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.

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.

The folks at Peacehaven Community Farm in Guilford County recently put in a yurt from Blue Ridge Yurts. They are testing the yurt to determine how to best use their land with as light an impact as possible. Some of the future uses for the yurt that they are considering include meeting or office spaces and storage uses.

Our friends at the Abundance Foundation recently completed their “Office of the Future,” a fossil fuel-free workspace. The office runs off of a 510 watt solar array, a 30 watt solar air heater, and they plan on putting in a solar air conditioner for the summer. It was made out of local materials and they also used soy spray insulation and low VOC paints. In the photo above, they are sporting their new red TS Designs shirts on a snowy afternoon in front of their office in Pittsboro, NC.

TS Designs is proud to invite you to the 1st Annual Piedmont Green Gala, an event organized to promote sustainable communities.  It will be held on October 4th from 8am to 6pm.
The focus of the event is to display methods and products that offer a low environmental footprint, including demonstrations of biofuels and wind and [...]