Next time a beach vendor offers you a brightly coloured sarong,
give a thought to all the textiles produced in Bali for the
tourist trade and for export each year. Those inexpensive
garments carry a high price tag for the environment.
Chemical dyes arrived in Indonesia over 100 years ago and
quickly became popular because their colours were bolder than
traditional plant dyes. Most of the textile dyes and associated
chemicals used in Indonesia today are very harmful to the
environment. Cheap, harsh chemical dyes, many containing heavy
metals, are routinely flushed into Denpasar’s waterways.
This effluent, with its extremely high pH of between 10 and
14, quickly kills any fish or plants that come into contact
with it.
Gede Sugiarta, an environmental engineer who worked with Visnu
Foundation between 2000 and 2003, surveyed 234 dye factories
in Denpasar as part of a project to find a solution to this
seriously polluting industry. At that time 90 of these businesses
were considered large -- each producing over 50 cubic meters
of effluent each day. Gede experimented with several possibilities
including anaerobic wastewater treatment plants, using chicken
manure to create a soup of dye-consuming bacteria and adding
more chemicals to the effluent to remove the colour. None
of these methods was effective, mainly because they could
effectively treat only a fraction of the effluent at any time.
Companies that wished to add treatment facilities found the
cost of the infrastructure and chemicals prohibitive.
“Because of the very high alkalinity of the dye waste
water, hydrochloric acid is used to neutralize it,”
explains Gede. “Even at that time, industrial grade
HCl cost about Rp 500,000 a drum, and large amounts were needed
to cope with the huge volume of effluent being produced every
day.” And neutralization is just one of the steps.
“There’s no easy solution. The dye factories need
serious government support; they don’t have the resources
to put in treatment systems. Bali can’t handle even
a small polluting industry. It’s better not to allow
it at all if the factories can’t treat their effluent.”
There’s currently a crackdown on the hundreds of dye
factories that line the river in Denpasar. The factories have
been given two months to put settling ponds and filtration
systems in place, or face permanent closure. Many of the small,
cottage-industry level factories working on lean profit margins
will be unable to afford these improvements. Meanwhile, the
factories release their effluent at night, in concealed drains
or wait until government inspectors are out of sight.
“When I saw the conditions people were working in I
was truly embarrassed to be part of the demand that creates
these factories,” says D, an agent who sends sarongs
to the United States. “ Closing them is good for the
environment, but what about the thousands of people involved
at all levels of the industry -– stirring dye vats,
stamping patterns, washing and stretching cloth, the owners
of the factories and shops, the shop workers, cargo workers,
buyers, agents…”
What are the alternatives to using harsh chemical dyes? Natural
plant dyes from India and high quality, non-polluting chemical
dyes are available, but the costs are high and the colours
are softer than local dyes. I talked to William Ingram about
the possibility of returning to Bali’s natural plant
dyes which were used for hundreds of years before chemical
dyes arrived with the Dutch. William is co-founder of Threads
of Life, a certified Fair Trade business that helps traditional
ikat-producing communities in East Nusa Tenggara maintain
their heritage of natural dyes.
“The biggest issue with using a natural dye like indigo,
for example, is the sheer volume of plant material that’s
needed to dye a relatively small amount of fabric,”
he explained. “It takes 20 kilograms of indigo leaves
to dye a single scarf or sash. Indigo grows like a weed in
the dryer parts of Bali but the amount required for commercial
production would require huge plantations. With the price
of land rising as it is, that’s not viable.”
And plant dyes are hard to standardize. The colours produced
by a single plant can differ according to variables like soil
type, amount of water available and freshness of the material.
Indigo as a dye is environmentally benign. It thrives in poor
soil and reproduces readily every three or four months. A
vat of indigo dye has a pH of between 7 and 10. “A vat
of indigo dye can be kept going indefinitely as long as it’s
kept fermenting. The fermentation process releases the indigo
from the leaves and reduces the oxygen in the solution, turning
it a yellow-green colour. When the thread is dyed and oxidizes
in the air, it turns blue.”
Before chemical dyes were invented, most of the world’s
flags were some combination of blue, red and white -- plant-derived
dyes that were colour fast and weathered well.
Some dying processes require a mordant which connects the
dye to the fibre. Much of the commercial batik industry uses
waterglass (sodium silicate) as a mordant, which further complicates
the witch’s brew of effluent. By contrast, the natural
dyes that require a mordant also use plant materials.
Sediment is a serious issue with chemical dyes. It can make
up as much as 20% of some dye wastewater, especially from
the batik dyes used in Java. This sediment contains high levels
of heavy metals and is very difficult to dispose of.
What’s the solution? “Better chemical dyes,”
says William firmly. “Natural plant dyes can’t
begin to meet commercial needs.”
But the office, collections, dying shed and gardens of Threads
of Life and its sister organization, the nonprofit Yayasan
Pecinta Budaya Bebali, hold their own fascinating story --
Indonesia’s living heritage of over 200 natural plant
dyes. My next column explores the rejuvenation of traditional
dying techniques in some of the archipelago’s most remote
communities.
