Unprecedented economic achievement in China’s textile industry (TI) has occurred along with rising water consumption. The goal of industrial sustainable development requires the decoupling of economic growth from resource consumption. This paper examines the relationship between water consumption and economic growth, and the internal influence mechanism of China’s TI and its three sub-sectors: the manufacture of textiles (MT) sector, the Manufacture of Textile Wearing Apparel, Footwear, and Caps (MTWA) sector, and the manufacture of chemical fibers (MCF) sector. A decoupling analysis was performed and the Laspeyres decomposition method was applied to the period from 2001 to 2014. We showed that six of the fourteen years analyzed (2003, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2013) exhibited a strong decoupling effect and three of the fourteen years (2005, 2007, and 2010) exhibited a weak decoupling effect. Overall, China’s TI experienced a good decoupling between economic growth and water consumption from 2002 to 2014. For the three sub-sectors, the MTWA sector experienced a more significant positive decoupling than the MT and MCF sectors. The decomposition results confirm that the industrial scale factor is the most important driving force of China’s TI water consumption increase, while the water efficiency factor is the most important inhibiting force. The industrial structure adjustment does not significantly affect water consumption. The industrial scale and water use efficiency factors are also the main determinants of change in water consumption for the three sub-sectors.

The extensive use and discharge of chemicals is one of the main factors leading to serious environmental pollution in the textiles and apparel industry. The chemical footprint (ChF) is a toxicity-based chemical management method that is used to quantitatively evaluate the potential toxic effects of chemical pollutants discharged during the production of textiles and apparel products on human health and environmental safety. Compared with the traditional quantity-based method, this method needs to simulate the entire process of chemicals from discharge to impact, involving a series of steps of fate, exposure and effect, which greatly increases the difficulty of modeling. A scientific question is whether it is worth spending so much effort to quantify the toxicity of chemicals. Taking the warp-dyeing phase of denim jeans as an example, this paper calculated the ChFs for both human and ecological toxicities of textile chemicals based on the USEtox model, and compared them with the values of discharge quantities. The results reveal that there is a certain inconsistency between the discharge quantity and toxicity of chemical substances. Relying solely on the amount of chemicals discharged can sometimes lead to misjudgments, emphasizing the importance of controlling the toxicity of chemicals.

Silk garments with its unique luster, softness and glamour has always occupied an important position in the fashion market. However, such fabrics present difficulties in daily care and tend to deteriorate in visual perception after laundering. Panasonic in 2021 has therefore launched a novel washing mode characterized by up-and-down soft pressure and vacuum dehydration to address the mechanical damage of common household washing methods to the silk garments. In this study, the effect of the press washing mode on the appearance and mechanical properties of silk garments based on common household laundering scenarios was investigated by comparing with hand washing, gentle machine washing and normal machine washing. The experimental results demonstrated that press washing had the best performance in terms of appearance indicators and elastic recovery, especially in the case of repeated laundering, due to the minimum fiber damage and surface degradation during washing. The laundered samples were also subjected to sensory evaluation by taking into account the personal feelings of consumers, which further verified the instrumental test results to a certain extent. The results obtained in this study can provide scientific care guidance and optimization ideas for subsequent research and applications.