16/04/2026
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A group of 369 Colombian women artisans in Boyacá, Cundinamarca, and Santander now use coca leaf flour as a natural textile dye through Tinta Dulce, a circular economy project that Bogotá designers Daniela Rubio and Mónica Suárez founded in 2021 in El Tambo, Cauca, converting the country’s most stigmatized crop into a legal industrial input that more than doubles the commercial value of handcrafted pieces sold on both domestic and international markets.
Colombia cultivates more than 253,000 hectares of coca annually, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, making it the world’s largest producer and giving the plant a presence in regions where artisan communities have worked with natural fibers for generations. Tinta Dulce takes that proximity and turns it into a circular economy argument, treating coca leaf as a raw material available in abundance rather than as a problem to be eradicated.
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