Antai Textile: Dope Dyeing Technology Leads the Green Revolution in the Textile Industry, 32 Years of Deep Cultivation in Acrylic Fibers Delivers a 'Riding the Trend' Answer Sheet
In the midsummer of 2025, the focus of the textile industry is on a quiet 'green revolution' – the industrialization wave of dope dyeing technology. When the news spread that Hebei Aikerui Fiber Co., Ltd. officially authorized the preparation method of dope-dyed acrylic black fiber on July 15, in the production workshop of Antai Textile in Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu, Factory Director Huang of the Production Department was staring at the fluctuating process parameters on the display screen and instructed the technician beside him: 'Recheck the color fastness test data of this newly adjusted batch of dope-dyed acrylic sliver; the customer is waiting to use it on the terry cloth of high-end sportswear.' In the nearby office building, Li Xiong, Marketing Manager, had just hung up a video call with a Zhejiang home textile customer, and his notebook was densely filled with the customer's requirements: 'Starting from August, the order quantity of dope-dyed acrylic yarn will increase by 30%, and the color batch stability error is required to be controlled within △E ≤ 1.5.' In this industry transformation driven by both technological innovation and environmental protection needs, Antai Textile, founded in 1993, is delivering a 'riding the trend' answer sheet with over 30 years of deep cultivation experience in the acrylic fiber field.
"Three years ago, we predicted that 'carbon reduction' would change from a policy requirement to a market刚需 (urgent need)." Li Xiong pulled out the 2022 industry trend report, with a line circled on the yellowed pages: 'Carbon emissions from traditional dyeing and finishing processes account for 28% of the total emissions in the textile industry, and dope dyeing technology can reduce dye usage and wastewater discharge from the source.' At that time, Antai Textile's colored acrylic sliver already accounted for 20% of the East China market share, but the traditional process relying on post-dyeing had long had bottlenecks – insufficient color uniformity, large batch differences, and more importantly, carbon emissions from the dyeing and finishing process of each ton of products were as high as 1.2 tons. 'Customers began to ask 'What is the carbon footprint of your colored fibers?' This is not a multiple-choice question, but a survival question.' Li Xiong recalled that in early 2023, he walked into Factory Director Huang's office with market research data, and the two squatted in the production workshop for half a month. Finally, at the company's annual strategic meeting, they made a decision: to take dope dyeing technology as the core upgrading direction for the acrylic sliver and acrylic yarn product lines.
"The hardest part is balancing 'technological leadership' and 'cost control'." Standing in the newly completed dope dyeing pilot workshop, Factory Director Huang pointed to an operating screw extruder and introduced: 'Traditional acrylic sliver production is 'dyeing after spinning', while dope dyeing requires uniformly mixing color masterbatch into the spinning solution before spinning, which has extremely high requirements for the mixing precision and temperature control of the screw.' To overcome this problem, Antai Textile joined forces with the College of Textiles, Donghua University to form a special team, and after 18 months of research and development, developed the 'gradient temperature-controlled mixing process', which increased the color masterbatch dispersion uniformity to 98.7% and the color fastness to level 4-5 of the ISO 105 standard. At the end of 2024, when the industry was still discussing 'the difficulties in the pilot test of dope dyeing technology', Antai Textile's first 5,000-ton/year dope-dyed acrylic sliver production line passed the environmental protection acceptance, becoming one of the few enterprises in East China to realize large-scale production of dope-dyed acrylic fibers.
Today, entering Antai Textile's raw material warehouse, traditional dye buckets have long been replaced by rows of sealed color masterbatches. 'In the past, the dyeing and finishing workshop had to treat 800 tons of dyeing wastewater every day; now the dope dyeing process has almost zero wastewater discharge.' Factory Director Huang calculated an account: after adopting dope dyeing technology, the carbon emissions per ton of colored acrylic sliver have dropped from 1.2 tons to 0.42 tons, exactly meeting the industry's '35% carbon reduction' target, and the improvement in color batch stability has increased the product qualification rate of downstream customers by 5 percentage points. This dual advantage of 'environmental protection + quality' is enabling Antai Textile's products to quickly penetrate the high-end market – a leading home textile brand in Zhejiang uses its dope-dyed acrylic yarn for infant blankets, a Shandong knitting enterprise uses its colored acrylic sliver to develop outdoor fleece fabric, and even Korean merchants who relied on imports in previous years have signed an annual order of 2,000 tons this year.
"From pulling out 'the first acrylic sliver in Zhangjiagang' with the first acrylic spinning machine in 1993 to now being a practitioner of dope dyeing technology, Antai Textile's 32 years have been 32 years of following industry needs and keeping an eye on the technological frontier." Li Xiong looked at the camphor tree planted when the factory was built in 1993 in the factory area, its branches and leaves already lush. At present, he and Factory Director Huang's team are busy调试 the second dope dyeing production line, aiming to increase the production capacity to 12,000 tons/year. 'The industry says that 12 leading enterprises have completed pilot tests; we want to be the leader 'running from pilot test to industrialization' – after all, letting every acrylic sliver carry 'green genes' is the textile people's answer to the times.'