Is Your Tshirt Murdering The Earth?

If your tshirt isn’t organic, it might be. Most people don’t pay too much attention to America’s most popular fabric, tshirts are our business though, so we’re not most people. We started researching organic options for our garment decoration in 2000. Back then, green was still the realm of the hippies, so major manufacturers were pretty much ignoring organic cotton. Only smaller boutique manufacturers were producing the garments, and while we were all for supporting those smaller outfits, our clients weren’t too hot on paying the (dramatically) increased cost for environmentally sustainable t-shirts.

According to the World Wildlife Fund (at panda.org):

“The current production of cotton is not only environmentally unsustainable, it undermines the necessary conditions for future cotton production.”

Because the cotton plant is especially susceptible to insect infestations, conventional cotton production uses large quantities of highly toxic pesticides. Conventionally grown cotton is very pesticide intensive, consuming up to 25% of the world’s pesticides while only taking up 3% of the earth’s farmland. The chemicals used are very toxic, rendering the farmland unusable after several harvests if they are not rotated with alternate crops on a regular basis.

According to HAE NOW, a producer of organic cotton garments:

“A year 2000 USDA study revealed that eighty-four million pounds of pesticides were sprayed on cotton in the U.S.A, ranking it second behind corn. Some of these toxic chemicals include the infamous defoliant Paraquat and insecticides like Parathion which is 60 times more toxic that DDT! In fact, the EPA considers 7 of the top 15 pesticides used on cotton as “likely” or “known” human carcinogens.”

In addition to the environmental benefits of using organic cotton, there are quality implications too. The shirts we chose to use for ShirtsForBands.com clients are a very clean knit garment, they are comfortably tapered, and overall a very high quality product. We’re in love with them, they line our own closets. The knit of the fabric is very tight and nice, and the collars are seamless. Killer tshirts.

I’m wearing one now.

Normally organic tshirts are more costly than regular shirts, but ShirtsForBands.com has changed that equation by removing the unsustainable industry standard Gildan 2000 from its screen printed product offerings and replacing them with Anvil Organic Tees at the same price. Starting at $5! We’re all pretty stoked about it.

Check out the 100% organic cotton tee option under screen printed apparel in our design lab!

Tags: custom printed tshirts, custom tees, ecological alternatives, environmentally friendly, green t-shirts, organic, screen printing, screenprinting, sustainability, tshirts

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 10:22 pmand is filed under Custom Tshirts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.