Exceedingly high temperatures (normally similar to 98 degrees C) are used to perform hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) bleaching of cotton fabrics in textile industrial practice. Such harsh conditions lead to high energy consumptions and high fabric Mass loss. In recent years, the industry and academic communities have conducted extensive research to reduce the temperature for industrial cotton bleaching. In this research, we developed a new H2O2 activator based on amino nitriles. All of the data demonstrated that in the presence of the new H2O2 activator, the combined scouring/bleaching of the knitted cotton fabric could be performed at 60 degrees C. The cotton knit fabric treated using the low temperature procedure also has lower fabric weight loss; some of the hydrophobic substances were retained on the fiber surface after the process. We found that the residual hydrophobic substances had little effect on the whiteness of the treated fabrics after application of optical brighteners, and had little effect on the shade-depth and colorfastness to washing and rubbing of the treated fabrics after dyeing. The higher was the weight retention, the more value of the treated cotton knitted fabrics was increased. The removal of less substance from cotton also resulted in lower chemical oxygen demand in the wastewater, thus providing additional environmental benefits. Moreover, the low temperature scouring/bleaching procedure had significantly lower energy consumption than the traditional procedure. The possibility and effectiveness of this new technology has been confirmed in our industrial scale trials. The disadvantage of this method was that it required higher quantity of chemicals for the treatment.