Water footprint assessment of textile enterprise based on ISO14046.

With increasing severe global water crisis, effective management and utilization of water resource have become an important problem to be solved for enterprises. Water footprint assessment has provided a new perspective in making flexible water resources development strategy. This study reports the results of a water footprint (WF) assessment for a typical textile printing and dyeing enterprise using the international method based on ISO14046. Since the calculation boundary "gate to gate" is select, the study pays particular attention to the industrial production stages from 2011 to 2013, and present an impact assessing caused by freshwater consumption and wastewater discharge at organization, product and process level. The results show that both the enterprise and product water scarcity footprint (WSF) in 2012 are the highest. Through the analysis of direct water scarcity footprint (DWSF) composition of each facility, it can be seen that dyeing factories account for 68% of the total enterprise DWSF. In light of the product level, the WSF of products are sorted from the highest to the lowest as follows: chemical knitted fabric > cotton knitted fabric > blended knitted fabric. Among the major water consumption working procedures of these three products, the water consumption of dyeing working procedure is the largest, which is successively followed by that of the printing and washing working procedure as well as that of sizing working procedure. The water degradation footprint, water eutrophication footprint and water acidification footprint of products show an overall downward trend. It is meaningful to reduce the freshwater consumption and wastewater discharge of the hot-spots through the improvement of freshwater management pattern and production techniques. Specific recommendations for further research in this field were also proposed in this study accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]