5. Conclusions
The Outline of the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) of China
has clearly put forward some restrictive requirements involved
industrial production: (1) resources utilization efficiency will
be improved considerably while energy consumption of per
unit GDP will be lowered by 20%; (2) water consumption will
be decreased by 30%; (3) the total emission volume of major
pollutants will be reduced by 10%. These are all closely interrelated
to textile industry, especially textile wet processing sector.
Recent studies on the contribution of biotechnology in the industrial
sector show that biotechnology in textile industry reduce
water usage and energy demand for bleaching (bio-cleanup)
by about 9–14% and 17–18%, respectively, or could cut water
consumption by as much as 30–50% (bioscouring) and cost
associated with water usage and air emission by about 50–60%
(biostonewashing). Evidently, the application of textile biotechnology
can result in cleaner processes that produces less waste
and use less energy and water and is one of the most promising
new approaches to pollution prevention, resource conservation
and cost reduction.
To date, more and more attentions have been focused on textile
biotechnology, in particular enzyme technology in China.
Genetic engineering offers new opportunities to produce modified
or new enzymes with better properties. However, so far only
partial success was achieved using existing commercial enzyme
preparations due to the recalcitrant nature of some of the components
and the process was found to be too slow and therefore
uneconomic for current applications. Undoubtedly, the use of
genetically modified microbial enzymes of commercial importance
can be expected to expand into many other areas of the
textile industry thus replacing existing chemical or mechanical
processes in the not too distant future. To sum up, the application
of biotechnology in textile industry is a good solution for
the cleaner production technology compared with conventional
procedures which have severe pollution problems, and biotechnology
will gain greater success in textile industry.