A few years ago, we looked at the production chain of a printed t-shirt and separated its impact into 3 categories:

• Where the shirts were made
• What the shirts were made of
• How they were printed

We’re always striving to push the envelope of sustainability with each of these impacts. But addressing every one certainly gets expensive, so we always encourage our customers to address what they can afford, and push to continuously improve the footprint of their shirts.

For over a year now, TSD has been committed to only processing orders that meet at least one of the following criteria:

• Made in the US
• Made out of a sustainable fiber
• Printed with low-impact water-based or other PVC/phthalate-free inks

We’re not in this to be the only sustainability-minded printer. We want to raise the bar in our industry, and the best way to do that in a capitalist society is demand. If you’re buying t-shirts, whether you buy from TSD or not, consider committing to a process of continuous improvement for your products. The more demand for a more sustainable product, the more the industry will convert to a more sustainable model.

The REHANCE process is a more environmentally-friendly, higher quality alternative to traditional t-shirt printing methods. Before explaining how REHANCE works, it would be helpful to review how the vast majority of textile printing is accomplished.

Traditional Printing

There are two main formats of screenprinting ink – plastisol and waterbased. A typical screenprinter will take a dyed shirt (which is to say, a shirt that is already a color) and print it with plastisol inks. Plastisol inks are all-around nasty. They create a surface coating on the shirt that feels like plastic (surprise!) leaving the fabric covered with an uncomfortable, rubbery print that will eventually crack and peel off the shirt.

These inks also almost always contain PVC and phthalates; the former emits dioxins (a very potent environmental toxin/pollutant) during manufacture/disposal and the latter are known to cause various negative health effects.

Waterbased inks, on the other hand, soak into and become part of the shirt. They are more permanent, will never crack, peel, or fade, and leave the fabric completely breathable. They also contain no PVC or phthalates.

So why is most printing performed with plastisol over waterbased inks? Because in order to print a light color on a dark shirt, a surface coating must be used.

Analogously, consider watercolor paint vs. latex paint. If you have a black piece of paper and try to paint a light blue watercolor paint on it, the result is less than impressive. The paint will soak into the paper, but since the paint is translucent and does not sit on top of the paper, no color is perceived.

On the other hand, if you paint that piece of paper with latex paint, a paint that is opaque and will sit on the surface of the paper, the color will be bright and vibrant. But you’ll also be able to feel that surface coating, and could chip it away with your fingernail if you tried. This is essentially the same difference between waterbased and plastisol inks.

So while waterbased inks feel better and are more environmentally-friendly, they don’t work well on color shirts. On the other hand, plastisol is less comfortable and harsher to the environment, but easier to work with and more versatile.

REHANCE is the solution to this problem.

The Solution

The REHANCE process utilizes a specially-formulated waterbased ink that resists dye, which means we must print white shirts and then dye them a color (rather than printing on a shirt that is already a color).

Using our example above, we would take white shirts, print them with the REHANCE chemistry, and then garment dye the shirts black. The printed ink will essentially ‘seal’ the area it’s printed on and prevent the color from dyeing or staining that area. As a result, a white print is visible on the shirt. However, this white print is not a surface coating – it is simply the lack of black dye.

Think of it as using painters tape before painting a wall. Tape over the area you don’t want to paint, then peel the tape off afterward and voila! No color. REHANCE essentially works the same way, except there’s nothing to peel off afterward.

The Specifics

Reactive dyes chemically attach to cellulosic compounds (e.g. cotton) on the molecular level by creating a covalent bond between the dye molecule and the hydroxyl groups of the cellulose molecule. On the wild off-chance that you have no idea what that means, I’ll explain in a bit more detail.

When I say “hydroxyl groups,” I’m referring to a single oxygen atom bonded to a single hydrogen atom. In the diagram below of a cotton molecule, the hydroxyl groups are everywhere you see OH.

During the dye process, reactive dyes will bond to these hydroxyl groups to create a permanent color on the shirt. The chemist who developed REHANCE refers to these hydroxyl groups as “dye sites.” The REHANCE chemistry bonds to those hydroxyl groups before the dyes have a chance to. Take away the dye sites in a printed pattern, and no color will bond to the areas printed.

Even Better

So what I’ve just described allows us to achieve a white print on a dark shirt without using a surface coating. But what if I want, say, a light blue print on a dark shirt? Never fear! The REHANCE chemistry can be printed over a waterbased ink to protect that ink from the color the shirt will eventually be dyed. So first: print ink color, second: print REHANCE over ink color. From there, it works exactly the same way as described above, except that the fabric has an ink printed on it before the REHANCE chemistry bonds to the dye sites.

If you’re asking yourself “How can ink be printed in the same place as the REHANCE chemistry and they don’t conflict with each other?” then worry not, for I will make all things clear. Inks, unlike dyes, are affixed to cotton in a completely different way. Normal inks do not bind to hydroxyl groups, so there is no conflict among the inks and REHANCE chemistry for dye sites.

Advantages

No PVC; no phthalates; no cracking, fading, or peeling; no petroleum products; no rubbery, sticky print across your chest. Just a completely breathable, permanent, colorful print. You could even iron the shirt if you were so inclined (though why anyone would iron a t-shirt is beyond me).

It’s also worth noting that REHANCE printing leaves less stuff on the shirt in general. REHANCE works by stopping stuff from being put on the shirt, whereas plastisol printing adds stuff (ink) on top of the shirt to cover up even more stuff (dye).

Not Discharge

For those familiar with textile printing, it’s important to know that REHANCE is not discharge. Discharge works by taking an already-dyed shirt and printing zinc formaldehyde sulfoxylate to blast that dye out of the shirt. Rather than our method, which prevents dye from bonding to the shirt in the first place, discharge uses harsh chemicals to eliminate the color after it’s already affixed to the cotton.

Learn More

REHANCE is the technology that allows us to stop dye from sticking to fabric in a targeted manner. To learn more about the waterbased inks we use to print the design colors, check out this page.

We’ve had several conversations with potential customers lately who prefer to do business with the screenprinter in their town because that printer is local.

While we’re all about local business, the problem is that the vast majority of local printers just perform the last step locally. The cotton of the shirts they print may have been grown and ginned in the US, but chances are that all the other steps of the process – spinning, knitting, finishing, cutting, and sewing – were all done overseas.

Take, for instance, an organization that needs shirts in Asheville (about 200 miles west of us). There are t-shirt printers located in Asheville, all of whom are 200 miles closer to the customer than we are, but the best case scenario is that these printers are using American Apparel shirts. AA shirts are made in LA, which means they travel over 2,300 miles to reach the printer (not to mention AA shirts use Pakistani cotton).

That’s roughly analogous to driving down to your local Wendy’s for a nice local burger. Sure it was cooked locally, but the beef and other ingredients came from who-knows-where.

Our Cotton of the Carolinas t-shirts are made, dirt to shirt, right here in North Carolina. While we might be 200 miles away from that customer in Asheville, the shirts travel fewer than 750 miles in their journey from farm to printed product. Tack on the 200 miles from Burlington to Asheville, and you still have a product that’s traveled less than half as much as the best possible product from an Asheville printer.

And our shirts help support over 700 NC jobs in the process. That local printer might employ 5 people in Asheville, but its shirts are grown, ginned, and spun over 7,000 miles away and knit, finished, cut, and sewn over 2,000 miles away. CotC shirts are farmed, ginned, spun, knit, finished, cut, sewn, printed, and dyed within 300 miles of Asheville.

In fact, if you’re located within 500 miles of TS Designs, you would be hard-pressed to find a lower transportation footprint or greater nearby job impact in a shirt from any of your local printers.

This isn’t to say that these local printers are doing anything wrong; most don’t have the resources or connections to custom-make their own locally-produced apparel lines. And the fact is, there are a lot of people out there who don’t give a lick about whether a t-shirt travels 200 or 20,000 miles. But if you’re in the Southeast and low transportation footprint and local jobs are important to you, look no further than TS Designs and Cotton of the Carolinas for your custom printed t-shirts.

In May, Eric Henry, along with t-shirt maker Brian Morrell and cotton farmer Ronnie Burleson, gave a presentation on Cotton of the Carolinas.

The presentation was held at the BALLE Conference (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) in Charleston, SC to an audience of over 300 owners and leaders of businesses all promoting locally-sourced products and services.

Here’s the video of the highlights of the presentation. Stay tuned for the full version coming soon!

Thanks to BALLE for the opportunity to talk about how Cotton of the Carolinas is challenging the status quo in the apparel industry.

Thanks also to Hungry Mind Recordings for the original video footage of the presentation! Other recordings from the conference are available on their website.

The Harvest ‘09 Tour was a great success! Thanks to everyone who came out to see Ronnie’s farm and hear about our plan to bring consumers back to the farmer of their clothing and everyone in-between.

Check out this video by the NC farm bureau to see a bit of footage of the tour; we have our own video on its way!

THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED
TS Designs is looking for a full-time sales rep for custom print t-shirts to expand its customer-base. The position will be mostly in-house, with occasional travel.
Requirements:
• At least 4 years sales experience
• Experience with a Green organization
• Ability to multi-task and prioritize work with minimal supervision
• Ability to structure customer desires within the framework [...]

TS Designs is proud to help sponsor Vote for Land 2009, a $3000 grant program put together by our friends over at Great Outdoor Provisions to aid in the protection of the lands, water, and wildlife of North Carolina.

This year’s winner is the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust. Coastal Land Trust works with the state and other organizations to permanently protect Masonboro Island, the largest undisturbed barrier island along the southern part of North Carolina’s coast and host to a vast array of wildlife.

Wes Morgan of Rolling Hills Gin was kind enough to send us some early photos of the Cotton of the Carolinas Harvest ‘09 up-and-coming crop. The photos were taken at Ronnie Burleson’s (Wes’ uncle) farm over in Richfield, NC.

According to Wes, so far this year’s crop is right on track. Now we just need a hot damp summer, which in North Carolina is a pretty good bet!

Great Outdoor Provisions, a Raleigh-based outdoor clothing and equipment retailer and long-time sustainability partner of TS Designs, is now offering Cotton of the Carolinas t-shirts in all of their retail outlets. To see GOP’s own blog post about this exciting new offering, click here.

If you’re in the area, drop by one of Great Outdoor’s several NC locations and pick up a 100% local t-shirt today!

On March 24th, TSD was honored by Apparel Magazine as one of five Sustainability All-Stars at its Tech Conference West in Irvine, CA. The winners were chosen based upon having taken significant steps toward incorporating sustainable best practices in their businesses.

TSD won this honor alongside sustainability innovators American Apparel, Greensource, Levi Strauss, and Patagonia.