"Pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value." - R. Buckminster Fuller, LIFE, 1971
The world produces around 92 million tonnes of textile waste each year, and less than one per cent is recycled back into new clothing. Colour is one of the world's most invisible supply chains. Most hues arrive through fossil fuel extraction, detached from place, labour and consequence. Circular design has reached fibre, garment and material, yet colour, one of the most chemically loaded steps in the system, remains largely unexamined. Chroma Waste Lab exists to make that question visible.
Based in the School of Design and Social Context at RMIT University, the Lab treats colour as a resource, a material, a history and a shared cultural act. We collaborate widely, because breakthrough innovation does not rest quietly in silos. We work alongside research scientists at Deakin University's Institute for Frontier Materials, who engineer pigment from post-consumer textile waste, and with Colour of Saying, a London-based colour, materials and finishes studio. Together we build the research, standards and participatory programmes that a new design research field, Ethical Colour, requires, asking what becomes possible when colour refuses extraction upstream and disposal downstream, and is reframed from property to commons. The current phase centres on post-consumer textile waste, where the volumes are largest and the colour is already there, waiting to be recovered.
*R. Buckminster Fuller is: "Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value." It was published in Barry Farrell's article, "The View from the Year 2000," in LIFE Magazine on February 26, 197
Materials research at the intersection of waste valorisation and circular economy, investigating how mechanically recovered pigment performs as a sustainable colourant at scale.
Advancing design justice and inclusive design in colour, asking whose chromatic knowledge counts and what industrial standardisation renders inadmissible before design begins.
Building the benchmarking tools industry needs for provenance and supply chain accountability, from evaluation criteria to a directory of bio-based and waste-derived colour.
Co-design and knowledge translation with communities, treating the workshop and the exhibition as sites where research happens rather than where it is reported.
Displacing conventional dye processes implicated in toxic aquifers. Colour is recovered mechanically without solvents or chemical synthesis.
Making visible the labour behind colour, who makes it and under what conditions, and holding designers accountable for where the harm of a colour choice lands.
Building the instruments a responsible colour industry requires: the Ethical Colour Standard and the Bio Colour Directory.
Making colour supply chains accountable. Honouring the labour, communities and knowledge systems that colour extraction has erased, and holding colour as commons, not monopoly.
Closed-loop pigment recovered from post-consumer textile waste: refusing extraction upstream and disposal downstream, treating waste not as endpoint but as starting condition.
Refusing fossil fuel extraction as the default origin of colour by recovering pigment mechanically from existing waste rather than synthesising new petrochemical hues.
Advancing the work through unusual allies: materials scientists, textile practitioners, designers, decolonial thinkers, waste systems and communities.
Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow
City Campus Australia
School of DesignCODE teams commit to designing complex simulations and precision interactions in the service of natural, cultural and social ecosystems.
The Centre of Material and Design Exchange (CO:MADE, formerly Weft Research Centre) is RMIT’s collaborative Research Centre advancing material and design innovation to transform fashion and textile systems and support more just and sustainable futures.
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