At the grand opening, Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture Jai Templeton said, “This is an historic day for Tennessee agriculture. Not only is Stony Creek Colors bringing an alternative, high-yielding crop to our farmers, but it’s also developing our rural communities. We anticipate great things from this.”
Founded by Sarah Bellos, Stony Creek Colors is an emerging, four-year-old manufacturer of bio-based dyes for the textile industry. It is expanding production of its flagship product, natural indigo for denim and other clothing items. The company contracts with local farmers for its indigo supply in order to sustainably produce its natural indigo dye with full transparency and authenticity.
NSF grant to create measurement device
With the NSF grant, the collaborators will use a portion of the research funds to create a high-throughput handheld assay device capable of rapid measurements of the naturally occurring chemicals for indigo, which is formed in the plant leaves.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, nearly 100 percent of the indigo dye used to dye yarns for denim jeans globally has been chemically synthesized from petroleum derivatives and hazardous, toxic chemicals. The Danforth Center will improve the understanding of the genetics of the existing indigo plant stocks through DNA analysis of specific high-yielding plant varieties. This research will enable Stony Creek Colors to produce an improved bio-based specialty chemical derived from the renewable, abundant plant-material of the indigo crop, Persicaria tinctorial.
Posted September 21, 2016
SPRINGFIELD, Tenn. – Stony Creek Colors, Inc., a manufacturer of biobased textile dyes, recently held a grand opening and ribbon cutting for its factory here.
The indigo plant processing and distribution company will expand to invest $7.2 million over the next five years and create 50 jobs in Robertson County, the company announced.
Separately, Stony Creek and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a not-for-profit research institute with a mission to improve the human condition through plant science, announced they have received a one-year grant of $224,676 from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnership (IIP), to improve the available genetic resources for plant-based indigo dye production to help make the manufacturing of blue jeans more sustainable.
Stony Creek Colors opens factory, receives NSF grant
Stony Creek Colors' Founder & CEO Sarah Bellos, with state, local and company officials, cuts the ribbon on the company's new indigo processing factory.
Indigo crop, Persicaria tinctoria, with nearly a 3 billion base pair genome, growing in Stony Creek Colors fields
“Our bio-based dyes improve profitability and ecosystem health for farmers, while empowering designers, brands, and mills with greater transparency and traceability,” Bellos said. “This allows us to innovate and scale-up natural dyes that clean up the fashion industry, tout full integrity and contribute to a thriving future. Stony Creek Colors’ research collaboration with the Danforth Center funded by this NSF grant is a critical next step in the evolution of this plant-derived chemical. Higher yielding and more consistent indigo crops will allow our bio-based colors to reach deeper into the industrial marketplace, ultimately replacing more of the petroleum based-chemicals currently imported by the textile industry with a domestically grown, plant-derived solution.”
The Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project will map existing genetic resources while developing a unique approach for plant indican (indigo precursor) analysis which will enable non-destructive analysis of plant leaves in breeding lines.
“Genomics and non-destructive, high-throughput phenotyping are cornerstones of our research at the Danforth Center, and it’s exciting to have the opportunity to use the methods we have developed to directly accelerate improvements in a sustainable indigo feedstock,” said Noah Fahlgren, Ph.D., director, Bioinformatics Core, Danforth Plant Science Center, co-principal investigator on the project. “Currently, the measurement of indigo yield is done by harvesting plants or by chemical analysis of precursors, both of which are time-consuming and difficult to do on large populations, so the ability to use non-destructive techniques to measure or estimate indigo yield will be particularly important to enable rapid screening of breeding materials.”
These improvements will be commercialized through higher indigotin yielding breeders seed stock, with a goal of reaching 26,000 acres of cropland in the Southeast U.S. within six years. This will allow plant-derived indigo to be more cost-competitive with synthetic indigo dye and to meet the immediate market demand for U.S. bio-based indigo by denim mills.
Stony Creek Colors estimates by 2021, indigo will be growing on more than 26,000 acres and the demand for their natural indigo solution from denim companies such as Tellason, 3x1, and Taylor Stitch, with whom they currently partner, will continue to grow as customers shop for more sustainable and natural fashion.
Sources: Stony Creek Colors and The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center