Colorifix Starts Industrial Trials Of Bio-Engineered Dyestuffs
Image Courtesy of Colorifix
The Textile Industry made another step on its long journey to sustainability with the announcement this week that award-winning Colorifix of Cambridge UK is starting its first pilot dyeing schemes for Bio-Engineered Dyestuffs before Christmas this year.
These pilots based in Portugal, Italy and India, are a pre cursor to a full scale commercial launch in 2020, and are in co-operation with fashion groups such as H and M, Arvind and Forster Rohner, and will take place in production dyehouses for commercial and process assessment.
Colorifix uses synthetic biology, removing the need for harsh chemistry in the creation or deposition of dyes.
The first step is to find a colour that is created by a living thing such as an animal, plant or microbe.
Via DNA sequencing, they work out what encodes the instructions to make a pigment and they then translate that message into our engineered microorganisms, which they use both to grow and transfer the colour.
Colorifix create colour at the lab and then ship a tiny quantity of live microorganisms to local fermentation partners who then grow the colour, like beer, using by-products of the sugar production industry.
The microorganisms are then transported locally and used directly in place of dye liquor, requiring no additional specialist equipment or toxic chemicals and one tenth of the water of standard processes.
Colorifix technology allows dyeing to take place at 37 degrees on both natural and synthetic fibres.
Nature has an incredibly broad colour palette.
Colorifix can therefore create bespoke product according to a customer’s need and have a rapidly evolving colour library.
Whilst other eco-friendly alternatives often fall down on quality and price, Colorifix are focused on showing the industry that there does not need to be a trade-off.