WE ARE ALL (OR ALMOST OF ALL) AWARE THAT THE TEXTILE SECTOR POLLUTES. A LOT.
Recent statistics from the World Bank estimate that the fashion industry is responsible for around 20% of all water pollution, a pollution mainly due to dyeing and finishing treatments.
Let’s go with the data: every year in the world, the textile sector uses nine trillion liters of water, of which six for the coloring process alone, and uses a total of over 8000 chemicals. Making a simple t-shirt requires over 2500 liters of water and a quantity of chemicals that can vary from 10 to 100% of the weight of the fabric itself. With such data, how is it possible to talk about sustainable fashion?
Matter of fact, depending on the fabric and pigment used, the bleaching and dyeing processes can use a quantity of water 50 times higher than the dye itself. Furthermore, following dyeing, about 10-40% of dyes and chemicals, including heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury and chromium, are released into the environment.
As of today, a zero environmental impact coloring process does not exist but a minimum level of environmental impact can be achieved by not dyeing the fabrics. And here is the point from where talking about sustainable fashion starts to make sense.
So what are we going to do at SEAY?
1. To stop producing from tomorrow (2022, October 1st) white organic cotton t-shirt. We will start to use only the natural white of the cotton before being dyed. This solution allows us to offer (almost) white organic cotton t-shirts with (almost) zero impact.
2. To proceed as quickly as possible with the tests of use of natural vegetable dyes which still require synthetic fixatives to remain “solid” over time but completely replace the use of chemical dyes that are highly harmful to the environment. Thanks to one of our production partners we are in fact already testing the colors coming from 100% vegetable pigments for all our future organic cotton garments (t-shirts and sweatshirts).
3. And for synthetics items? We are still working on it but slowly you will see that …
In any case, you have now discovered why your white SEAY t-shirt will be less white than you expected… with all due respect to the 70s commercials when white was so white it couldn’t be whiter, but there was no commitment at all towards sustainable fashion.
