Coloured powder from coloured textile waste for fabric printing application

Waste textiles generally have various colours. The largely discarded textiles not only result in huge loss of the limited natural materials, but also waste the colour in it which had cost substantial energy consumption and risked water pollution during dyeing. This work aimed to recycle both the waste textiles and the colours in them. In this research, magenta waste cotton fabric was firstly milled into powders with different particle sizes, and then printed as “pigments” onto cotton fabric to achieve new magenta coloured fabrics. Properties of the powders and corresponding printed fabrics were tested, including powder morphology, colour and fabric colour fastness. Powders with different particle sizes showed different colour depth from the K/S and L*a*b* value results. The K/S value of printed fabrics indicated that particle size did not have an apparent influence on the fabric colour. Furthermore, fabrics printed with 2, 5, 10 and 30 µm magenta cotton powders presented good fastness, among which the fabric printed with 5 µm powders possessed the best colour and rub fastness. This study demonstrated a potential new application for coloured textile waste.