The dyeing and finishing step represents a clear hotspot in the textile supply chain as the wet processing stages require significant amounts of water, energy, and chemicals. In order to tackle environmental issues, natural dyes are gaining attention from researchers as more sustainable alternatives to synthetic ones. This review discusses the topic of natural dyes, providing a description of their main features and differences compared to synthetic dyes, and encompasses a summary of recent research in the field of natural dyes with specific reference to the following areas of sustainable innovation: extraction techniques, the preparation of substrates, the mordanting process, and the dyeing process. The literature review showed that promising new technologies and techniques have been successfully employed to improve the performance and sustainability of natural dyeing processes, but several limitations such as the poor fastness properties of natural dyes, their low affinity with textiles substrates, difficulties in the reproducibility of shades, as well as other factors such as cost-effectiveness considerations, still prevent industry from adopting natural dyes on a larger scale and will require further research in order to expand their use beyond niche applications.
Keywords: biomordants; dyeing process; mordanting; natural dyes; natural dyes extraction; textile.