Over the last eight years, ozone has made a prominent place for itself in the garment processing industry all over the world. Widely used as a bleaching agent, Ozone is a powerful within the denim industries that give denim garments a unique and distinctive look and feel from other traditional processing without reducing strength.
Though it changes the color of the Indigo dye, ozone eliminates tinting from the reverse of the denims as also from the sewing thread, pocket fabric, labels, zippers, buttons etc. giving the garment a cleaner look.
Normally jeans are rinsed with large amounts of water to get rid of the excess indigo from the garment, and chemicals are applied to fade the jean and clean up indigo bleeds on the pocket linings. When a jean is ‘ozonized’ however, those processes are drastically reduced, if not eliminated. The ozone acts as a bleach to disinfect the garment, kill bacteria and clean up the indigo, dramatically lowering water consumption and greatly lowering energy and chemical usage.
Ozone is generated via corona discharge in an ozone generator and fed into the bleaching machine as a gas. The bleaching machine is a tumbler where ozone gas is introduced and removed after processing. The process time is 15 to 20 minutes per batch. During this time; tumbling action slowly turns over the garments for even exposure to the gas circulating in the entire tumbler. Later, with the help of the exhaust pipe the gas in the tumbler is flushed into an ozone decomposing system.
Koos Manufacturing applies ozone technology to its denim manufacturing as a dry process that essentially produces a cleaner finish to the jean, in a much quicker time frame and uses no water during its cycle. Koos expects to reduce its consumption of water, chemicals and dirty energy by approximately 25% annually, helping to save the world one jean at a time.