Fashion for Good‘s multi-year effort to replace fossil-fuel-derived carbon black with waste-based pigments in textile dyeing is approaching its conclusion, with final pilot trials and a screening life cycle assessment set to wrap up in the first quarter of 2025, according to a case study published by the Amsterdam-based sustainable fashion innovation platform.
The Black Pigment Pilot project launched in February 2022 with brand partners Bestseller, Kering and PVH Corp., alongside manufacturing partners Birla Cellulose and Paradise Textiles. Three innovators were selected to supply alternative pigments: Graviky Labs, which converts industrial carbon emissions into pigment through its AIR-INK technology; Living Ink, which derives pigment from waste algae; and Nature Coatings, which produces bio-based black pigment from wood waste under its BioBlack line.
Conventional carbon black, the dominant pigment used to dye apparel, is sourced from fossil fuels and has been linked to environmental degradation through its production process. Black dye accounts for a disproportionate share of the textile industry’s dyeing footprint given how widely the color is used across apparel categories. The project targets dope dyeing, a method in which pigment is added to fiber or polymer before it is spun into yarn, rather than applied to finished garments through water-intensive wet processing that typically involves dipping fabric in heated chemical baths.
The project structured its work across two main workstreams: man-made cellulosic fibers and recycled polyester. Using a stage-gate approach, the partners validated each pigment first at lab scale before progressing to pilot-scale production, with Birla Cellulose producing dope-dyed man-made cellulosic fibers and Paradise Textiles handling recycled polyester yarns. Each innovator’s technology had previously been used only in printing applications, making the shift into fiber and yarn dyeing a first test of dope-dyeing viability at scale.
Through the trials, the project partners identified particle size as a critical lever in formulating each pigment for use in both polyester and cellulosic applications, alongside the volumes needed to achieve adequate colorfastness. Testing also measured affinity, light fastness and tensile strength against standard synthetic dyes currently used across the industry, and showed that each innovator’s pigment performed best with a particular fiber type, providing the companies with insight into which application areas to prioritize going forward.
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At launch, Fashion for Good framed the initiative as a first-of-its-kind collaborative effort to validate three distinct pigment technologies with the goal of extending their use into dope-dyed textile production at commercial scale. Katrin Ley, managing director at Fashion for Good, said at the time that replacing the industry’s heavy reliance on conventional black dye chemistry required exactly this kind of cross-supply-chain collaboration.
Birla Cellulose, the cellulosic fibers arm of Aditya Birla Group, has said dope dyeing viscose with sustainably sourced black pigments could eliminate chemically intensive dyeing processes and the wastewater effluents that result, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions across the dyeing process. Paradise Textiles, the material science and innovation hub of Alpine Group, contributed manufacturing expertise in sustainable and performance fabric production. Kering’s Material Innovation Lab has pointed to the project as part of the luxury group’s broader push to reduce its supply chain’s environmental footprint while pushing innovation across the wider industry.
The remaining scope of the project includes completing final pilot trials and conducting the screening LCA, which will be carried out by Fashion for Good’s Impact Team and used to benchmark each innovator’s pigment against conventional dyestuff. The team will also work with manufacturing partners and innovators to validate the business case for commercial-scale adoption of the pigments, a step that will determine whether any of the three technologies progress beyond pilot volumes into mainstream supply chains.
The Black Pigment Pilot followed Fashion for Good’s D(R)YE Factory of the Future project, which launched a month earlier to accelerate the textile industry’s shift from wet to dry processing methods, an approach considered important to reaching net-zero emissions targets in textile manufacturing.
Fashion for Good has continued to expand its portfolio of processing-focused initiatives since the pilot’s launch, including a Retrofit Track offering implementation support to facilities in India, a Demonstrator program aimed at integrating validated technologies into operating factories, and an open-source Blueprints initiative for near-net-zero Tier 2 textile manufacturing that aims to cover seven geographies by 2030.