The fashion industry soaks up 20% of the world’s water, and dumps it back into local streams and rivers as wastewater. That’s water left over from dyeing fabrics and thread. To produce one kilo of dyed thread, 70 liters of water are used; enough wastewater to fill 2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools a year.
While many companies in the fashion industry have committed to sustainable practice, and we at Green Prophet have been reporting sustainable fashion on a personal level for years, it was high time that someone developed a dependable way to reduce the ecological cost of the clothes we buy. That someone is Twine, an Israeli startup that created a machine that dyes threads digitally, similar to how your home printer color-prints. A clothes manufacturer can now program a machine to produce thread of the exact type, length, weight and colors required, only as much as needed, and ready for immediate use.
At present, threads are dyed using traditional water-consuming methods. Samples are shipped from South and East Asia to Western countries for approval, then shipped back for production to start, sometimes twice or even three times. This delays production and raises costs of manufacture. Significantly, this shipping back and forth leaves a large carbon footprint.
The Twine digital thread dyer will cause a revolution not only for manufacturing sewing, knitting and embroidery threads, but also for industries producing clothes, shoes, upholstery, home decor and more. 
Information from the Twine office:
Twine’s system continuously dyes a single raw or off-the-shelf (white) thread to any requested length and in any color, with a choice of millions of colors, shades, as well as color gradients.
Twine’s DST (Digital Selective Treatment) disruptive technology eliminates the need for colored thread stock, dramatically reduces logistics, dead stock and other waste costs, as well as dramatically reducing time to market.
The single thread, single needle, multi-color method will free creativity and design limitations, while improving production efficiencies, margins and overall profitability, all that in a sustainable, eco-friendly process.
Watch the video. It’s interesting, if you’ve never thought of what it takes to dye thread in your life.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vesESBNftA?feature=emb_rel_pause]
Author: Miriam Kresh
Miriam Kresh is an American ex-pat living in Israel. Her love of Middle Eastern food evolved from close friendships with enthusiastic Moroccan, Tunisian and Turkish home cooks. She owns too many cookbooks and is always planning the next meal. Miriam can be reached at miriam (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
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