Painting With Pollution

John Sabraw makes swirling, rainbow-hued paintings—but he doesn’t use ordinary paints. His paints come from polluted rivers. Sabraw is an art professor at Ohio University. He learned that drainage from now-closed coal mines had polluted many waterways in Ohio. The streams and rivers look orange because they’ve been contaminated with iron oxide—the same chemical used as a pigment in many paints to give them their color.

Sabraw teamed up with Guy Riefler, an engineer who created a process to remove iron from polluted water. Riefler dries and heats the compound to produce a range of colors—like orange, burgundy, and violet—that can be safely used to make paints. Now, the environmental group Rural Action is building a water-treatment facility based on Riefler’s method. It will clean up a local creek and turn its pollution into paints called True Pigments. “This new technology takes something that was just considered a problem and turns it into a solution,” says Sabraw.