Sustainability
Recycling reduces intake, not demand. Only one of those is what the processes actually use.
— L/kg
Fresh water drawn per kilogram, after recycling
The balance treats recycled water as fully substitutable for fresh, which it is not: recovered water carries dissolved salts, colour and hardness that accumulate every pass, so most mills can use it in washing, rinsing and cooling and not in dyeing a pale shade or in a boiler. A recycle rate quoted without saying which processes it feeds is not comparable with anything. Evaporation is taken as a share of process demand and covers stenter exhaust, drying cylinders and cooling; it is water that never reaches the drain and therefore never appears in the effluent figure, which is why intake and discharge do not balance and should not be expected to. The last line is deliberately provocative: the recycle rate that would match the benchmark is offered because a mill will often reach for it first, and comparing it with the recycle rate the mill already has usually shows that the benchmark cannot be met by recycling at all - the demand itself has to fall. Specific consumption is also strongly a function of product mix rather than of discipline; a mill dyeing dark reactive shades on cotton cannot reach the figure a polyester disperse house does, and benchmarking across that difference produces a target nobody can hit and everybody stops believing.
Mill Water Balance against a Specific-Consumption Benchmark — free, with the formula and a worked example, at Textile School.