The fabrics, either in the form of natural or chemical fibres, have reached millions of tonnes of production and have provided huge advantages to world economic values (Aizenshtein, 2004). In social terms it has provided benefits to more than 2.2 million workers through 114,000 textile-related companies. In 2001, the European textile and clothing industries contributed to about 3.4% of the EU manufacturing industrial revenue and granted 6.9% of

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the work opportunities to the citizens (IPPC, 2003). According to recent statistics, the global textile market is worth more than US$400 billions (Directory of Textile Manufacturers and Suppliers — http://www. teonline. com/industry-overview. html). It is predicted that the global textile production will grow up to 50% by 2014 as compared to the fabrication in 2005.

Globally, Malaysia is also known for its high quality textile and apparels. Since the early 1970s, when the country started to embark on being an export-oriented country, the growth of Malaysian’s textile and apparel industry has increased tremendously and now provides an export value of 3.5 billion USD. This has listed the textile industry as the ninth largest contributor to total earnings of the manufactured exports in 2007. The industry has provided more than 67,000 work opportunities through 637 licensed textile production companies with investments of 2.6 billion USD (MIDA, 2007).

In Malaysia and many other developing countries, most of the textile mills are of small and medium scale. For these mills, the full installation of a wastewater treatment plant is quite difficult due to economic reasons. Hence, the mills have been discharging significant quantities of pollutants into the streams with fiber manufacturing and dyeing sectors being the predominant ones (Haroun and Azni, 2009).