The colourant industry is a major polluter globally, producing 20% of the world’s wastewater and consuming 800,000 tonnes of synthetic colourants annually. The discharge of coloured wastewater into global waterways has caused massive biodiversity loss, death and diseases including cancers, respiratory disease and skin diseases. The industry has been searching for sustainable colours yet is struggling to find viable alternatives. Current clean colourants aren’t scalable to meet the scope of demand nor the required performance standards. To meet this market gap, Lite-1, a Vancouver-based company, aims to produce clean, zero-waste, non-toxic pigments for use in the cosmetic and textile industries. Their first target colour is black, which is the most consumed dye colour in the world as it is used on its own and is blended to darken other colours.

This project will attempt a new approach, drawn from nature and adapted to recombinant systems, to produce a black, microbial colourant. While the targeted black pigment is present in nature, researchers from Lite-1 will attempt to engineer a host organism to overproduce this dark pigment at a commercially and economically viable scale, with the ultimate goal of replacing synthetic dyes.