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It seems obvious when you stop and think about it, but you probably haven’t. Most pigments and dyes—the substances that imbue your clothes, furniture, packaging, and cosmetics with their infinite shades of color—are derived from fossil fuels.
This includes carbon black, one of the top 50 industrial chemicals produced worldwide. An estimated 8.1 million tons of carbon black is created every year by partially burning heavy oil or natural gas to create black soot that is turned into a pigment.
Sounds dirty, right? It kind of is.
All sooty products, from combusted petroleum and burning cigarettes to the char on your backyard grill and, yes, carbon black, contain polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a class of carcinogenic chemicals that includes things like benzene and naphthalene. The International Agency for Research on Cancer categorizes carbon black as a “possible human carcinogen,” and as a result, it’s been removed from cosmetics like eyeliner.
The Las Vegas startup Nature Coatings intends to disrupt this market with BioBlack, a product that purports to make dyes, inks, and industrial pigments that are the same dark hue without the nasty consequences.
It’s made from waste, it’s carbon-negative, it’s petroleum-free, and it’s nontoxic. On the strength of this, Nature Coatings is aiming to take over the carbon black industry estimated by the market research and consulting company Grand View Research to be worth $2.29 billion.
The core ingredient of BioBlack is wood waste that's been certified as sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council, an environmental nonprofit. This massively abundant waste stream—55 million tons of wood waste are created every year in the US alone—is normally burned, with the ash then landfilled, releasing all of that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Nature Coatings essentially locks up all that CO2 in the pigment, keeping it out of the atmosphere for as long as the garment avoids getting burned itself. (It will be released if the garment is incinerated later on, but not if it’s landfilled.)
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And creating BioBlack is a clean process. The wood waste is heated in an oxygen-free environment, yielding black pigment and just a few benign byproducts: wood vinegar, which can be sold on to the acetic acid industry; steam, which can be used to power parts of the equipment; and a biogas, which can also be used to power the equipment. “It's self-sustaining and runs on its own renewable energy as long as the machine is up and running,” says Jane Palmer, Nature Coatings’ CEO and founder.
Between the renewable energy used to power the production process and the tree carbon stored in it, BioBlack is carbon-negative—it draws more carbon out of the atmosphere than is emitted producing it. According to a lifecycle analysis produced by the carbon removal consultancy Accend, a kilogram of BioBlack has a carbon footprint of –0.6 kilograms—that is, making BioBlack actually removes carbon from the atmosphere instead of emitting it. A typical kilogram of carbon black has a carbon footprint of 1.91 kilograms. (Palmer says Accend will submit its analysis for peer review, but Natural Coatings will only publish a summary of the report because it contains proprietary information.)
What’s more, because BioBlack is not a product of combustion, it doesn’t contain PAHs, nor does it have heavy metal contaminants that can sneak into regular carbon black pigment. While most carbon black comes in powder form, BioBlack is sold in a liquid form called BioBlack TX, so concerns about workers breathing in black particulates and getting lung disease fall away. In fact, most of the climate impact of BioBlack TX comes from the bio-based ingredients added to make the liquid product.
This liquid can be used as a bio-based pigment to print on almost anything: sports shirts, cardboard packaging, and the interior pockets of Levi’s recently introduced Plant-Based 501s. BioBlack can also be used to dye natural fibers like animal wools and plant fibers like cotton and hemp.
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Carbon black ranges in price, but Palmer says BioBlack is the same price per kilogram as the regular carbon black that at least one of their mill partners uses. “I am coming from the pigment and dye industry for textiles; I've been working in that space for about 20 years,” Palmer says. “And so I am very aware that for textiles for fashion, it's really challenging to get new technology adopted. The way to make it as easy as possible is to get it to the same price and the same performance, or a little bit better.”
What’s the Catch?
The Turkish denim mill Orta has been working to be more sustainable since the early 2000s, incorporating organic cotton into its denim, for example. So when the team heard about a bio-based black pigment two years ago, they contacted Nature Coatings to try it out. After spending a couple of years of experimenting, Orta has since begun using it in place of sulfur black in two black denim collections. “Ideally we would like to replace all our black with BioBlack,” says Orta’s executive director Sedef Uncu Aki. She likes the waste story, and the negative carbon footprint.
But Orta has had few takers—just sample orders from the brands it produces denim for. First, because the resulting denim isn’t black enough for Orta or its clients, which Orta is working on. Also, what it’s replacing, in this case sulfur black, doesn’t have large health concerns. Finally, and this is the important part, “the price is still high,” Aki says. She clarified by email that it’s 70 percent higher than their usual pigment, and four times as expensive as the sulfur black, mainly due to the added cost of the particular coating process the mill uses. Though with the amount used, it doesn’t add so much to the overall price of the garment. Still, “it's really tough to incorporate for brands as a main dyestuff, because unfortunately, consumers are always asking for lower and lower prices.”
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With the production amount being so tiny, the switch to BioBlack hasn’t improved the denim mill’s environmental metrics.
The fashion industry does have a lot of serious problems that need solving. Highly toxic PFAS coatings are being found on water- and stain-resistant apparel ranging from zippers to children’s school uniforms. Much of the industry runs on coal boilers. Rainforests are getting chopped down to be turned into “plant-based” viscose fabric. By comparison, the “problem” of carbon black seems almost insignificant.
In fact, in reports produced by consultancies and foundations about how to decarbonize the fashion industry, the production of dyes and other chemicals never comes up. Their climate impact hasn’t even been measured. The focus is on switching away from coal-fired boilers, choosing better materials, and reducing production.
When products are marketed as “petroleum-free,” you might assume it automatically means a low carbon footprint. But carbon black is such a tiny part of any piece of clothing—the dye makes up perhaps 1 percent of a garment's total weight—that even switching to a carbon-negative alternative doesn’t make an appreciable difference in the footprint of a T-shirt or jeans.
“It's better to look at it from a mass production perspective,” Palmer says. For example, if a factory that uses 10 tons of carbon black a month switched to BioBlack, it would reduce its carbon footprint by about 25 tons a month. (Remember, it’s supposed to be carbon-negative.)
“Textile coatings and additives are a small percentage of the garment by weight and have a relatively small impact on carbon emissions,” says Martin Mulvihill, cofounder and partner at SaferMade, an early-stage venture capital fund that invests in companies that remove hazardous chemicals from consumer products. “But they do drive the health impact.”
In the case of carbon black, it’s not the impact to your health that’s the problem. Carbon black’s negative effects are mainly felt by workers in dye and printing houses, and workers at the chemical plants that produce it. But Palmer says you’ll often find a warning label on products containing black pigment because California’s Prop 65 legislation, which requires brands to put warning labels on consumer products with hazardous substances, mandates such a label for products containing PAHs like benzene. PAHs are also regulated in consumer products in the European Union.
“I would advise a client on what chemicals to test for on black-pigmented items, PAHs will be pretty much top of the list,” affirms Phil Patterson, the UK-based managing director at the textile consultancy Colour Connections.
And then there is a question of which type of carbon black Nature Coatings is disrupting. Textiles and packaging was the natural first choice for Nature Coatings, since the company’s process creates a liquid that’s ideal to be used as printing ink. But liquid ink for textiles and packaging represents just 9 percent of the carbon black market. The largest and arguably most problematic user of carbon black is the tire industry, which buys carbon black in powder form to use as a filler alongside natural rubber and synthetic polymers. A 2022 California academic study published in Environmental Pollution showed that air particulate pollution from tires and brakes has exceeded tailpipe emissions.
So why would brands opt for BioBlack if making the switch doesn’t materially improve their climate or safety metrics?
“Brands like a marketing story,” Palmer says. While brands do have (let’s be honest, entirely voluntary) emissions reduction goals and don’t like putting the California-mandated labels on their products saying they’re toxic, she says “brands also like it for the waste recovery story. It's kind of easy to visualize and understand.”
Brands, in the end, are not just selling a physical product, but also a narrative and an identity. To make a real impact, BioBlack will have to fit into the story that the fashion industry wants to tell about itself.
