Phase II: Novel Extraction and Processing Method for Year-round Production of Natural Indigo Dye

Stony Creek Colors sells clean and safe natural dyes to the textile and fashion industries allowingits customers to offer environmentally conscious premium products. Through its flagship naturalindigo product the company has developed and proven a complete agricultural supply chain toreplace synthetic dyes with plant-based drop-in solutions. This supply chain is currently based onthe mechanized harvest and immediate processing of fresh leaf biomass from nearby farms as thehighly perishable biomass degrades to an unusable state within hours of harvest.This limits thecompany's sourcing geography to local farms as well as the factory's operational window to thefour months of harvest season.Stony Creek has recently developed a method for biochemicallystabilizing its biomass for storage and transport which has allowed it to expand its farmer networkinto new climates which are well-suited for production of the crop. To support this new opportunityfor regional expenasion and factory efficiency a scalable and robust factory process for convertingthe new feedstock to high-yield high-purity natural indigo was needed. Phase I work focused onunderstanding the optimal and boundary conditions for each step in the new dry-leaf conversionprocess and developing and operating a pilot scale processing line to validate to increased yield andpurity assumptions.Phase II will expand upon this research to allow feasible transport ofconcentrated feedstock new novel process steps for activating the conversion processmodifications to substantially increase yield per batch and focus on water reuse and improvedwastewater profiles through better control of the front-end extraction.