Hey guys I'm summer with BELLA+CANVAS a few months ago we launched a video
taking you through some of the key things we do at Bella Canvas in order to
reduce our ecological footprint in today's video we're teaming up with Cole
from shirt agency to show you how you can take it one step further to stay eco
in every step of the t-shirt making process from the garment to the printing
to the packaging
most of the damage to the apparel industry has on the environment takes
place during the manufacturing process oftentimes you see manufacturers wasting
tons of fabric and water at Bella Canvas we recycle absolutely everything so no
excess fabric paper or plastic is sent to a landfill we also dye all of our
fabric in the US with the most efficient dye machines that only use three gallons
of water per pound of fabric the average manufacturer uses 20 gallons we also
only use eco-friendly dyes and all the water is run through a filtration system
that recycles any water used so you'll never find harmful runoff from any of
our dye factories
so one big step to make your shop a lot more eco-friendly is to switch from
plastisol inks to water-based inks water-based inks are gonna be able to
fully biodegrade whereas the plastisol inks are a PVC based ink so even though
they have been improved in the last decade or so they're still not going to
be nearly as eco-friendly so with plastisol all you're gonna have a print
that ultimately won't break down the same way that a water-based ink would
break down a water-based ink is just pigment going on to the cotton fabric
and so it's going to degrade just as quickly as the cotton will another major
step is to include a water filtration system for your shoot out booth a lot of
shops will have their water runoff go directly into the city sewer which
obviously is polluting far more than you need to
one good suggestion is to get a filtration system there at the end of
your shootout booth which will allow you to capture all those nasty particles so
a lot of people when they're cleaning are going to use a product like this
which is a cancer-causing aerosol not only is it bad for the environment but
it's also bad for your employees so I recommend going with green chemicals
they clean up just as well and it's possible for you to purchase them at
only a few cents more than the cheap stuff another option to offer your
clients is a recycled polymer so instead of using the cheapest poly mailer when
you're shipping individual shirts to clients what you can instead do is use
recycled based poly mailers these normally aren't a hundred percent
recycled but they're at least twenty-five percent recycled material
which is always better than nothing
so here at shirt agency to try to limit our impact we actually do not create
shared agency boxes we use the boxes that the shirts are shipped in with and
then we just simply re label and ship them back out this allows us to have
every single piece of cardboard be used and go to the final customer instead of
us just throwing them away another thing that we do is all misprints become rags
so that we don't purchase any rags for the shop everything is reused until it's
absolutely destroyed and then on top of that the city of LA is really good about
recycling so we actually have a recycling dumpster that's larger than
our normal trash and we found that about eighty-five percent of our waste can
actually be put into the recycling instead of being sent to a landfill I
think that customers are searching out different premium aspects to your print
shop aspiring to have higher standards for your shop it's going to attract the
right kind of customer if you want to learn more about our eco friendly
practices at Bella canvas be sure to click the video here we'd also love to
hear how you and your brand are taking measures to reduce your own ecological
footprint be sure to let us know below see you next week
Be Different.