Adidas DryDye

Official Olympic sponsor Adidas is rolling out a line of t-shirts made with DryDye, a fabric and manufacturing technology developed by the Yeh Group that doesn’t require water to dye clothing, as it starts to level the playing field with competitors Nike and Puma to manufacture athletic apparel more responsibly and sustainably.

Compared to conventional dyeing methods, which requires on average 25 litres of water to colour one shirt, the technology DryDye not only uses no water but also uses 50 percent less energy and 50 percent fewer chemicals, according to DyeCoo, the Netherlands-based company that built the first commercial waterless textile-dyeing machine.

The new waterless technology is important as textiles and clothing manufacturing still uses huge amount of water, as just colouring the world’s clothing consumes the equivalent of one Mediterranean Sea every two years.

Part of Adidas’s Better Place sustainability initiative, the company recently produced 50,000 DryDye t-shirts that were dyed using pressurised CO2 instead of water, saving 1,250,000 litres of water in the process. The sportswear giant plans to use the fabric in other products and expects to save 1.2 million litres of water by using DryDye technology over conventional methods.