Circular colour systems and material trials
The Lab's practice-led research returns recovered pigment to cloth and tests what colour will hold. Colour knowledge is already in the waste, in the fibre, in what the garment carried. The work brings it back into use and lets the weave decide. Colour with a biography, contingent on what was thrown away.
Outputs
Colour Without Extraction: Towards Ethical Pigments
Conference paper (full paper). Tonya Meyrick and Jacinta Kay. Textile Intersections 2026, Design Research Society, hosted by the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, 17 and 18 September 2026
This paper investigates how recycled textile waste, reconstituted as particulate pigment, reshapes understandings of material intelligence in textile design. Through six iterative dyeing trials on cellulose substrates, conducted within the Perpetual Pigments research initiative, it examines what occurs when colour is treated as an active participant rather than a controllable output. The trials revealed that fabric architecture, not mordant chemistry or heat, is the primary variable governing how colour holds. Drawing on new materialist theory and circular economy frameworks, the paper proposes the term Ethical Pigments to name colour systems in which the conditions for ethical production are made legible through the material encounter itself.
Colour Lab: From Waste to Value
Exhibition and open studio, in research partnership with Colour of Saying. London Design Festival 2026, Switchboard Studios, Waltham Forest, London.
Colour Lab returns to Switchboard Studios for London Design Festival 2026, the third iteration of the programme in Waltham Forest and the first developed in research partnership with Chroma Waste Lab. A three-day, waste-to-studio experience of exhibition, open studio and hands-on participatory sessions, it traces how post-consumer textiles become new pigments, dyes and inks. Visitors encounter waste differently here, not as the end of a material's life but as the beginning of its next one. The exhibition presents both the science and the design applications: what the pigment looks like, and how designers and makers could put it to work.
Funding
Pigments from Textile Waste for Creating Sustainable Market Ready Products
Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP250100351, 2025 round 1. $512,458. Commencing 2026. Chief Investigators: Associate Professor Rangam Rajkhowa (Deakin University), Professor Xavier Conlan (Deakin University), Professor Ross Shalliker (Western Sydney University), Dr Tonya Meyrick (RMIT University). Partner Investigator: Ms Maureen Taylor (Textile Recyclers Australia). Partner organisation: Richmond Industrial Laundry Pty Ltd.
Awarded to investigate the science behind pigment colour derived from textile waste, including application formulations and fastness properties. The project moves recovered pigment from proof of concept toward industrial viability, working directly with the recyclers who supply the waste stream and the laundries that will handle treated textiles at scale.
Perpetual Pigment: Textile Waste to Paint for Sustainable Coloured Products
Australian Economic Accelerator Ignite. Dr Tonya Meyrick (RMIT University) and Associate Professor Rangam Rajkhowa (Deakin University). $492,754.
A commercialisation-focused programme transforming textile waste into pigments for printing inks and paints, offering an alternative to the synthetic pigments those products currently rely on.
Recognition
Gold Anthem Award, United States, 2024
Sustainability category. Presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, for the Perpetual Pigments exhibition
Deakin University Award for Transformative Research, 2024
For the Perpetual Pigments project.
13th International Design Biennale, Saint-Etienne, France, 2025
Perpetual Pigments was the sole work from Australia featured in the international design exhibition, under the theme Ressource(s), presager demain. Awarded for work undertaken at Deakin University.
The research and development of colour from post-consumer textile waste continues at RMIT University through Chroma Waste Lab, following Dr Tonya Meyrick's appointment as Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow in 2026.
Colour, ethics and knowledge systems
The Lab's research asks who decides what a colour is, and on whose terms. Colour knowledge exists in many systems, in ceremony, in craft, in land relationships, and industrial standardisation cannot register most of it. This research names what is ruled out before design begins, and works with the knowledge that survives. Not whose colour is correct, but whose counts.
Outputs
Particle Studies: Colour After Wear
Exhibition. Tonya Meyrick and Jacinta Kay. Textile Intersections 2026, Design Research Society, Imperial College London, 17 and 18 September 2026.
Particle Studies presents the material findings of the dyeing research programme as a parallel mode of knowledge production, making arguments through objects, surfaces and material encounter that the paper makes through language. The pigment on display does not dissolve. It suspends, deposits and lodges in weave architecture, demanding that researchers become responsive rather than directive. The exhibition presents the pigment itself, treated swatches from across the trials, and larger dyed textile works produced from the most viable mordant protocol identified. The work is the documentation.
What Colour Remains: After Pigments
Exhibition. Dr Tonya Meyrick and Jacinta Kay. Geelong Design Week 2026, Victorian Regional Design Fair, Nyaal Banyul Event and Convention Centre, Geelong, 1 to 4 October 2026.
A material research exhibition presenting the first public showcase of dyed textile samples produced through the experimental pigment extraction programme. Working from post-consumer textiles, the project recovers reusable pigments via ball-milling and applies them to natural fibres, asking what colour survives when a garment's life is over and what it can become. The exhibition presents physical sample outcomes alongside process documentation, inviting visitors to encounter recovered colour as a design resource, a political question and a material argument.
A Visual Language for Ethical Colour
How should a lab that interrogates colour represent itself? The identity works in mono, declining to claim a proprietary brand colour, and treats that refusal as the same argument the Lab makes of industry applied to its own representation. The page covers the logo system, typography, event lockups, icons, the poster series and the colour explorations developed for exhibition collateral.
Standards and field instruments
There is no standard for ethical colour, which is the problem. The Lab is building one. Working across material, social and cultural dimensions, it makes legible what industrial colour systems are structured not to see. The Ethical Colour Standard is the instrument a field needs before accountability is possible at all. Colour as commons, not monopoly.
Outputs
Colour as Commons: Chromatic Inadmissibility and Structural Inclusion in Circular Pigment Systems
Conference paper (full paper). Tonya Meyrick and Jacinta Kay. INCLUDE London 2026, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, Battersea, London, September 2026.
Marking the fortieth anniversary of Lady Helen Hamlyn's New Design for Old exhibition at the V&A, INCLUDE London 2026 critically examines the evolution of inclusive design across ageing, gender, diverse abilities, neurodiversity, economic status, culture and social identity. This paper argues that industrial colour production, grounded in synthetic pigment supply chains, proprietary standardisation and technical authority, structurally excludes diverse communities, knowledge systems and perceptual experiences from colour-making decisions, rendering many chromatic knowledges inadmissible before design begins. Drawing on the Perpetual Pigments project, the research employs a practice-led, pluriversal methodology including collaborative co-design with six First Nations artists as co-investigators, structured through cultural protocols of self-determination. It proposes colour as a shared commons, a system in which inclusion is a structural outcome rather than an added feature
Ethical Colour: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?
Public talk. Associate Professor Rangam Rajkhowa and Dr Tonya Meyrick. Geelong Design Week 2026, Victorian Regional Design Fair, Nyaal Banyul Event and Convention Centre, Geelong, Friday 2 October, 12.30pm to 1.30pm.
A paired design and materials science conversation introducing Ethical Colour and the double refusal of extraction upstream and disposal downstream. The talk moves from the scale of synthetic colour pollution and the materials opportunity in post-consumer textiles, through the science of how the pigment is derived and how it bonds, to the dyeing trials and what the material taught the designers. It closes on the three dimensions of the Ethical Colour framework, material, social and cultural, and on the chromatic commons: colour as shared rather than owned.
Participatory and public methods
The Lab's participatory methodology invites communities to map colour to place and co-author a colour's public appearance. Colour knowledge already lives in stories, land relationships and cultural memory. Chroma Grounding brings it into the room and makes it count. Colour made in common, belonging to place and people.
Outputs
Participatory sessions, Colour Lab
Workshops and open studio. London Design Festival 2026, Switchboard Studios, Waltham Forest, London.
Hands-on participatory sessions within the Colour Lab programme, where visitors work directly with waste-derived pigments, dyes and inks. The sessions put the Chroma Grounding methodology into practice, drawing colour knowledge out of participants rather than delivering it to them, and treating the workshop as a site of research as much as of public engagement.
Common Ground
Participatory game. In early pre-production.
A participatory game in early development, designed to make the mapping of colour to place playable. Common Ground extends Chroma Grounding into a repeatable, portable format so that communities can co-author colour outside the exhibition context, and so the knowledge generated in a session can be recorded, compared and carried forward.
