if you've been following us for a while you know how dedicated we are to sustainability
and improving the fashion industry's standards. From our dyeing processes
that use seven times less water than the average clothing manufacturer;
to our solar powered cutting floors. Today i'm at Kornit's Customer Experience Center to get
an inside look at the sustainability efforts in print on demand and direct to garment printing.
Hey everyone, i'm Wes Tate with BELLA+CANVAS. Kornit Digital is a company that also sees the
importance of sustainability. Kornit is one of the largest digital printer companies in the world.
They are innovating and changing the way we print and think about apparel decoration.
Let's sit down with them to learn more about the initiatives that they're behind.
Mike, thank you so much for having us here today. Can you tell us a little bit about your
job here. Yeah at Kornit Digital i'm an account manager and i'm responsible for
some of our strategic accounts and some of our strategic partnerships, like with BELLA+CANVAS.
Excellent, well i'm excited to be here and to learn more about your sustainability efforts.
As you know, sustainability is really important to BELLA+CANVAS and we know it's important to Kornit;
so can you start off by just telling us some of the problems that we're facing in the fashion
industry right now and what you're doing to fix those? Yeah so traditional supply chains,
producing overseas, requires really long lead times, which makes you have to kind
of guess how much you're going to need to produce. And the result of that is about 30%
of garments that are created never get sold so they end up in landfills. Which just
creates, you know, terrible waste. Yeah, that's a pretty shocking number that that much ends up in
landfills. And you always see stuff on clearance sections in stores and you don't think about,
you know, what doesn't get sold and where does it go. And the apparel industry is very necessary
industry but it's also a very wasteful industry. About 20% of global water waste is due to the
textile industry. Tons of water gets wasted right literally millions of liters of water
get wasted every single year and it doesn't have to be that way. Our vision at Kornit is
to have sustainable on-demand fashion so brands could produce what they need.
Once they sell it, it gets produced. Tell me about this latest report that just came out.
Yeah we just released our impact report which covers our environmental social and governance
initiatives. We're just being very transparent about what we're doing to transform the industry
be more eco-friendly and move textiles to a more sustainable way of producing. Let's
talk about print on demand for a second. It's a newer thing that's out there; a lot of people
are still researching to learn about print on demand. Can you just tell us what that is and
the sustainability efforts there or how those two relate to each other? Yeah sustainability
really kind of lends itself to print on demand because especially now with so many people wanting
customized or personalized apparel, print on demand allows people to get exactly what they want
without all the waste. Kornit technology literally allows our customers to
produce the shirts that they have already sold. So if you're on the internet, on social media,
you see a shirt that you like you buy it. Our technology allows brands to produce that shirt
once you've bought it. Now let's dive a little bit into Kornit Digital and the
printers that you have and how those are kind of changing the game, how those themselves are
helping everything become more sustainable. Yeah, well first off, our printers only use water-based
inks. Which is a much more sustainable way than plastisols are. What you would have to use for
a lot of analog screen printing, our systems use zero water. They have humidifiers but
there's no water required to rinse screens or clean print heads or anything like that. Tell
me a little bit more about your the new printer that you're just coming out with and kind of
the new initiatives that you're doing with that. Yeah the Atlas Max is our latest system and it's
actually carbon neutral because every system that we produce we plant trees to offset that.
How does energy usage tie into these printers? Our systems are really energy efficient
they don't require some of the extra steps that you'll see with other DTG printers where you've
got to lay down some pre-treatment and then flash dry that and then put ink on that on top of the
pre-treatment. With Kornit our fixation happens in line so we're actually laying down fixation
and then laying down ink all at the same time which really reduces the energy impact. Thank
you for sharing all this information with us today about Kornit. If someone's watching this
video and they're wanting to take their business or their efforts in the step of sustainability,
what advice do you have to give them? Yeah if you're currently a screen printer or you're a
brand that's looking to be more eco-friendly, have less of an impact on the environment,
you should really consider digital printing. For all the reasons that we've already talked about
but you're going to have a far lower impact on the environment using digital technology than analog.
Thanks for staying tuned to this video. Thank you again for Mike and Kornit for having us here
at their facility. If you'd like more information on the sustainability efforts on BELLA+CANVAS and
Kornit, there'll be links in the description below. If you like this video go ahead and
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