Revolutionising Color Creation: Pioneering an End-to-End Manufacturing Process for Food Waste derived Natural Dyes

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The textiles industry is the second most polluting in the world. Synthetic dye pollution is the silent culprit accounting for 80% of the industry's total emissions \[Lellis-2019\].The global market for textile-dyes is £9.1billion (2022) with 98.5% of dyes being synthetic. These dyes are used in everything including clothing, accessories, furniture and bedding. They are derived from either coal-tar or petroleum-based intermediates \[Modor, 2023\] are inherently unsustainable, and wreak havoc on the environment and human health.Chemical dye effluent is dumped into waterstreams causing contamination, killing aquatic biota, damaging soil, and contaminating the food chain/drinking supply. Workers and local populations experience effects such as bladder-cancer, infertility, nervous-system disorders and rashes amongst many other side effects \[Khan,Malik,2018\]. Recent research shows wearers can experience skin-burns, asthma, auto-immune diseases and cumulative-toxicity with carcinogenic, mutagenic and reprotoxic effects\[Wicker,2023\].The industry however continues to rely on synthetic-dyes. This is attributable to the fact that alternatives have not been able to achieve the levels of **brightness**, **longevity** and **consistency** as synthetic-dyes.Current alternatives are existing traditional natural dyes which are **inconsistent** and **expensive** due to their use of farmland, algae dyes, which **lack UV resistance** and have a **limited colour palette**, and microbial dyes, which are **complicated to integrate** and **pale in colour**.These alternatives have not been able to satisfy industry needs and there is a desperate requirement for natural, biodegradable, and commercially-viable dyes.**SAGES DYES**SAGES create **natural, biodegradable, non-polluting** and **non-toxic** dyes **derived from food-waste**. We utilise UK food-waste streams such as onions skins, avocado pits, and red cabbages to extract vibrant dyes which can be used to colour textiles.This project will see SAGES face its largest hurdle in combining lab-tested extraction/filtration methods into an end-to-end process, scaling from 100g/day lab-scale batches to commercial-scale quantities of 5kg/day.