Simon Marks Textiles | SUSTAINABILITY

Somebody once told me that if the demand for natural dyes was to be fully met nowadays, we would need three times the earth’s surface to grow it all!

There has to be balance. Certain communities only ever had very limited space to grow their dyes, often being limited by the surrounding terrain. Many mostly need the land to grow and the harvest crops for food.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were huge madder industries in Holland, France and Russia. These required a lot of land and the process involved in extracting the dye was an extremely complex and lengthy one, with an enormous amount of hard manual labour. Chemical dyes were seen as a miracle, when they came along, due to their speed, reliability & constant supply.

There are so many factors to depend on with natural dyes: the sun, the rain, the soil, the mordants, the techniques and steps involved, the fabrics that can be used for certain dyes. If any of these things go wrong – not enough rain, too much rain, infestation, incorrect processing – for example – the end result is ruined.

This is why natural dyes are so much more time-consuming and more expensive. Often, people don’t understand how much time and effort goes into making a blue or red. Red was always a luxury colour, until the advent of chemical dyes.

Responsibility to make sure that the dyestuffs used are from sustainable sources, ie bark and wood from trees that are being replanted Roots from trees that are dug up in rotation so as not to kill the tree. Leaves that fall to the ground and can be used as mordants.That endangered species are not used.

Tyrian purple was made from squeezing the glands of thousand of molluscs. There are other ways of getting purple, such as from the logwood tree, that is sustainably harvested in parts of South America, or a mixture of red dye and indigo can be used.

Indigo is a prime example of how a profitable crop that takes only a few months to grow, can be harvested and be grown again. It is non-toxic and has no harmful effects on the environment.

I work with dyes and processes that are non-invasive to the environment. I buy my dyestuffs from local sources, wherever possible, which often involves travelling far and wide to track them down.