Eco-Friendly Thickening Agent for Cotton Fabric Reactive Dye Printing

The textile printing process’s use of artificial thickeners has a number of detrimental effects on the environment. Researchers use starch-based thickeners, which are the most popular natural thickeners for cotton printing due to their availability and low cost. However, the use of native starch-based thickenera is not recommended for reactive printing due to the presence of many accessible hydroxyl groups. Here, the main aim of this study has been the extraction of protein-based thickener derived from trimmed fleshing waste of animal hide for better colour fastness properties of reactive dye print on cotton. The physicochemical properties and the application of this thickener with sodium alginate in different proportions were studied. In addition, after printing was performed on the cotton fabric, the physical and mechanical properties of the printed fabric were evaluated. The results show that the properties of the printed fabric, namely, overall fastness and softness, are dependent on the percentage of gelatin thickener. Moreover, the analytical result showed that the colour strengths and colour fastness properties of printed cotton fabric were enhanced. Therefore, the developed protein-based gelatin is suitable to be applied as a sustainable, eco-friendly thickening agent for the application of reactive dye printing on textiles.