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You can’t tell by looking at it, but algae is a key ingredient in the latest Nike x Billie Eilish sneaker.
The Nike Alpha Force Low X Billie Eilish, on sale from 7 August, uses black pigment produced by Living Ink, a bioscience startup that makes colourants grown from algae. The shoe is anticipated to be worn by Eilish at Lollapalooza this weekend, and will also be sold at a pop-up during the event.
The pigment makes up only a fraction of the sneaker, but it’s an indication that momentum is building within apparel and footwear to address one of their most overlooked — and potentially easily addressed — sources of greenhouse gas emissions: the use of petroleum-based pigments.
“If you look around the room and see something that’s black or colourful, all of that colour comes from petroleum,” says Scott Fulbright, CEO and co-founder of Living Ink. “We take waste product from the algae industry and we turn it into colourants that can be put into everything from the colour on my wallet to my iPhone case to the ink on a package or a shirt.”
Living Ink is part of a growing list of companies founded with the intent of cleaning up the colour industry, with major potential implications for fashion as well as other sectors, from paints and coatings to tyres and asphalt. Industrial colourants are not only derived from petroleum, they are also made with a cocktail of additives that scientists and environmentalists would like to see phased out. Replacing them with nature-based solutions can reduce the toxicity concerns and carbon footprint of synthetic colours, but there’s also a heavy focus on using waste generated in other industries — from algae waste in Living Ink’s case to wood waste to industrial carbon emissions — as the starting point for producing these next-generation colourants.
The space is expanding quickly. Biotech companies Pili and Colorifix use bio-based ingredients and processes such as fermentation to develop a range of colours that can be used in fashion and beyond; Colorifix has partnerships with major fashion players including LVMH. Living Ink, in addition to its Nike partnership, has worked with Coach, Patagonia, Tommy Hilfiger parent PVH and Gucci parent Kering, while Levi’s launched products as part of its Spring/Summer 2023 collection made with black pigment from Los Angeles-based Nature Coatings. Last year, innovation platform Fashion for Good launched a Black Pigment Pilot project — in partnership with Bestseller, Birla Cellulose, Kering and PVH Corp — to “validate and scale” black pigments derived from waste feedstocks such as industrial carbon, algae and wood that could replace synthetic dyes.
It’s one of many sustainable material innovations that Nike has been experimenting with as it works to reduce its environmental impact. Most prominent in its product innovation portfolio are its Air soles, which the company says are made with at least 25 per cent recycled manufacturing waste; Nike Flyknit, a lightweight fabric it says cuts out 60 per cent of the waste associated with traditional manufacturing of footwear uppers; and Nike Flyleather, which combines recycled leather with synthetic fibres. Considering Nike’s size — the company says it “has the climate impact of a global city” — critics say those efforts are not enough. Still, it’s notable when a company as large and influential as Nike adopts a new technology and proves it can work in the supply chain — even if it’s more for the benefit of the technology company than for Nike’s own footprint, because other brands may see less risk in trying it out.
Making black more sustainable
Black is taking off the fastest mainly because it is, by far, the most ubiquitous colour. This enables companies to focus their efforts on perfecting the one colour and the different formats they want to offer it in, rather than spreading themselves too thinly by working on a range of colours at once and with no guarantee that clients will pick up any of them.
“If there’s one colour that’s used everywhere, it’s black. It’s a big commodity material,” says Martin Mulvihill, chemist and founding partner at investment firm Safer Made. “Black is the only one where if you can make a sustainable, safer black, you can build a whole company around just that pigment.”
The industry’s growing interest in bio-based pigments — if it is sustained, and not used for marketing purposes only — is extremely positive, he says. Safer Made has invested in Nature Coatings specifically because of the startup’s focus on green chemistry and the market gap in need of filling.
“Carbon black is not only petroleum-based, it has polyaromatic hydrocarbons [a class of organic compounds associated with cancer, cardiovascular disease and poor foetal development], which isn’t great, and heavy metal contamination, which isn’t great,” he says. “Our interest in Nature Coatings and the other bio-based carbon black companies that we took a look at is the elimination of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, the elimination of heavy metals, and to have a renewable source for this widely used pigment.”
For Nature Coatings, the renewable source is wood waste. For Living Ink, it’s waste from an algae farm in California: the company has developed a way to heat that waste and transform it into a black powder. Fulbright explains that the powder is basically biochar — a carbon-rich soil amendment that researchers believe has origins in Latin America dating back over 2,500 years — but it’s much finer in texture and its particles are much smaller in size, crucial characteristics to have any potential for textiles and other industrial applications. What’s most exciting, he says, is that the technology replaces a process that generates carbon emissions — conventional carbon black production — with one that removes them. By using organic waste as a feedstock, instead of sending it to a landfill or incinerator where it would generate its own emissions, he says Living Ink can sequester the carbon instead.
“There’s a lot of companies using all sorts of different microorganisms, such as algae, to grow different products. It’s always a great story, and then you realise that sometimes, a lot of that biomass is a waste product that either gets incinerated or goes to a landfill. That’s where we come in. We take that material and turn it into our product,” he says.
Setting brands up for impact
It is not going to slash a product’s footprint all on its own. Living Ink can decrease the footprint of a pair of shoes by about 10 per cent “by putting it into foams and rubbers and things like that”, says Fulbright, according to a lifecycle analysis that the company conducted. But, applied industry-wide — and if fashion chooses to be a role model for other sectors and consumers — the impact would be major. “It’s not going to save the world by itself, but it’s meaningful,” says Fulbright.
Previously, Living Ink has partnered with Nike and other brands on other shoes, T-shirts and sweatshirts, as well as a range of other products — packaging, hang tags and leather accessories, with larger projects in the works to be announced over the next year. This autumn, Fulbright says, they will launch eyeliner and mascara products with a London-based cosmetics company.
Replacing carbon black is less a technological question than an economical one, according to Mulvihill, given the artificially low price of petroleum products. “It’s not the hardest thing to do — just ground-up bits of charred material. In that way, it’s like, ‘Hey, it’s time to do this, people. This is an easier one.’ People like to talk about low-hanging fruit. Switching to a bio-based carbon black is low-hanging fruit at this point.”
The real test of impact, he says, will be what Nike — and Levi’s, LVMH and others — do next, after their initial pilots and product launches. (Nike declined to comment for this story.)
“It is great to see brands looking at alternatives to traditional carbon black and the inclusion in capsule collections, and collections that highlight the ability for these things to integrate into the supply chain. It’s a great step forward for helping the transition away from carbon black,” he says. “The challenge is, and what I hope Levi’s does and what I hope Nike does is that they, having proven that it works, also expand it into a much broader cross-section of their collection.”
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