For years, the fashion industry’s color palette has come at a steep price—plastic-heavy pigments, toxic dyes and dirty processes that stain more than fabric. A fresh breakthrough overseas hints at a cleaner, brighter future, as the Elucent project pushes biobased pigments from lab experiment to industrial reality.
Sparxell, Pangaia and the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) have developed the world’s inaugural plastic-free, reflective pigment.
Innovate UK—representing one of the public body’s nine councils as part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)—funded the trio’s project, dubbed Elucent. For 18 months, the teams explored “how science, engineering and design can work together to create new, sustainable color technologies.”
Related Stories
“The biggest challenge was ensuring the scalability of our manufacturing process while maintaining product performance with increasing scale,” said Sparxell’s Benjamin Droguet, founder and CEO of the Cambridge spin-out. “Success came from interdisciplinary collaboration—combining our cellulose-based color technology with Pangaia’s design expertise and MTC’s engineering capabilities in scalability.”
Built on the British plant colorant startup’s cellulose color platform—inspired by the natural hues of butterflies and beetles—the pigment is fully biodegradable and made sans synthetic and chemical inputs.
“We view the material landscape as being in transition and use innovation to replace the challenges of existing materials with positive solutions,” said Chelsea Franklin, Pangaia’s head of advanced concept design. “To validate impact, we rely on material certifications and lifecycle assessment data to ensure our choices genuinely support this transition and deliver measurable environmental benefits.”
Pangaia tested the pigments on textiles with Orto Print Studio, a female-owned and operated screen-printing specialist in London. This allowed Sparxell to trial-and-error the process—identifying practical limitations and refining formulations iteratively.
“Testing the pigments revealed what was creatively possible, how reflectivity shifted with different base colors and the fine detail that could be achieved in printed artwork,” Franklin said. “These insights have shaped our design approach and opened up new possibilities for translating the innovation into wearable, high-impact products for future seasons.”
Over in Coventry, the MTC built custom production systems and validated its performance on the industrial level, per Droguet, to ensure that the pigments could be scaled beyond the lab.
Looking ahead, the automotive sector is especially auspicious as “it faces the same pressure to reduce environmental impact while maintaining high-performance coatings and finishes.” Droguet noted strong interest from the packaging world, too, as the sector looks for circular alternatives to synthetic inputs.
“Our technology extends beyond pigments—to biodegradable pearls, glitters, inks, foils and sequins—to give companies options for both superior sustainable colorants and tangible proof of their circular manufacturing commitment,” he said. “Our commercial launch next year will demonstrate that cellulose-based color can match or exceed conventional alternatives without compromise.”
