Performance Quantification/Enhancement Study: Microbial Colouration & Finishing for Textiles?

尽管颜色占消费者购买决定的80%，但纺织行业使用的着色剂仍有99%以上来自化石燃料，更不用说工业合成染色过程中涉及的危险化学品、致癌物质和重金属了。\r\r我们知道颜色很重要，所以我们想求助于微生物。\r\r通过使用自然产生着色剂的微生物，如b-胡萝卜素、紫罗兰、虾青素等，我们可以通过减少用水量、对化石燃料的依赖和废水污染来减轻着色业的环境负担。与天然植物颜料相比，微生物色素也具有巨大的优势，例如，在低成本介质中生长迅速，相对容易加工，不受天气条件影响，维护相对较少，效率较高。\r\r本项目是一项性能量化研究，旨在提高由微生物着色剂产生的颜色/整理的技术性能，用于纺织品应用。目前的挑战是，微生物染料的性能仍与合成染料一样高。在获得资金以获得先进的量化机制和专家材料测试学者和技术人员的资助下，我们计划在项目结束时系统地测量、比较和优化符合商业标准的现有配方，并确定相关的市场结果。

Even though colours make up 80% of the buying decision for consumers, more than 99% of the colourants employed in the textile industry still derive from fossil fuels, not to mention the hazardous chemicals, carcinogens & heavy metals involved in the industrial synthetic dyeing process.\r\rWe know colours are important, so we would like to turn to microbes for help.\r\rBy employing microorganisms that naturally produce colouring compounds like b-carotene, violacein, astaxanthin, etc., we can alleviate the environmental burden of the colour industry by reducing water consumption, fossil fuel reliance and effluent pollution. Microbial colours also have enormous advantages over natural plant-based pigments, e.g. rapid growth in low-cost medium, relatively easy to process, independent of weather conditions, and relatively low-maintenance and high efficiency.\r\rThis project is a performance quantification study to enhance the technical properties of colours/finishes created from microbial colourants for textile-based applications. The current challenge is that microbial dyes are yet as high-performance as synthetic dyes. With the funding to access advanced quantification mechanisms and expert material testing academics & technicians, we plan to systematically measure, compare & optimise the existing formulae up to commercial standards and identify relevant marketable outcomes at the end of the project.