The Colour of Waste: pigment made from food waste
Turning avocado pits, orange peel, red cabbage, and coffee grounds into sustainable colour pigment that can be used for making ink
With the project: The Colour of Waste, Sara van Laerhoven graduated from St. Joost School of Art & Design.
Designers are working a lot with colour. This can be digital but also in the form of ink. Colour and printing have almost become something normal. You press the print button, and a beautiful, coloured sheet comes out of the printer, but how the colours are made we are often not concerned with.
Sara wanted to go back to basics and show how special and beautiful colour can be and that it can be natural.
By using material research, she created a natural alternative to synthetic inks to use in graphic workshops. This alternative is made from food waste. She started by collecting the waste. For this, she approached restaurants, greengrocers, and farmers. She boiled the food waste with water. To get the colour out of the waste, she added soda while boiling. Then she filtered the liquid to take out the waste residue. She added alum and more soda to the coloured liquid. These metal salts react with each other. The colour sticks to the salts. When this is filtered again, and dried, what is left are hard pieces of coloured flakes. When these pieces are crushed the result is a natural pigment.
Pigments that are made this way are called lake pigments. The pigments are meant to be long-lasting and durable. Lake pigments can be applied widely, for example printing, painting, and colouring various materials such as textiles, paper, and wood.
For her graduation she designed a toolkit that contains the pigment as well as explanations on how to do it yourself, what it looks like and how to apply it. It also contains examples of different uses of the pigment and colour experiments. She made her process visual to inspire and motivate others to try it themselves.
Contact information
Name: Sara van Laerhoven
Email: saravl@live.nl
Website: https://saravanlaerhoven.nl
Instagram: sara_van_laerhoven
