers to any material loss that exceeds the expected level of normal waste. This typically results from inefficiencies such as:
- Poor material handling or storage.
- Negligence in production processes.
- Substandard workmanship or excessive rework.
Unlike normal waste, the cost of abnormal waste is not included in manufacturing costs. Instead, it is treated as a separate loss and may require corrective measures to prevent recurrence. The key distinction between the two lies in their predictability and controllability—normal waste is inevitable, while abnormal waste indicates operational inefficiencies that need to be addressed.
Category of Waste in Textile
The category of waste generated in textiles is loosely classified into four classes. Everyone has characteristics that demand different pollution interference and treatment approaches:
- Hard to Treat Wastes: This is a category of waste. And it includes those who are persistent, resist treatment, or make contact with the operation of the treatment facilities. Non-biodegradable organic or inorganic materials are the chief sources of waste, which contain color, metals, phenols, bound surfactants, unhealthful organic compounds, pesticides, and phosphates.
- Hazardous or unhealthful Wastes: It is another category of waste in textiles, which consists of risky or unhealthful wastes that include metals, solvents of chlorine, non-biodegradable or volatile organic materials. A number of these materials are typically used for non-process applications like machine cleansing.
- High Volume Wastes: A Massive volume of waste is typically a deterrent for the textile process units. Most typical massive volume wastes include:
- High volume of wastewater.
- Wash water from preparation and continuous colouring processes and alkaline wastes from propaedeutic processes.
- Batch dye waste contains massive amounts of salt, acid, or alkali.
- Dispersible Wastes: The subsequent operations in the textile business generate extremely dispersible waste.
It stems from continuous operation (e.g., propaedeutic, dyeing, printing, and finishing).- Paste for Printing (printing screen, squeeze and drum cleaning).
- Lint (preparatory, colouring and laundry operations).
- Foam from coating operations.
- Solvents from machine cleansing.
- Still bottoms from solvent recovery (dry cleansing operation).
- Batch dumps of unused process (finishing mixes)
Causes of Wastage or Waste Formation in Textile and Apparel Industry:
The forms of textile and apparel waste or wastage are as follows:
- Leftover raw materials,
- Scraps from production,
- Rejections,
- Trial run quantity,
- Waste from poor material handling.
All the above wastage or wastes have been explained below:
1. Leftover Raw Materials:
This form of wastage is due to the input raw materials, which are left unused in the input area at the end of the production process. For example, leftover yarn in the yarn cones and creels is used in textile knitting, warping, etc.
2. Scraps from production:
This type of wastage arises during the manufacturing process due to machine breakdown, cutting, shaping, or finishing, etc., and which cannot be reused for manufacturing. For example, fabric waste from the fabric cutting operation or process.
3. Rejections:
Rejections are the production units that do not meet the product specifications or standard approved by the buyer due to defects or faults, poor workmanship, etc. In the clothing manufacturing industry, it is normally sold at reduced prices.
4. Trial run quantity:
In some processes, before going into bulk production, a trial run or test run has to be carried out to bring the standard operating or process conditions. This quantity of the material cannot be used further. For example, trial runs of printing, finishing, etc.
5. Waste from poor material handling:
These types of wastage arise due to poor material handling during the wet processing stages, buttons and labels are lost during the sewing operation because of poor handling, etc.
Conclusion
No textile or garments industry wants to have or generate waste. We have to improve handling during the production process to reduce this. The varying characteristics and properties of textile material and different types of processes & methods lead to a higher waste or wastage percentage. The lack of awareness and concept of standardization or processes, methods, materials, etc., also plays an important role in increasing wastage or waste. Standardization of waste or wastage percentage is necessary to control and reduce waste in apparel manufacturing. Due to various types of materials, machines, methods, specifications, capacities, etc. are being used in apparel manufacturing, it is also very important to go for the standardization of different processes, raw materials, methods, etc.
Standardization also enables easy, accurate, and effective calculation. It must be done after conducting many number of trial studies and analyzing the data. After that, the average standard waste or wastage percentage for each process, machine, materials, methods, etc., must be finalized.
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