This fall, the Art Department of our local liberal arts college, Elon University, will be working to add an Eco-Art course to its repertoire. A small student research team, led by Professor Samantha DiRosa, aims to create a brand new curriculum set to be introduced in the 2011 spring semester. The class will be centered on the rapid rise in the sustainability movement and its emergent impact on the art world.

This isn’t a tree-hugging, crunchy granola meeting for the exclusive Birkenstock-donning population of the University’s campus. DiRosa and her team want to involve everyone, from the engineers to the biologists and from the sociologists to the journalists. The combination of scientific inquiry and artistic creativity opens up a brand new channel for discovery in both the arts and the sciences. Collaborating teams of students in this course will get a chance to critically address and resolve issues in our community with the implementation of their original sustainable artistic solutions.

Science geeks, meet the art freaks. Now go save the world.

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If you’re wondering who this new mystery contributor to the TS Designs Blog is, I’m Natalie Saragusa.  I’ve recently come on board to this amazing company as an intern for my senior year at Elon University.  People and the planet are two of my greatest passions in life.  I’ve been after this position for months now, and finally get to be a part of the company that can successfully incorporate both of those aspects into its business.  I am a digital art major at Elon, with a particular interest in printing, graphic design, and fashion.  Looks like I found the perfect niche here, huh?

I look forward to sharing TS Design’s amazing story and all that a more sustainable world has to offer with you, bloggers!  Stay tuned.

PEACE LOVE & T-SHIRTS,

Natalie

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.

Both Tom Sineath and Eric Henry here at TS Designs are committed to reconnecting their employees back to local food. It is better for them, their wallets, and the environment. TSD will be moving ahead with their community garden this year after a successful first year under the management of Glenn Kern. Glenn will be returning, but there will be a lot of changes for this season. This year, instead of volunteering, all employees will be required to work a half hour a week in the garden—they will be paid for their time, of course.

TSD lost the hoop house during a recent windstorm (see photo above), but that opened the door to bring in chickens. Ben Wright from Peacehaven Community Garden and Will Hooker, head of the Permaculture program at NC State, will help with the chicken endeavor. The plan is to start with about six chickens, which will be allowed to graze in the fallow rolls of the garden, contained in a fence, within the fenced garden.

Tom is working on updates to our greenhouse (see photo above), which should be complete by the end of January. After taking a refresher course at the fall conference of Carolina Farm Stewardship in Black Mountain, Eric is planning to dive into heirloom tomatoes this year. Partnering with Weston Monroe from Peacehaven, they will start the seeds next month in the greenhouse.

There will also be other changes in the garden this year, including improvements to the watering system, putting in individually controlled soaker hoses for each row. The deer fence will also be improved. Last year there were continuous issues with sections coming down, deer never got into the garden, but it is just a matter of time if the problem is not corrected. It should be a bumper crop at TSD this summer, come by and have lunch with us!

In an effort to help our customers differentiate Cotton of the Carolinas products from conventional shirts, we have created marketing materials for retailers selling CotC shirts. If you sell or distribute Cotton of the Carolinas shirts, please click on the links to download these materials and use them as you see fit.

This is a 8.5×11 sheet that profiles Ronnie, our cotton farmer.

This is a 1/3 page pamphlet that shows people how to track their shirt that can be cut into 3 pamphlets per page.

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.

Dr. Jack Martin recently completed his first semester class from Alamance Community College’s Green certificate program, the first in the state. The program focuses on “Alternative Energy Technology,” and trains students in concepts of environmental sustainability, renewable energy, and wind-solar-hydro power systems. Dr. Jack’s classes were taught in the large conference room at TS Designs.

Sheryl from Twisted Limb Paperworks converted some of our organic cotton scraps to paper. A combination of manila folder folders and the t-shirt scraps were used to create cards. The T-shirt scraps were in the Hollander beater for seven hours before they were broken down enough. Usually, her recycled paper is in this beater for only an hour. Twisted Limb Paperworks sustainably produces handmade 100% recycled paper. Below is a photo of a mold for the paper pulp.

The Downtown Burlington co-op grocery took several hundred pounds of scraps and packed them into the open side of a rolling partition wall, then covered the side with chicken wire to hold the scraps in. The wall is now sound absorbent, drastically improving the acoustic quality of the building.