Obtaining color on polyamide fabrics without using dye

Among the textile wet processes, the coloring process is the process step that causes the most environmental pollution. New approaches that support sustainable production instead of environmentally harmful processes are extensively researched in the literature. When considering substitution of chemical processes with environmentally friendly methods, one of the issues that comes to mind is enzymatic processes. In recent years, interesting and promising studies on the use of laccase enzymes in textile dyeing have attracted attention in the literature. However, studies on enzymatic coloring are very limited and sufficient success has not been achieved especially on polyamide. The aim of this thesis is to develop an environmentally friendly enzymatic dyeing method, which can be an alternative to dyeing polyamide knitted fabrics with 1:2 metal complex dyes according to the exhaustion method. For this purpose, various phenol and amine compounds, and their mixtures were used as precursor, and the results were compared with 1:2 metal complex dyeings in terms of technical properties and economy. According to the results obtained, it can be said that polyamide can be enzymatically colored in yellow, red, blue and brown tones and the levelness and fastness properties (washing, rubbing and perspiration) of the dyeings are quite good. Only the light fastness of enzymatic colorings was found to be worse than conventional dyeing. Studies have shown that enzymatic coloring is a less energy-consuming and cost-effective process compared to 1:2 metal complex dyeing. Therefore, it can be said that enzymatic coloring is an environmentally friendly alternative to 1:2 metal complex dyeing, but there are still aspects that need to be improved in terms of performance properties.