Technology Profile
Supercritical CO₂ dyeing replaces the water bath in conventional textile dyeing with pressurised carbon dioxide. Developed by DyeCoo Textile Systems (Netherlands, founded c. 2008), the technology was licensed to CleanDye, which operates the world’s only dedicated supercritical CO₂ dyeing facility in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (opened 2019). DyeCoo was declared bankrupt by a court in Noord-Holland in December 2025 after years of losses and shareholder disputes, despite investment from Nike and IKEA. CleanDye continues to operate, supplying fabric to brands including Decathlon, Tom Tailor, and s.Oliver.
In December 2025, a Dutch court declared DyeCoo Textile Systems bankrupt. The company had spent 15 years trying to convince the fashion industry to dye fabric without water. Nike invested. IKEA invested. The press called it a revolution. Then the court declared it insolvent — despite all of it.
To understand why the idea attracted such powerful backing, it helps to know what conventional dyeing actually looks like. A dyehouse fills an industrial drum with water, adds chemical dyes, heats everything to high temperatures, and tumbles the fabric through it. When the cycle ends, that water — now saturated with dye chemicals — has to go somewhere. Across South and Southeast Asia, it often goes straight into rivers. Textile dyeing’s chemical wastewater is one of manufacturing’s most persistent pollution problems.
DyeCoo’s answer was carbon dioxide (CO₂). Push CO₂ beyond a specific heat and pressure threshold and it enters an unusual state — behaving at once like a liquid and a gas. In that form, it carries dyes into synthetic fibres with no water required. Release the pressure and the CO₂ returns to gas, the fabric emerges clean and colour-fixed, and nothing toxic reaches the water supply. One company, CleanDye, built an entire factory around this concept in Vietnam in 2019. It still runs today. The science, at that scale, works.
The claims made for it are another matter.
Adidas commissioned a study finding the technology cut greenhouse gas emissions by 58% compared to conventional dyeing. That figure travelled around the world and was reproduced as settled science. What most coverage omitted was that Adidas had a direct commercial interest in validating a technology it had helped promote — and that the 58% figure holds only under optimal conditions, including access to clean electricity. According to Ember’s 2025 Global Electricity Review, Vietnam relied on fossil fuels for 56% of its electricity in 2024, with coal alone accounting for 48%. The best-case emissions figure and the real-world energy grid point in opposite directions.
The ‘waterless’ label has the same problem. Lutz Walter, secretary general of the EU body that advises on textile innovation policy, published an independent assessment four months before DyeCoo collapsed. His finding was striking in its simplicity: the process is not fully water-free. Fabric must be pre-washed before it enters the CO₂ chamber. The machines require steam for heating. Both steps use water — nowhere to be found in developer communications. The waterless technology, it turns out, uses water.
There is a harder limitation underneath all of this. Ilaria Barletta, a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, found through EU-funded research that the process works only on synthetic fibres — polyester and nylon. Cotton, the world’s most widely grown textile crop, cannot be dyed this way. Natural fibres in general cannot. And natural fibre dyeing is where chemical wastewater from textile manufacturing causes its greatest damage. The technology addresses part of the problem and leaves the worst of it untouched. The machines also cost up to $4 million each — placing them beyond most of the small dyehouses where that damage actually occurs.
The science is not in question. What was always in question was whether it could reach the scale of the problem it set out to solve — for the fibre range the industry actually uses, on the energy grids most factories actually run, at a price most dyehouses could actually afford.
DyeCoo spent 15 years trying to answer that question and produced one factory. Meanwhile, simpler alternatives were already scaling. Existing dyeing equipment, upgraded incrementally, cuts water use by 30 to 50% with no major investment required. More advanced waterless systems were expanding commercially across multiple continents. Walter’s conclusion was direct: these approaches ‘may deliver far more impact, more quickly, and at lower cost.’
The 58% figure was always conditional. The ‘waterless’ label was always partial. And the technology that inspired both spent 15 years proving it could not scale beyond one factory in Vietnam. That is not simply a story about a company that ran out of money. It is a story about what the fashion industry chooses to celebrate — and what it quietly stops funding when the numbers no longer hold.
