Environmental life cycle assessment of indigo rope dyeing for denim production: a case study from the Tunisian textile industry.

Authors

Maha Abdelileh, Haythem Haddad, Hatem Dhaouadi

Published in

Environmental science and pollution research international. Jun 25, 2026. Epub Jun 25, 2026.

Abstract

The denim industry, a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption, is under increasing pressure to adopt more sustainable practices. While life cycle assessment (LCA) has been applied to denim products at the product level, large-scale, process-specific environmental assessments of conventional industrial indigo rope dyeing remain limited. The purpose of this study is therefore to provide a detailed environmental evaluation of that process, identify key environmental hotspots, and support targeted mitigation strategies at the process level. To this end, a gate-to-gate environmental LCA was conducted for conventional indigo rope dyeing IRD, using recent (2025) primary data collected from a large-scale Tunisian denim dyeing facility and complemented with relevant secondary datasets. The results indicate that the production of 1 kg of indigo-dyed rope generates 2.34 kg CO₂ eq. Contribution analysis shows that electricity and steam consumption mainly supplied by fossil-based cogeneration are the primary contributors to global warming potential (GWP) and abiotic depletion, while sodium dithionite is the main contributor to acidification. In addition, the consumption of steam and synthetic indigo dye is identified as a major contributor to terrestrial and marine aquatic ecotoxicity impacts. Scenario-based sensitivity analysis demonstrates that replacing fossil-based energy with renewable alternatives can substantially reduce the environmental burden of the dyeing process, particularly with respect to climate change and resource depletion. These findings highlight the critical role of energy transition and chemical substitution in improving the sustainability of denim dyeing.

PMID:
42348076
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 25 Jun 2026.

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