IT took weeks of long cold hours on the beach, followed by messy experiments in an improvised laboratory but marine scientist Jessica Giannotti had her Eureka moment when she made a beautiful pink dye from seaweed.
Now, with the support of the prestigious James Hutton Institute and Scottish Enterprise, she is working on bringing it to market with the aim of having a global impact.
Giannotti is convinced seaweed dyes have the potential to be not only a game-changer for the fashion industry but also for the rural economy in Scotland.
“In Scotland, you have renewable natural resources, great universities and incredible research institutions with a wealth of knowledge and you have amazing people with diverse skill sets,” said Giannotti who is half Italian and half Venezuelan and has settled in the Highlands with her Gaelic-speaking German husband, Andreas Wolff.
“People are kind and interested so it is a good place to be creative but we need to build an infrastructure.
“There are other countries like Norway and the Faroes that have invested heavily in their aquaculture and seaweed industries, so we need to build that here and work with industry partners and academia to support the aquaculture industry in Scotland. The seaweed gathering in the Outer Hebrides is mainly for animal feed.”
She added: “The rural economy here is full of potential and talent and I think Scotland could become a bigger hub of innovation.”
Giannotti settled in Scotland in 2005, leaving a high-powered consultancy job in Germany to study her first love of marine science at the University of the Highlands and Islands.
Giving up a regular income was hard but she had no regrets about her decision and after her studies founded the company Crùbag in 2013 to make and sell textiles inspired by the ocean.
As the years passed, however, she became increasingly concerned about the impact of man-made materials on the oceans and human health, so in collaboration with the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) in Oban, she started to explore the potential of using seaweed in the fashion industry.
“I wanted to look at nature-based solutions and Scotland has so much seaweed it was really worth looking at,” explained Giannotti (above).
While the project did not go on to develop any dyes from seaweed, by the end of it she had a good idea of the type of seaweed that could be used to make pigments and decided to carry on experimenting on her own to try to find an alternative to health and environment-wrecking synthetic dyes which currently leak into the environment at a rate of 200,000 tonnes per year.
Last year alone, textile dyeing and finishing accounted for 3% of global CO2 emissions, and projections suggest that figure could rise to 10% by 2050.
The industry is also the second largest contributor to global industrial wastewater pollution, impacting entire ecosystems and millions of people. Textile dyes can be toxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic agents and can persist as pollutants.
Said Giannotti: “I thought making dyes could be a real game-changer for the fashion industry and I became a bit obsessed with it, spending hours collecting seaweed to do some trials.
“People donated equipment and I set up a lab in my printing room at Crùbag and started working on developing dyes.
“For weeks and weeks, I had many failed trials until I started to see some good results. It was quite messy actually so I had to take a shower after every time I did it!”
Eventually, Giannotti succeeded in making a bright pink dye from the seaweed.
“The dye was so beautiful,” she said. “It looked like a cocktail or a smoothie – really pink and really bright. I thought it was too good to be true but I replicated it and realised we had something good. Then I did some initial trials on cotton and wool and the colour was lovely.”
Making the dye was a breakthrough but in order for it to have any impact, Giannotti realised there would have to be market interest.
“I wanted it to be a market-driven solution because pushing out a new invention is not worth it if the market is not ready for it.”
She decided to showcase the dye at the Future Fabrics Expo in London where the feedback was “amazing”.
“This is when I thought we could become a Scottish sector leader in this industry,” said Giannotti.
As well as reducing the carbon footprint of the textile industry and pollution, sea dyes developed with green chemistry processes have the potential to benefit the rural economy in Scotland and in other countries around the world where seaweed is abundant.
“There is enough seaweed that can be found in different parts of the world and does not compete with arable land which can help develop the economies of rural areas,” said Giannotti.
“Making seaweed dyes in Scotland will help our net zero targets and also show that innovation is not just based in universities in cities.”
SeaDyes has now joined the James Hutton Institute as a spin-in company, securing £75,000 of funding from Scottish Enterprise’s High Growth Spinout Programme.
Giannotti said it was a transformative step for SeaDyes.
“We can now treat seaweed as a crop and our dyes as a natural product, and have the capacity, skills and space to refine our technology, develop a market-fit product and scale,” she said.
“It is about managing natural capital well and respecting the boundaries of the ecosystems. We need to continue working with scientists to make sure we understand our stocks and species.”
Industry partners are currently testing the dyes with initial tests being successful.
Reds, pinks, browns and yellows have been produced but SeaDyes is currently focusing on magenta in order to bring a colour to the market as quickly as possible.
“When we do that, we can work on expanding the colour ranges and look at other species of seaweed,” said Giannotti.
