The colour black is everywhere. From our phones to our cars to the ink in our pens. But black has a dark side. Every black thing you own is likely to contain carbon black – a pigment derived from petroleum. The way carbon black is made isn’t sustainable. Vast tracts of land called tar sands are stripped of all life and vegetation to extract the heavy petroleum, while the production process creates significant greenhouse gases.

So we’re on a search for the new black. And our aim is to reinvent the way in which the colour itself is made using black algae. You don’t have to dig up the Earth to find black algae. It grows in ponds using sunlight and carbon dioxide. Not only does algae generate more than half the oxygen on Earth, but once it becomes part of these sweatpants, it captures and stores the carbon it used as its fuel for the next 100 years.