Things were going smoothly, and, seeing that we were apparently trying to swim against the tide of progress, it was looking all too easy to accomplish. Then quite suddenly, and with little explanation, the guys we were working with to develop the natural dyes said they didn’t want to carry on. As we were the first people they had worked with who were demanding rather high ethical standards, they didn’t believe that these issues were of growing concern in the west. Where are the orders? they wanted to know. We can’t get orders until we sort the dyes out, we answered. This, it turns out, wasn’t good enough, and so they pulled out.

I can understand their reluctance to spend time developing something that no-one else appears to be asking for. In fact western rug traders have been so clear in their demands for cheaper rugs, woven at speed and using consistent dyes where colour can be precisely matched and repeated, that they had some trouble even understanding our reasons for not doing it that way. That 2007 was the UNESCO year of natural dyes, and 2009 is the UNESCO year of natural fibres means not a thing in an industry that has bent over backwards to try to compete with the cheaper and poorer quality rugs produced by their Indian neighbours.

In a “fast food” market that values speed over quality, progress has meant mechanisation, and rug companies not up to these changes have disappeared. The growing demand for environmentally friendly products over here has yet to make a great impact over there. A change might be coming, but as the Nepalese are still trying to reach the previous goal, it’s difficult for them to grasp why they might need to turn back now.

So, they are on board with everything else (see previous article) because we are paying for the extra time it would make to complete each rug, and people still have the skills, but we parted ways when we attempted not just to use natural dyes, but bring natural dying up to a standard where they could be used with confidence to meet our rather picky western demands. The up-front time required to do this, even with our help, was a step too far. It would mean changing the way the dying is done to make it less of a health hazard to the dyers (although they thought their new chemical dying vats had already achieved this); changing some of the dye stuffs (some of them are poisonous, some come from endangered plants and trees, like red sandlewood which needs to be cut down to get the heartwood suitable for dying, and some are the byproducts of animals or the animals themselves). It also means changing the water that’s being used. The water is so unreliable because of the varying chemical and mineral content (which changes the colour of the dyes), not to mention all the other stuff that gets dumped into it, that we needed to find a way to use a consistent (and consistently clean) water source. Quite prepared were we to invest in the necessary water collection and purification, introduce new natural dyestuff to compensate for the colours we were would need to remove, and pay for the R&D in general. However given the history of rapid industrialisation of the rug industry, they simply don’t (at this point) believe the effort it would take from their side is at all worthwhile. After all, no-one else has ever mentioned these things to them before.

Reaching this rather unscalable brick wall in our development, and after spending a peaceful week when we stopped doing anything to do with rugs and imagined how easy life would be if we were to just give the whole thing up, we decided nonetheless to persevere.

However taking on board the issues the Nepalese raised, we decided it might well be a good idea to test the meerkat first, before we go for full world domination. So we’ve gone back to basics and decided on a very cut down, rather purist approach. Since we cannot possibly engage in anything to do with the chemical dye ‘scene’ as it is in Kathmandu, and we will need to prove ourselves first before we can hope for any dye house to agree to the kind of R&D that would make vegetable dying a real alternative, we are relying on the sheep to come up with their own colours and going dye free. Simples.

Self coloured rugs are a venerable Tibetan tradition and the antique ones we have seen are beautiful in their simplicity of tone. (Plus neutral colours are the most sold colours in the rug industry anyway).

So, for the sake of our suppliers, here’s where you can help us test the meerkat.

Picture this: a beautiful mountainous land, fertile and green from abundant rivers filled with crystal clear snowmelt, clean high-altitude air, and very happy healthy people. This is the shangri-la everyone goes to Nepal to experience.

First stop – Kathmandu airport (where you first come to the purse emptying realisation that Nepal nowadays pretty much runs on the many taxes imposed on foreigners, including the somewhat imaginative tax you have to pay in order to be allowed to leave Nepal).

This is followed by the ’breathtaking’ ancient city of Kathmandu where the dream is shattered, because the Kathmandu valley, surrounded by said majestic mountains and fed by said abundant rivers is fast becoming one of the most polluted places on the planet.

In 1983 the Kathmandu valley ring road was built through fields and rice paddies fairly far away from the three cities of Bhaktapur, Lalitpur and Kathmandu. These cities have now merged into one, and when we were in K’du six years ago they were starting to spill out over to the other side of the ring road. However although very busy, Kathmandu was a peaceful haven compared to the bustle of an average Indian city. Just six years later and the ring road has become virtually impassable, with places like Swayambhunath which had seemed pretty much out in the countryside now completely surrounded by haphazard and congested housing with narrow impassable lanes (although our taxi driver proved to us that even the most impassable 45 degree narrow lane full of rocks can be navigated if one is persistent). It can take hours to crawl from one side of the city to the other, and the city is not very big.

Everyone aspires to own a car, and settles for a moped or motorcycle until they can afford one. This ‘progress’ has brought with it one of the highest incidents of respiratory disease in the world. Daily rolling blackouts (quaintly called load shedding) is so normal it’s scheduled, forcing people to run on diesel generators for hours every day adding to the already poisoned air. It was only after leaving K’du we realised that the constant chest pain and streaming eyes we experienced weren’t from a strange summer cold, but from the air pollution. It’s not as if the Nepalese don’t know this is problem, but they are a very poor country and decent infrastructure is expensive. It appears the Chinese might come to the rescue with a planned nine flyovers which will no doubt ease the congestion for now, but it will also mark the end of the old city as we know it.

Another serious problem in Kathmandu valley is the water and sewerage system (using the singular and not plural here, because they are often the same thing). Neither the sewerage pipes nor the water pipes were built to handle such large volumes and they regularly split, with effluent mixing directly with the city‘s tap water supply. Most of the piped sewage ends up flowing untreated into the river, and some doesn’t even get to the sewage pipes – it just flows directly into the rivers. (http://tinyurl.com/nnzfdn). The Bagmati, Bishnumati, Dhobikhola, and Tukucha rivers which flow through the Kathmandu valley and beyond, and used to supply the entire valley with abundant clean snowmelt, now provides polluted water to only the most desperate Nepalese. The rest rely either on borehole water, or on the large water tankers that transport water to the city from springs in the surrounding foothills. Fish that used to live in abundance only 20 years ago have all long gone, and the banks of the rivers foam in protest at the sewerage and industrial effluent that pours into it. (The image with this blog is of the holy Bagmati River – completely blocked by pollution).

Some of the main culprits of this toxic run-off in the east of the city are the dye houses that supply the rug industry – the largest industry in Nepal after tourism. Like almost everything else in Nepal except for the mountains, it is situated almost entirely within the Kathmandu valley adding to an already beleaguered infrastructure, and with little actual zoning people live surrounded by highly toxic industries. These industries often gravitate towards each other in areas that tourists seldom see. Traders selling the kind of things we like to buy are situated around the tourist areas of Boudhanath, Swayambhunath (where the big stupas are); Thamel and Freak Street near Durbar Square(where the 70’s hippies first set up head shops before the King threw them all out); and statue makers can be found around the narrow lanes of Patan. These are all beautiful places, kept nice and clean for the likes of you and me. Most of the dye houses, however, are not in such pretty places. They can be found congregated around the same impassable un-surfaced (as in mud) back streets, and as it takes about 90 litres of water to dye every square meter of carpet sold in the west, this water run-off, needing to go somewhere, ends up running down either side of the road and into the river.

Like everyone else, the dyers are doing their best to progress their industry and adapt the old traditional methods of vegetable dying to new western dyes – mainly using azo-free dyes. The makers of azo free dyes make a lot of noise about how non-polluting and harmless their dyes are, (I’ve even read a mother and baby clothing manufacturer who claims these dyes are actually safe for the environment!), but if you take a look at the water that is finding its way into the rivers from these dye houses you do have to wonder what the hell they’re talking about. In a country with little or no regulation in place for dealing with chemical effluent it simply runs straight into the rivers. Unfortunately they’ve managed to convince most of the rug companies in UK, Germany and America that these dyes are good, and the Nepalese and Tibetans, who can plainly see that this is not the case, go along with it because, well, they need the income. In fact the Nepalese think we are a little crazy for wanting to use vegetable dyes – but more on that later.

The dye houses are now so blamed for polluting the river that they are being pressured to move just beyond Boudhanath, to a dyers ‘industrial park’ outside the ring road (in amongst the rice paddies) which the dyers are financing themselves. We were invited for a tour of the brand new site, and, except for the much improved buildings, the waste water wasn’t being ’treated’ any differently to how it was before, because there is no way for a country without an effective infrastructure to deal with the effects of chemical pollutants. It’s true that the effluent now no longer flows into the river, it simply flows into the rice paddies instead.

So, bravo: our western demand for colour fast rugs is really ‘helping’ yet another country ‘develop’. With all these problems in the rug industry I cannot figure why child labour is the thing that gets people so worked up: what about the water the children are drinking and playing in?

Picture this: a narrow muddy lane; houses and dye sheds crammed up to the road; a slow steady stream of cars, mopeds and motorcycles weaving through the children that are playing in the multi-coloured water that runs downhill to the river.

Any colour as long as it’s green.

Wish I could use that Farrow and Balls tagline…

Enter the magical world of natural plant colour. The colours of nature are all around us: plants, flowers, animals, the sky; but it’s notoriously difficult to get those colours onto anything without a lot of time, effort and elaborate processing that may or may not include poisoning everything around you.

I realise that coming up with a half decent natural colour palette is going to require a bit more knowledge than tea-dying t-shirt’s by flinging a couple of teabags in hot water – which was a lot of fun when I was a kid and easier than trying not to stain my mum’s counter tops with those very difficult to get into little Dylon pots…

From a commercial point of view vegetable dyes can be tricky. It’s difficult to replicate colours – the same recipe will produce different colours depending on the water temperature; chemicals in the dye water (like chlorine); or changes in the dye plant material due to different growing conditions etc. Given this difficulty I’m not really surprised that the majority of people working with dyes and colour have opted for much easier to control chemical dyes. You can replicate colour almost precisely, and they don’t run. It’s all very easy to use provided you have a good set of scales and a thermometer, and even the most rudimentary of dye houses in Nepal have these. Unfortunately, unless you also have the facilities to deal with the effluent from the dyes, you will poison your own and your neighbours’ water. And even if you do have proper drainage you’ll be poisoning the rivers and the sea.

We first looked at using the usual ‘azo free’ dyes that everyone else uses, thinking that ‘azo free’ meant they weren’t really bad. We even made up a nice palette of colours and started thinking of getting the recipes made up – I have to say the azo free dye guys are a really helpful bunch. Sense prevailed when we realised that although they might be free of ’azo’s’, they’re not free of the other chemicals that poison the water (rivers, sea, water table – or all of the above). On a visit to Nepal recently we went to see for ourselves the disaster that is the synthetic dye industry in a country like Nepal, which has no infrastructure to deal with the toxic effluence, and therefore no way to protect the ground or water from being poisoned (more on this later). We were chatting in the office (more a shed than the whitewashed, furnished room that possibly sprang to mind at the word ‘office’.) when we noticed rows of jars all full of barks and flowers, so we asked about their vegetable dying. It turns out they don’t really do much vegetable dying any more as none of their buyers want to use them, but they were willing to pull out the old recipes and send us a few samples.

It took 6 months, but Kathmandu dye house sent us 144 colour swatches of natural colour, and we were quite beside ourselves with excitement. Closer inspection reveals there are a few blues, greens and reds, but 70% of the colours are variations on yellow and brown. They’re using an impressive list of natural ingredients (some of them admittedly poisonous), and I feel upbeat about us being able to all work together to get a good range of colours – I’m aiming for 200.

A fortnight of internet research and night time reading has turned up a few saddening facts: many of those lovely colours some people are getting from vegetable dyes aren’t always permanent and fade quickly (turmeric for example); many cannot be fixed and bleed; and some are actually poisonous and should be avoided. That’s just the dyes. As for mordents, if we use all the available mordents we could probably get a good range of nice bright colours, but given that they are mostly also poisonous they are best avoided.

So, with the mountain of knowledge that I was going to have to somehow acquire looming before me, I was relieved to meet Carla, our new dye friend, at the Eden Project when we joined an Oxford Alumni event. As Tim Smit said we‘d halved the average age at the event single handedly, and whilst the others were discussing the pro‘s and con‘s of chickweed, we escaped to the bio domes. Like all the best meetings, this one was unplanned and happened coincidentally whilst rambling around the garden. I learned more from her in 2 hours than I did from that fortnight of internet reading. It’s good to be reminded that the internet isn’t an expert in anything other than downloading web pages. Expertise comes from people.

She sent me home with some homework:
Send her all my samples and the table of ingredients the dye house has used.
Check what water they’re using. Using Kathmandu ground water for the dying as this might be causing the dominance of dull brown (the water in Kathmandu is full of iron, which is sometimes filtered with makeshift sandstone filters – makeshift as in a bucket with holes filled with sandstone rocks)

Ah, so relaxing to just follow orders… If you’re starting your own business I can recommend paying the occasional consultant.