It’s fairly common knowledge that white bed and bath linens are the easiest to care for. Mostly because when you stain your towel with makeup, or your furry friend decides to get sick in your bed (WHYYYY?), it only takes throwing them in the wash with a ton of bleach to bring them back to white. Except, for some reason, that stops working eventually. Blame it on life having no shortcuts ever, but white linens eventually stop taking the bleach and transform into some grimy shade of off-white until you feel totally unconfident displaying them in your home. But you don’t have to toss them (well, definitely don’t toss linens; donate them to a local animal shelter!). Naturally dyeing white linens is the most eco-friendly way to give your sheets and towels another chance, in a whole new hue to boot.
Even more earth friendly is the natural dye process that textile designer Maria Romero offers, for which she extracts the dye from food waste collected from local restaurants and gardens in Brooklyn, New York. Yes, food waste, like avocado pits saved by the restaurants La Superior and Cerveceria Havemeyer in Williamsburg (she gets around 300 per month, because guac), onion peels gathered from a local supermarket, and acorns she collected from oak trees in the area last fall.
