Waste Stream Colour

A Reclaimed Spectrum 

London Pigment is pleased to announce its new core range, Waste Stream Colour. These pigments are produced through low-impact, electricity-free methods that rely entirely on slow, manual processes to ensure minimal environmental impact.

Each colour is created using hand-powered tools, including a mineral ore crusher and a rotary quern stone, making the range fully hand-made from start to finish. These machines are modern replicas of 19th century and Roman tools, in which their combined use is rare to be seen in modern pigment making practices. 

With thanks to the team at Heritage Crafts for supporting this work through the Endangered Craft Fund (2024)

The Raw Materials

Construction, demolition, and excavation (CD&E) waste makes up around 62% of the UK’s total waste by tonnage and generates more waste than any other sector. In 2022, the UK produced 73.5 million tonnes of recycled or secondary aggregates, much of which came from construction, demolition, and excavation waste. 

Much of this consists of mineral-based materials such as bricks, concrete, slate, mortar, and stone — exactly the types of materials that can be reclaimed, processed, and transformed into stable, long-lasting pigments.

Although the sector has relatively high recycling rates for aggregates, vast amounts of valuable mineral waste still end up in low-grade reuse streams or landfill, especially broken bricks and slate, mortar fines, and other small, mixed fragments that are too irregular or contaminated for industrial recycling. These overlooked residues represent a significant material resource that often goes unused.

By using pigments from this range your work:

- Intervenes directly in one of the UK’s largest waste flows, reclaiming & revalueing debris that would otherwise be sent to landfill or aggregate fill.

- Honours the human labour and natural resources that went into producing the original brick or tile. 

- Makes use of, and gives meaning back to, the original actions that created these materials.

- Acknowledges the extractive processes of mining and quarrying, and how these activities altered and reshaped the landscape. 

- Highlights the material richness of waste, showing that colour, mineral structure and geological story remain intact even in broken, discarded forms.

- Demonstrates a circular approach, turning building waste into a creative resource rather than a disposal problem.

- Provides a low-energy alternative, since your pigments are made using human-powered, electricity-free processes rather than industrial crushing.

- Reconnects materials destined for waste with craft, creativity, and long-term artistic value.

- Re-examines our relationship to commercial supply chains and the Western capitalist, commodified systems within which we operate.

-Your work will consist of colours that are stable, non-toxic pigments with long permanence, working exclusively with artist-quality materials.

The Making Process: Powered by Human Touch

For all pigments in this collection, the following historical artisanal processes are enacted:

• Sorting & Grading: Raw material is carefully sorted and graded into colour collections. This often includes brushing to remove surface soil and impurities.

• Initial Size Reduction: Larger pieces are broken down using a mallet and pick into smaller fragments.

• Crushing: The material is fed through a crusher. This process may be repeated up to ten times, adjusting the crushing components each time to gradually reduce particle size.

• Grinding: Using a rotary quern stone, the material is ground by hand to achieve a finer consistency.

• Sieving: The ground material is sieved through various mesh sizes to produce particles of 60 mesh and above.

• Washing: Samples are washed to remove soluble impurities.

• Levigating: Using water, the finest particles are separated based on the relative density of the minerals. This process produces pigments with varied colour intensity and saturation.

If necessary I also use various weak acids, soap or glue solutions to clean & separate samples. 

Above image: Crushing- Initial particle reduction stages using mineral crusher.

Above image: Grinding- particle reduction stages using rotary quern stone. This quern stone was commissioned by London Pigment & made by master carver Nick Roberson.

Citing London Pigment in Your Work

Where possible, please acknowledge that you are using London Pigment waste-stream colours in your work. My artistic practice encompasses making pigments, painting, and teaching. While the process may seem simple, a great deal of care and labour goes into making these colours available for creatives. Thank you for recognising this work.

Why Waste-Stream Pigments?

I have been making pigments for creatives since 2018. Over the years, I have experimented extensively and learned a great deal about historical colours, pigments, techniques, cultural practices, and the indigenous and ancestral knowledge embedded in this craft.

I have offered a wide range of handmade colours created according to historical recipes, including mineral pigments derived from collected clays and lake pigments made from plant and insect dyes.

However, after long reflection, I decided to restrict my commercial pigment production (commissions & workshops still include limited amounts of these traditional materials) to waste-stream sourced raw materials.

I feel it is both an ethical and creative responsibility—to the craft and to our shared place in the world—to think imaginatively about the materials we use and how they are sourced.

A Personal Perspective

On a personal level, as a British woman of mixed heritage, primarily Celtic and Gaelic (English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish), with ancestry also from northwestern Germany, Czechia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Estonia, and Latvia, I make no claim to the soils beneath my feet. Although I continue to use natural ochres in my own practice, I aim to minimise the depletion of these sources by offering waste-stream pigments more widely as commercial products. While I feel a deep affinity for earth-derived ochres, I believe it is more respectful and responsible to work with materials that others have discarded, giving new life to what might otherwise overlooked & forgotten. Ultimately, the waste-stream pigments in this series are of the earth, and when we treat them as such—rather than dismissing them as waste—we can honour the many material lives they have already lived.

I hope you enjoy using them as much as I did making them for you. 

Warmly,

Lucy