Color me Dead

Once upon a time, humans “gathered colors from naturally occuring materials in the world around them”, writes Whitney Balick. Ochre dug from the earth, charcoal, minerals found locally, local plants, saffron, those were the sources.

 

All that changed in 1856 when William Perkin, a British chemist, stumbled upon a way to turn coal tar sludge into a colored dye:

“Perkin’s discovery jump-started a revolution in synthetic dye-making that would change the way most of the world made color. It wasn’t long before other chemists began to figure out how to synthesize seemingly every color of the rainbow from coal tar and other petrochemical products.”

This industrialization of color set off huge environmental damage.

 

Multicolored waste would find its way from industry into waterways and poison the local ecosystem. Humans nearby had reactions to the chemicals, from rashes to outright poisoning. The colored products could also wreak havoc, like the lead used in paints permeated into kids and impacted their mental development.

 

If you thought regulations and checks have solved these issues, you’d be wrong. As recently as 2007, Mattel recalled millions of Barbie dolls and other toys for “unsafe levels of lead in the paint used on them”. But yes, it is true that the colored products have generally become safer with time.

 

The problem though has remained with “improper disposal of more benign ingredients” used to make those colors in the first place. No, it isn’t just the disposal of chemicals that is being discussed here. Even “safe chemicals” can do damage:

“Salt might be so safe you can eat it, but if you dump loads of it into a freshwater river, it will still kill off local species and wreak havoc on the ecosystem.”

Ironically then:

“Putting biodegradable things into rivers without treating them properly causes far more problems than toxic chemicals, carcinogens.”

 

The root problem lies in the division of labour!

“In most cases, the industry that produced the color is not the industry that uses the color.”

The producer of the color often doesn’t have the expertise, knowledge, money or ability to handle the waste material correctly.

 

If you thought that natural was good and synthetic was bad, that is not entirely true either:

“Lead paint was popular for millennia, despite the fact that prolonged exposure to it is fatal. Realgar was used as both a rich orange pigment and a rat poison in the Middle Ages because it was so toxic. And the Romans used slave labor to mine for orpiment, which yields a gold paint, because they knew it was so poisonous that mining it was essentially a death sentence.”

 

Sadly, there’s no easy solution to all this:

“If we’re really serious about reducing the impact that our appetite for color has on our own ecosystem and human health, it will mean a shift away from producing and consuming so much stuff—a hard pill to swallow for a culture oriented toward endless consumption as a symbol of prosperity and a means of self-expression.”