Cotton fabric as a kind of important natural fibers was widely applied in the different styles of textiles, such as carpets, clothing, wallpapers, and other areas due to its outstanding properties of vast quantities, moisture absorption, pollution-free, comfort and biodegradability (Li et al. 2020). Dyeing is a kind of essential method for the cotton fabric to color using different organic synthetic dyes such as direct dyes, and reactive dyes. During traditional cotton fabric dyeing in water, it is not regarded as an eco-friendly process due to the discharge of wastewater for retaining dyes (Dong et al. 2019).
Organic dyestuffs as colorants are widely employed in current some industries, such as cosmetic, textile, paper industries as well as dyeing (Varjani et al. 2020A; Yun et al. 2020). Dyes have a greater solubilizing performance in water, bright-color and rarely changed fabrics softness for the textile industry. Dyeing as an important part of the textile industry generated large amounts of effluents into the water system every year, which is neither readily amenable to treatment and nor easy to be cleaned and biodegraded naturally (Kan et al. 2016; Payan et al. 2018). Currently, textiles printing is one of the most significant coloration manners. All over the world, the printed textiles account for over 30%-40% of textiles produced (Lili et al. 2018). However, the traditional dye printing procedure consumed a large amount of water to eliminate unfixed dyes, residuary thickeners and auxiliaries, leading to high water consumption and pollutants discharge into environment.
Pigment dyeing presented superior advantages compared with dyes dyeing, such as simple procedures, relatively clean and friendly environment, and applicability to all textile fabrics (Damasceno et al. 2020; Fang et al. 2017; Hakeim et al. 2020; Liang et al. 2016). Nevertheless, pigments have some drawbacks such as particle size distribution, poor color yield, and crocking fastness (Kan and Man, 2017; Steiert and Landfester, 2010). Moreover, the absence of affinity for fabrics required binder to fix pigment particles on the fabric's surface, resulting in poorer rubbing fastness and stiff hand feel for fabrics (Numan et al., 2018; Hakeim et al. 2020; Min et al. 2017). In recent years, various efforts have been developed, with which modified pigment has been concerned. For example, Ibahim et al. prepared pigment with UV protection properties by modifying solvent-free pigment printing formulations (Ibrahim et al. 2013). Wang et al. fabricated ultrafine Spherical Pr-ZrSiO4 pigment and shows bright lemon yellow (Wang et al. 2020). Correspondingly, compared with printing, pigments dyeing exhibits less usage of binder agent, but it required small particle size pigments.
In view of the trait of ultrafine pigments and dyes, choosing a kind of materials to load dyes forming new pigment in the textile industry. Inorganic loaded materials exhibited good durability and mechanical strength (Geng et al. 2016). Porous silica materials have been focused in the area of dye adsorption, because of their large space, porous structure, high surface area and low refractive coefficient (Liang et al. 2017; Nagappan et al. 2019), which it can promote pigment color strength and chemical stability. Moreover, porous silica materials have some superiority in its harmlessness for humans, and good control, recycled and economical property (Geng et al. 2016). Yin et al. synthesized modified silica coatings (OMSC) by sol-gel manner to apply in knitted cellulose fabric (Yin and Wang, 2012). The color fastness of knitted fabrics treated with the OMSS was enhanced to some extent. Zhang et al. employed thermochromic silica nanocapsules (TLD@SiO2) in dyeing. For dyeing textiles with TLD@SiO2, they exhibited good fastness for the finishing polyester fabrics (Zhang et al. 2017). It is likely to capture and recycle the dye-nanoparticles through the separation system. The strategy that utilizes the silica dye-nanoparticles for the wastewater-free, clean and environmental dyeing process has been seldom reported so far.
In this work, cotton fiber was dyed by colored WHMS particles after adsorption from the dye's aqueous solution to achieve dye removal. The property of WHMS and WHMS-dyes was characterized, and during the adsorption of dyes process, the performance was investigated to complete the best adsorption. Color yield, rubbing fastness and hand feel were measured and evaluated for the application in cotton fabrics, which exhibited excellent performance, such as good fastness, hand feel, and high color strength. Besides, pigment can be collected to be recycled. This kind of dyeing method with WHMS-dyes pigment offers the prospect for sustainable and clean development in terms of the textile industry.