In the Colours of Nature dye house, Vijayakumar Varathan is busy prepping a vat of indigo. At 51, he looks frail, with a tanned body made mostly of bones, but he runs to and fro, setting up an open fire where he'll brew cauldrons of natural colorants made from plants. He's worked here for 15 years. But until his early 30s, Varathan mixed chemicals in a conventional clothing factory in the same region of southern India. There he developed a disease that caused layers of his skin to peel off. Even today, it is discolored. "It was pretty bad," he says, in his fragmented English. "But I didn't have a choice." Conventional textile manufacturing is tough on both the people who work in it and their land. Issues arise at almost every stage of the process — the ubiquitous genetically modified seeds that strain farmers' budgets, the pesticides used in cotton fields, the harsh chemicals used in dyes, the toxic waste that pollutes rivers, and the chemically treated clothing that ends up in landfills. The problems are exacerbated in the low-price, quick-turnaround segment of the market known as "fast fashion," which encourages cheap production and a throwaway mind-set. A new crop of small businesses are investing in organic farming, natural dyes and a transparent supply chain that encourages shoppers to think about the effect of their purchases — and they're selling their products online and in a small but growing number of U.S. stores, from small trendy boutiques to Target. A woman hangs dyed yarn to dry at a textile mill on the outskirts of Agartala (The Washington Post) ‘Clean' clothing The air inside the dye house smells of fermented indigo, oddly similar to the scent of cow dung. Pungent, to say the least. Men squat over indigo vats, dipping in T-shirt after T-shirt — some of them multiple times, to produce a darker, more intense shade. They hand the colored garments to sari-clad women, who throw them onto a clothesline. The T-shirts transform from green to blue as the indigo encounters oxygen. Dozens in varying shades of blue are drying in rows stretched across a sunny field. "Just think if this is the way all our clothes were made — dip and dry," says Juan Gerscovich, as he watches. "There is no need for chemicals. We just need to look to the Earth for answers." Gerscovich and his brother Fernando, co-founders of Industry of All Nations, spend several months every year visiting the communities in India, Latin America and sometimes Africa where they source their products, always including a stop here at Colours of Nature in Auroville. The dyeing shop is a key contributor to what the company calls its "Clean Clothes Project" in south India — clothes produced in a way that promotes clean rivers, oceans, soil and air. Juan, dressed in his company's wares — indigo-dyed chinos and a breezy white organic-cotton shirt — stands over a 250-gallon vat of indigo, set in a hole dug in the ground. There are about two dozen of these big holes; each can dye about 50 pounds of cotton. Run-off from the dying process at Colours of Nature is free of toxins and chemicals commonly found in conventional dyes, making it safe for employees to walk around barefoot (The Washington Post) The Gerscoviches, who created their company in 2010, found common ground and a business partner in Jesus Ciriza Larraona, who founded Colours of Nature here in 1993. Larraona, a Spaniard, lives right next door to his business, and has become a passionate student of the art of natural dyeing. "This is a practice that has been going on since the Egyptians," he says. "But why had it disappeared?" The answer isn't hard to understand: Synthetic dyes are quicker and easier to use and they produce more colors. Natural dyes — notably indigo, but also plants such as madder (which produces a red hue), acacia (brown) and myrobalan (yellow), plus resins such as shellac (purple) and minerals including iron (black or gray) — take more time and are labor-intensive. But chemical dyes take a toll. They can include compounds dangerous to the health of workers, ranging from chlorine bleach to known carcinogens such as arylamines. And if they aren't treated properly, they can pollute the water supply. That's what propelled Mohan Sundaram Eswaran to change his business model. He ran a company in Tirupur, India's textile manufacturing hub, for 12 years, making clothes for U.S. and European brands; the fabrics were dyed with conventional dyes, and the fabrics were not generally organic. Business was good, he says: "I was selling more than 6,000 pieces a month, and had over 150 employees working for me."
