Eric Henry and Tom Sineath with one of the newest additions to TS Designs

(From Eric Henry, TS Designs president)

I have been talking about getting chickens at TS Designs for over a year, well on April 5th we got 7 of them. Why chickens at a company that prints t-shirts? A couple of things I have learned on journey to be a more sustainable company, there is no clear path to get there and you have to be the one to take the lead if you want to see positive change. We started growing veggies at TS Designs a couple of years ago to give our employees access to local, healthy food, inexpensively. One of the negatives you hear about the local, organic food movement, is that it is only for the higher income folks. We think company gardens can help fill that gap by giving employees access to this food. We are able to take advantage of the space that most companies plant grass on and spend the summer mowing. I have found that chickens can be a key to successful gardening and a very cheap source of protein, via eggs, for our employees.

Chickens give back to the soil what the plants take out. We have created a chicken area inside the garden area. We picked a couple of rows that we are not planning to plant in the next 6-12 weeks and use a solar powered electric fence to keep the chickens out of the rest of the garden. While the chickens are in these rows they scratch and peck out bugs and worms, which aerates the soil along with depositing some great fertilizer. I am excited about testing out using our organic cotton scraps as the nesting material. We just redesigned the compost pile that is set right outside of the garden. I am hoping the chicken manure will help break down the cotton scraps faster, which will come back into the garden as great compost. So next time you are in the area to buy some of our great t-shirts walk around the corner of our building and introduce yourself to our 7 latest TS employees.

Here at TS Designs, we are currently working on a project with Dow Corning to test their silicone inks in automatic printing. We at TS Designs want to support anyone who is interested in developing more environmentally friendly products and we’re excited to contribute to the development of a cutting-edge environmentally-friendly printing technology. We are interested in anything with an environmental story and Dow Corning came to us because they knew we would have an open mind. The silicone inks have similar properties to plastisol inks, but they are a much more environmentally friendly option because they do not contain PVCs or phthalates (both of which have harmful effects when they are washed into the water supply and become a part of the ecosystem).

Dow Corning, a multinational corporation specializing in silicone-based technologies came to us because of our close proximity to their location in Greensboro, NC, as well as our environmental interests. We rented them the equipment in our facility as well a production employee so that they could test the inks in a multi print, production environment.

So far, they have completed one day of trials, and we anticipate that there will be more to come in the future as they continue to develop their inks.

Here at TS Designs we are all about sustainability. We focus on sustainability in our product, our business practices, and our final impact on the environment. However, there is only so much we can do, the rest of the environmental choices are up to the consumer. In a 2007 report commissioned by the Danish EPA, an environmental assessment was conducted on six textile products—one of those was the cotton t-shirt.

The report concluded that it is the consumer of the product that ultimately has the greatest impact on the environment—first by choosing an organic product, and then by washing as little as possible, drip-drying, and not ironing.

So if you have ever wondered what you can do for the environment, you can make informed decisions on how you launder your t-shirts. Here at TS Designs, we recommend you wash your clothes with cold water using environmentally friendly detergents and line-dry. According to the study, the consumer can reduce primary energy consumption by 70 percent by not tumble-drying. It is also important to simply wash less. The study concluded that by halving the amount of times you wash your t-shirt increases the life of the t-shirt by 50%.

If you want to reduce your impact, wear your t-shirt more than once before washing it and limit your use of your clothes dryer. Eric Henry, president of TS Designs said, “We are making a sustainable product, but the consumer in the long run has the greatest influence on the impact to the environment on how they care and dispose of it.”

To read the full report, click here.

Want to see your design on a TS Designs shirt? Now you can! We are having a T-shirt design contest. There will be 3 winners, 1 for each of our different brands (tsdOrganic, tsdRecycled, or tsdCarolinas). The prize is $100 and your design on shirts all over the country. The deadline is Feb. 28.

Click here to find out more.