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Water conservation in theatrical dyeing
Oct. 15th, 2010 07:58 amToday is Blog Action Day, and the topic of the year is Water.
I've participated in BAD before (2007 and 2008), and that 2007 post on running a dye shop in a drought still gets fairly frequent hits, three years later. (In 2008, i posted about poverty and theatre, which was a cool thing to write about but not something as many people google for resources on.)
So, partly this post is to remind folks of that earlier drought post, which talks about water conservation in theatrical dye shops during times of water shortage--in the Carolina piedmont, where my theatre is located, we hit drought conditions fairly often. Wherever you live though, if you run a dye facility, it's an ethically responsible thing to keep an eye on the water supply and advise your coworkers accordingly. Your city and/or state will have online resources for up-to-the-minute water supply status info, such as this page about the water supply in Durham, NC, and Orange County's WaterWatch page. I check those resources a couple times a month to keep tabs on how severe the water supply issues might be.
Of course, conservation is a good thing, whether it's drought in your area or not. Dyers (including myself, before i began really looking into it) always worry about such things, because we absolutely require water to do our jobs. Even if you are conducting a dye process that requires a very low quantity of H2O--the actual dyeing of the batik i posted about recently took under 2 gallons of water--you still have to run post-dye laundry loads to rinse the fabrics.
There are a lot of sustainability initiatives out there, grants and organizations looking to award funds to companies with conservation-related projects--this kind of issue is right up their alley. You can write a grant proposal for these groups/funds to upgrade your facilities to utilize energy-efficient laundry machines, and to install greywater reclamation systems that pipe through your dyeshop. Greywater can be used to run rinse cycles in the post-dyeing laundry process, for example. At my shop, i have a dye-specific laundry area, and a different fabric prep laundry area. The machines for pre-washing could run entirely on greywater (and in fact, this is something we're researching for exactly this reason).
As a dyer, you can also help to conserve water by lobbying for low-water-immersion dye techniques (which produce results that look better under stage lights than high-water-immersion baths anyway) and requesting the purchase of PFD fabrics--PFD stands for "Prepared For Dyeing," which means you don't need to do the massive loads of pre-washing to remove sizing and finishes. The batik linked above was done on PFD muslin, which we were able to stretch on our batik frame right off the bolt.
As a costume designer, you can help to conserve water by shopping fabrics in the colors you want, rather than buying things that aren't the right color and planning to have them dyed. Just because you have the resource of a dye shop, doesn't mean you have to rely on it rather than your shopper to get the colors of fabrics and garments you want. Or, when you do need fabrics or garments dyed, choose a fiber content that lends itself well to low-immersion dye processes (like cold-water fiber-reactive dyes on cellulose fibers like cotton/linen/rayon) and plan well enough in advance for your dyer to utilize those techniques. It does take about a day longer to use those dyes well, but so much less water and they yield so much more vibrant, visually exciting colors than the faster, high-water-usage union dyes.
Water conservation is not something anyone should write off as a fringe-hippie bleeding-heart eco-kook issue--it affects literally every person on this planet. Some more than others, clearly, but for those of us with access to fresh potable water, we need to find ways to conserve it. I admit i never thought much about water wasting til i moved to a drought state and realized how quickly that vital resource can literally dry up. I was so moved to action, that not only did i write the 2007 action post on dyeshops in droughts, i also wrote a creative nonfiction piece about it, Mordant, which is part of the NC Writers Network anthology, Writing the New South.
You don't have to shut down your dyeshop to make a difference. Every low water process you use saves water; every bolt of PFD fabric you buy, or costume you build in the desired color, toned with airbrush rather than dyed, saves water. Every bucket of greywater you dump into your rinse cycle.
Take steps to reduce water usage in dye processes if you can. It's not a lost cause unless you write it off as one.
I've participated in BAD before (2007 and 2008), and that 2007 post on running a dye shop in a drought still gets fairly frequent hits, three years later. (In 2008, i posted about poverty and theatre, which was a cool thing to write about but not something as many people google for resources on.)
So, partly this post is to remind folks of that earlier drought post, which talks about water conservation in theatrical dye shops during times of water shortage--in the Carolina piedmont, where my theatre is located, we hit drought conditions fairly often. Wherever you live though, if you run a dye facility, it's an ethically responsible thing to keep an eye on the water supply and advise your coworkers accordingly. Your city and/or state will have online resources for up-to-the-minute water supply status info, such as this page about the water supply in Durham, NC, and Orange County's WaterWatch page. I check those resources a couple times a month to keep tabs on how severe the water supply issues might be.
Of course, conservation is a good thing, whether it's drought in your area or not. Dyers (including myself, before i began really looking into it) always worry about such things, because we absolutely require water to do our jobs. Even if you are conducting a dye process that requires a very low quantity of H2O--the actual dyeing of the batik i posted about recently took under 2 gallons of water--you still have to run post-dye laundry loads to rinse the fabrics.
There are a lot of sustainability initiatives out there, grants and organizations looking to award funds to companies with conservation-related projects--this kind of issue is right up their alley. You can write a grant proposal for these groups/funds to upgrade your facilities to utilize energy-efficient laundry machines, and to install greywater reclamation systems that pipe through your dyeshop. Greywater can be used to run rinse cycles in the post-dyeing laundry process, for example. At my shop, i have a dye-specific laundry area, and a different fabric prep laundry area. The machines for pre-washing could run entirely on greywater (and in fact, this is something we're researching for exactly this reason).
As a dyer, you can also help to conserve water by lobbying for low-water-immersion dye techniques (which produce results that look better under stage lights than high-water-immersion baths anyway) and requesting the purchase of PFD fabrics--PFD stands for "Prepared For Dyeing," which means you don't need to do the massive loads of pre-washing to remove sizing and finishes. The batik linked above was done on PFD muslin, which we were able to stretch on our batik frame right off the bolt.
As a costume designer, you can help to conserve water by shopping fabrics in the colors you want, rather than buying things that aren't the right color and planning to have them dyed. Just because you have the resource of a dye shop, doesn't mean you have to rely on it rather than your shopper to get the colors of fabrics and garments you want. Or, when you do need fabrics or garments dyed, choose a fiber content that lends itself well to low-immersion dye processes (like cold-water fiber-reactive dyes on cellulose fibers like cotton/linen/rayon) and plan well enough in advance for your dyer to utilize those techniques. It does take about a day longer to use those dyes well, but so much less water and they yield so much more vibrant, visually exciting colors than the faster, high-water-usage union dyes.
Water conservation is not something anyone should write off as a fringe-hippie bleeding-heart eco-kook issue--it affects literally every person on this planet. Some more than others, clearly, but for those of us with access to fresh potable water, we need to find ways to conserve it. I admit i never thought much about water wasting til i moved to a drought state and realized how quickly that vital resource can literally dry up. I was so moved to action, that not only did i write the 2007 action post on dyeshops in droughts, i also wrote a creative nonfiction piece about it, Mordant, which is part of the NC Writers Network anthology, Writing the New South.
You don't have to shut down your dyeshop to make a difference. Every low water process you use saves water; every bolt of PFD fabric you buy, or costume you build in the desired color, toned with airbrush rather than dyed, saves water. Every bucket of greywater you dump into your rinse cycle.
Take steps to reduce water usage in dye processes if you can. It's not a lost cause unless you write it off as one.
