Almost all the clothes we wear are made from dyed fabrics, from even the simplest hoodies and jeans to printed T-shirts. Typically, synthetic dyes are used, the process of which causes significant damage to the environment on many levels. Recently more and more environmentally friendly alternatives are becoming available: from the ancient traditional methods to using the latest biotech to enable dyeing processes to fabrics.
Throughout human civilisation fabrics have always been dyed: from the ancient process that include examples of dyed canvases have been preserved through time, some of which are tens of thousands of years old. Our ancestors used plant, animal and mineral pigments: Henna and tree bark for example, and the most expensive and luxurious was purple extracted from sea snails. But in the middle of the 19th century, people learned to synthesise chemical dyes and a new environmentally sad chapter in the history of fabric dyeing began.
Today, the main problem with dyeing is that the process consumes a lot of fresh water (on average, one kilogram of fabric uses 30-60 litres of water, depending on the type of fibre), which means that a huge amount of wastewater is generated, which is very difficult to clean. Dissolved pigments, fixatives and other chemicals from factories end up in nature. Most often, these compounds are poisonous: salts of heavy metals; cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury are used as paint fixatives. At least half of them end up in the environment in large quantities because the molecules are too small to be simply filtered out.
Once in aquatic ecosystems, heavy metal ions accumulate: their amount increases in the tissues of organisms as they move up the food chain. As a result, they cause the death of animals and deterioration of photosynthesis of aquatic plants. Getting into our diet with water and food, the consequences can from from reduced immunity and even to the formation of tumours in humans. According to the World Bank, fabric dyeing processes account for up to 20% of all industrial wastewater pollution.
The good news is that dye wastewater treatment methods and alternative methods for dyeing fabrics are being actively developed and in my view a long overdue change is afoot.
One example is the Bio-Design Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture, they have created a modular system of tiles inlaid with algae that can filter toxic chemical dyes and heavy metals out of water.
Called Indus, the tiles are on display in the UK for the first time during the London Design Festival.
Under the theme of Nature/Nurture, they form part of curator Jane Withers' programme for the Brompton Design District, which explores how design can learn from and protect our natural environment.
Indus is designed to be built on site in areas with contaminated water sources, where artisans can pour water over the tiles to purify it.
Modular system of tiles with algae (image courtesydezeen.com)
The most common method of environmentally friendly dyeing remains plant pigments - now these ancient methods are again gaining popularity due to their simplicity and accessibility, as well as the large amount of plant waste that is generated in cities. Today, more and more brands are starting to use natural ingredients for their product colouring.
Silk samples SAH dyed with plant pigments (avocado pips and black beans)
Another example is the 'Buffy' bed linen brand colours its products using tea, pomegranate, nuts and eucalyptus bark. This type of dyeing is better for the environment, not only in terms of the composition and amount of waste water, but also because of its energy efficiency: the selected vegetable dyes are fixed to the fabric without using high heat.
Brooklyn based line 'Anthemia' works mostly with vintage fabrics to reduce the space need, and uses food scraps like avocado pits and onion skins as dyes when she can.
Gender-neutral clothing for the modern-day plant lover 'Older Brother' sell limited-edition lines based on the material they have to work with that season to create the same kind of buzz around their clothes that you'd find around the first ripe farmer's market tomatoes of the year. Right now, they're using indigo and saffron, but they've also done colour stories using chaga mushrooms and coffee-all shared in their signature whimsy, tongue-in-cheek marketing campaigns.
You can also dye fabrics with the plants that grow in the garden and forest. The Berlin studio 'Blond and Bieber' came up with the Algaemy project, where they created a "biodynamic colour palette" using micro-algae. Pigments extracted from algae are used to produce photosensitive patterns on fabrics: they change their hue and intensity in the light. The creators of the Algae Apparel project, which in 2018 reached the finals of the Global Change Award for sustainable development in fashion, they are also able to obtain dyes from different algae.
The prints are photo sensitive & change tone over time when exposed to sunlight (image courtesydezeen.com)
Fabric pigments can also be obtained from a variety of mushrooms. A striking example: the Mush-Hues project of the New York design studio Circular Union - liquid dyes worked with the fermentation of different types of mushrooms. The creators managed to extract a wide color palette: 50 different shades from pale yellow to purple. The pigments are suitable for textiles as well as wood.
All these methods described above involve the process of pigment extraction. But what if the dyes are not isolated, but produced immediately? This is precisely the path taken by the scientists who created the biotech startup Colorifix: they isolated the genes of different organisms responsible for the production of pigments (for example, those that allow birds to have multi-coloured plumage, and butterflies to have patterns on their wings), and introduced them into the genome of bacteria so that they produced coloured proteins. If fabric is placed in a nutrient medium with a colony of such bacteria, it will become coloured, after which the colour can be easily fixed by heat treatment. "Many fashion designers say they take inspiration from nature for their collections. Our technology literally recreates nature in them," says Dr. David Nugent, co-founder of Colorifix.
Similar biotechnologies have enabled CSIRO to grow coloured cotton fibres. This is not harvested from wild plants in the fields, but cotton grown in a petri dish on a nutrient medium from plant cells - they also added a gene responsible for the production of pigment, and the cotton fibres initially had red and yellow colours. So far, this technology is in the early stages of development, but scientists hope that they will be able to create plants that produce coloured crops, then we could negate the need for dyeing fabrics at all.
Coloured cotton plant tissue will soon grow into the plant (image courtesyABC landline: Tim Lee)
Plants, fungi and bacteria produce pigments that colour fabrics in different colours, but what about prints, which are usually done with ink or offset litho or silk screen printing? Printing does not leave as large an environmental footprint as dyeing: it is usually a technology that does not require water and therefore creates now toxic runoff, One eco-friendly brand Pangaia is striving to innovate with collaborator Graviky Lab to come up with an elegant solution for printing on hoodies and T-shirts: using water-based ink, the pigment part of which is air polluting particles.
To create Air-Ink, PM 2.5, fine carbon particles that are harmful to health and contribute to global warming, is precipitated from the air. Essentially, it's the soot released into the air when fossil fuels burn: anyone who lives near a busy street probably wipes a layer of it off their windows and sills on a regular basis. The air was filtered, the particles were cleared of toxins, concentrated and dissolved in water - every kilogram of such ink ultimately reduces carbon emissions into the atmosphere by 800 grams. Their production technology is open for use - Pangaia wants the fashion industry to switch to environmentally friendly alternatives to conventional processes.
So far, most alternative dyeing methods are experimental and labor-intensive, but this will be resolved over time; after all, the use of recycled materials in clothing has also recently been an innovative move, now leading fashion brands are working with these developers. In the near future, we will increasingly see "naturally dyed" signs in stores, and the growth of biotechnology will gradually displace toxic dyeing processes. In the meantime, anyone can give a second life to an old T-shirt by re-dying it in their own kitchen - both environmentally friendly and fun!
You can find our range of naturally printed silks scarves here. I hope you found this piece informative, now that you are here lets stay connected.
Source information with gratitude from...
dezeen.com/2014/10/14/blond-and-bieber-algaemy-coloured-dye-algae-lodz-design-festival-2014/
abc.net.au/news/2020-06-27/csiro-scientists-grow-coloured-cotton/12395250
dezeen.com/2019/09/21/bio-id-lab-indus-algae-tiles-water/
ecosphere.press/2021/05/25/palitra-bez-toksinov-pochemu-modnye-brendy-perehodyat-s-himicheskih-krasitelej- na-bakterii-i-sazhu/