A Nagoya trading company specializing in textiles has succeeded in avoiding the heavy environmental impact of chemical coloring agents, cutting the costs of producing natural dyeing agents, and reducing food waste -- all in one project.
Toyoshima & Co.'s Food Textile project uses otherwise-wasted pieces of vegetables to make dyeing agents and wares for clothing.
What prompted the company to begin the project was a remark by an employee of a major food producer. The employee told Yoshihiro Tanimura, 36, now the project leader at Toyoshima, "When we make precut vegetables, a large volume of unused pieces are disposed of."
At that time, textile trading companies were already going in search of new business fields, because clothing prices have been on the decline. The remark led to the idea of connecting totally different categories of products -- vegetables and textiles for clothing.
When dyeing substances are extracted from wasted vegetable pieces, "We already knew that the higher the nutritional values are in a vegetable, the deeper the color that can be extracted," Tanimura said.
A wide variety of foodstuffs, including old salted cherry flowers and unsaleable blueberries, can be used.
By controlling the pH (hydrogen-ion exponent) of the liquids, about 10 colors can be extracted from a single kind of food item.
Toysohima tied up with 15 other companies, including such major firms as Kewpie Corp., Kagome Co. and Tully's Coffee Japan Co., and began accepting some of their wasted foodstuffs.
The colors of natural dyeing agents are lost unless they are used in clothing just after the processing, so it's necessary to balance the inventories of both textiles and the dyeing agents, while seeking out new buyers at the same time.
At the moment, the volume of wasted foodstuffs that can be used for the dyeing agents is limited to about 300 kilograms a year. However, Tanimura said he's sensing a good response from the new business, which is an obvious benefit to the natural environment.
"I want to build supply networks while making this business more efficient. Even if technologies progress, human life is still dependent on the environment. I want to produce goods with which people can both coexist with nature and show its power at the same time," he said.
--Ethical consumption recommended
Sustainable development goals (SDGs) were adopted at a United Nations summit meeting in September 2015. The SDGs comprise 17 goals to achieve, such as the elimination of poverty and hunger, achieving high-quality education, and 169 practical measures for the goals.
The U.N. and its member countries aim to achieve the goals globally by 2030.
Among the SDGs, a realization of economic societies that do not result in the deterioration of environmental conditions and depletion of resources was proposed. Thus it became a task for each country to shift from mass consumption.
The government also established a promotion headquarters of the SDGs, and compiled implementation guidelines in which eight points, such as preservation of biodiversity, forests and the ocean, are priority tasks.
The "sustainable" part of the SDGs includes measures to eliminate poverty, eliminate inequality and reduce environmental pollution all over the world in all processes from production to consumption to disposal. To realize this, monitoring and improving efforts are necessary in not only manufacturing processes of goods but also raw materials.
Changes in consumerism are also required. Consumers need to adopt attitudes of choosing products based on standards of companies' actions on human rights and resolving poverty problems, and their responses to preservation of the natural environment.
This stance is called ethical consumption, and Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency has promoted it since 2015.
However, information about raw materials, production sites and production methods for implementing the ethical consumption has not been sufficiently available.
Arisa Kamada, an ethical fashion planner who promotes this way of life, said: "The first step of ethical consumption is to stop buying and consuming products without awareness. After collecting information about products, let's acquire skills to choose products which match your ethical values, such as goods respecting cultures of local communities or those which can be used for long."
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