I’ve just finished a rather good book called The Secret Lives of Colour, by Kassia St Clair. It tells the background stories of dozens of different colours, from woad to khaki to avocado green. It’s full of fascinating stories, but a couple of things jumped out to me.
One of them is that we take vibrant colours for granted. Most of history was considerably less colourful, with a very small range of reliable dyes for fabrics or paints, often at horrendous expense. Some of them were reserved for the rich. New colours were a novelty, usually relying on some scientific breakthrough or happy accident, and the arrival of a new colour often spawned a fad.
Another recurring theme in the book is the cost and complexity of dyes. There’s often a sophisticated chemistry behind them, and sometimes quite harmful compounds involved. The book talks about ‘lead white’, or the arsenic poisoning that resulted from a popular 19th century shade of green.
That’s a problem that continues in today’s dye and pigment industry, largely unseen to most of us. Dyeing still relies on petrochemicals and a variety of toxic substances. The industry is a major water user, using and polluting vast quantities every year – globally, 20% of water pollution is caused by fabric dyeing. As well as damaging rivers and wildlife, it’s a health hazard to employees, who often work in regions with more lax health and safety laws.
Colorifix is a company with an interesting solution to this problem. It was founded by two scientists who were researching water pollution in Nepal, and who recognised dyeing as a major cause. There was clearly a need for more natural dyes – which exist in nature, after all. There are plenty of colourful things in nature, and ancient cultures often relied on natural dyes as their only source of pigment.
What Colorifix do is “replace chemistry with biology.” They identify a natural organism that is coloured – animal, plant or microbe, and work out the DNA sequences responsible for creating that colour. The DNA sequence is then used to create a bespoke micro-organism to produce the desired colour. It’s a form of fermentation, similar to the processes used to make synthetic insulin, and it can use the waste products from other industries as a feedstock.
The result is natural dyes that are non-toxic, and that use 80% less water. It’s a dyeing process for a circular economy, and a potentially revolutionary idea for a fashion industry that is causing a huge amount of damage in pursuit of colour.
The Earthbound Report 
is this genetic engineering.
if so it will cause another problem.