Botanical resources of spontaneous and cultivated flora, with applications in the textile dyes industry

Abstract

This work presents a synthesis of the information found in the specialized literature regarding the tinctorial plants and the usefulness of painting the textile materials with plant pigments, considering the importance and the share that will be paid in the future to the natural dyes in food, cosmetics, pharmaceutical and textile industries. We are strongly convinced that the synthetic dyes will not be completely removed from the above mentioned areas, but we believe, with the same firmness, that in the future the choice will be more and more the one for natural dyes, environmentally friendly, biodegradable. This is the natural way, in the present context of returning more and more conscious of the human being towards the nature, towards a healthy life. The richness and the variety of spontaneous and cultivated flora, which presents tinctorial features for textile materials, have been continually explored since ancient times, transforming this area in one of the oldest occupations. Painting with vegetable dyes suggests those refined, alive colours, closer to the nature nuances to what a number of unitary colors is used. There is a great number of plants that contain coloring juices, some in the leaf, flowers, strain, root, others in flower buds and fruits. But out of these, few are the ones that can fix on the wool, flax, hemp, cotton, silk (gossamer) fibers, or even on the collagen fibers at the painting of leathers, so as the resistances of the paintings be good, resistant to the external factors such as: light, humidity etc. From the specialized literature, we conclude that, based on the made researches, it has been found that, in general, the paintings of the textile materials with vegetal dyes do not have good tinctorial resistances and as a consequence it was chosen the use of some fixative agents named mordants (Păsculescu et al 1986, Jolin et al, 1994, Glover, 1995).