From the Lab: Zeefier BV

Coloured samples exhibited during Dutch Design Week 2021 / Source: Zeefier Instagram Account (@zee.fier)

CottonEuropeLinenSeaweedSilkTextilesWool

3 MINUTE READ

8 Mar 2023
Mayer Nissim

Fast fashion brands will never miss an opportunity to remind us when they use organic cotton, but far less attention is paid to the dyes used to colour our clothes – despite the huge health and environmental impacts they have. Rather than polluting the oceans, Zeefier borrows from them, using seaweed to create natural fabric dyes.

What's more, instead of harvesting fresh seaweed, the company sources its raw materials from the growing seaweed waste streams left behind by food and cosmetic users.

Zeefier dye in the lab / Source: Zeefier Instagram Account (@zee.fier)

Zeefier's dye in Copper on cotton and silk / Source: Zeefier Instagram Account (@zee.fier)

WHAT IS ZEEFIER?

Zeefier (which means "sea proud") sources Seaweed waste from the EU food and cosmetic industries to create a range of natural dyes for the fashion sector. The process of extracting the colours has been perfected over a decade by the company's creative founder Nienke Hoogvliet at its three locations in the Netherlands.

With thousands of species of seaweed in our oceans, including Rhodophyta (red), Phaeophyta (brown), and Chlorophyta (green), the colour palette on offer is larger than you might expect, but reds and blues remain a challenge. Zeefier dyes are best suited for natural fabrics like Cotton, Wool, Linen, and Silk rather than synthetics — which is no bad thing — and while they can't match chemical dyes for colour and light fastness, the mordant used to fix the dyes to fabric doesn't affect their 100% biodegradability.

Zeefier will either sell its dyes direct to business clients, or partner with brands and handle the dye work themselves. Prototypes have been displayed at Dutch Design Week, the Future Fabrics Expo in London, and TextielMuseum in Tilburg, and there's a patent pending on the process.

Range of seaweed dye colors on yarn / Source: Zeefier Instagram Account (@zee.fier)

WHAT PROBLEM IS ZEEFIER SOLVING?

Synthetic dyeing is one of the most environmentally damaging features of the fashion industry, second only to finishing. The production of pigments pumps out greenhouse gases, releases pollutants into the environment, and exposes workers to potentially harmful chemicals. Then there's the water — huge quantities are needed to make dyes and even more to apply it, with dye and toxic fixers like chromium leaching into the rivers and seas. According to the World Bank, 72 toxic chemicals and solvents found in wastewater are directly linked to textile dyeing, and once in waterways they accumulate to the point where light can no longer penetrate, reducing plants' ability to photosynthesise.

All these issues mean designers are seeking out natural alternatives, and some companies are experiencing substantial success in bringing them to market. Using farmland to grow plants needed for dyes isn't without its own problems, however, with pesticides impacting soil quality and the use of farmland for a non-food crop rightly questioned.

It is these concerns that have led seaweed evangelists to look to the sea rather than the land. Whether it's food, fertilisers, or fuel, seaweed is having something of a moment – fast-growing seaweed doesn't need fresh water and produces more oxygen than trees, helping to provide a solution to the climate crisis rather than exacerbating it. The cosmetics industry has also gone big on seaweed thanks to its anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial agents, and now the fashion industry is exploring the abundance of algae.

While harvesting seaweed directly from the water can improve the health of the seas and beaches by reducing eutrophication and better balancing the pH of the water, Zeefier's ability to extract value from other industries' waste is a smart and circular way to rethink the dye industry.