In our never-ending effort to expand our product line to fill the need for eco-friendly clothing options, we are in the final stages of preparing to launch some very new and cool products. We work very hard to make sure that all of our products meet certain eco and fair labor standards and that the suppliers with whom we form relationships with support our commitment to providing eco-friendly and fair labor clothing. We also like to demonstrate to the consumer that we take sustainability and fair labor seriously and that’s why we post our organic certificates and fair labor materials online. The new suppliers with whom we are building relationships with are also interested in transparency and have already provided us some of their certifications.

We’re even moving into some new eco-friendly fabrics besides organic cotton. Fabrics made of computer parts, plastic bottles, coconut shells, and hemp. As with all of our product, you can rest assured that everything is made of only sustainable fabrics and in fair labor workplaces in the U.S. and outside. We are also one of the few eco-friendly clothing companies using water-based inks. Conventional screen-printing inks contain PVC, a non-biodegradable plastic that sits on top of the shirt. Water-based inks are eco-friendly and actually go into the shirt and won’t crack or peel off like PVC-based inks.

If you are a retailer that would like to offer stylish, eco-friendly clothing in your store, please give us an email info(at)sattlerclothing.com

Local Boise-based TV Channel 6 featured Sattler Eco Clothing Monday as part of its bi-weekly “Green Living” segment. Michelle Stark and the Green Living team have some really cool resources on the site including videos about eco-friendly cleaning products, how to save gas lessons from the ‘hypermilers’, and how to clean with lemons. Here’s a link to their site

To read more and watch the video

What is all the hulla-baloo about, how can clothing be eco-friendly? For starters let’s talk about organically grown cotton. The growth of conventional cotton is a very chemical intensive process. Growers dump synthetic fertilizers and pesticides on the cotton – it is commonly accepted that it takes approx. 9oz. ( just over half a pound ) of pesticides to produce just one t-shirt. So a wardrobe of just 10 shirts and 4 jeans dumps just shy of approx. 10 lbs. of pesticides into the ground. As a company, we have prevented over 1,100 lbs of pesticides from being dumped into the ground in the last 9 months alone. And I probably wouldn’t have believed it if you told me – but organic cotton is noticeably softer and breathes better than conventional cotton. Put an organic cotton shirt in one hand and a regular shirt in the other and you’ll notice that the conventional shirt feels like it has some kind of a film on it. How do you know if it is eco-friendly organic cotton? – Look for the certifications. We post them right online but you’ll want to look for the cotton to CERTIFIED organic cotton rather than just organic cotton. You should be able to notice a difference between a certified organic cotton product and it’s conventional cotton counterpart.

What about the screen-printing?

We talked about PVC more in-depth in this post, but the large majority of shirts are embellished using PVC or plastisol inks. How can you tell if your shirt has PVC or plastisol on it? If the screenprint is sitting on top of the shirt, you can see the artwork cracking or peeling, or if you can feel it when you pass your hand over it - then it is PVC or plastisol. What’s so bad about PVC? Again, visit this post here for a more comprehensive explanation but in short PVC comes with a host of toxic additives such as DEHP that is linked to cancer and birth defects. During the production of PVC, Dioxins, one of the most toxic chemicals and potent carcinogens known to science, are released into the air. It is estimated the U.S. screen-printing industry alone uses an estimated 1.5 million gallons of plastisol every year. Ironically, many companies take a shirt made of eco-friendly organic cotton and then put PVC-based inks on it. Sattler Clothing uses only water-based inks for all of our products as well as the custom work that we do.

What about Fair Labor Clothing?

In February of this year Megha Bahree wrote an excellent article in Forbes magazine portraying the reality of child labor today. Please note that this article was written less than 5 months ago, it is not old news. Child labor and unfair labor did not end with the Nike fiasco we still talk about today. According to the article, the government of India estimates that there are 12.6 million children under the age of 14 illegally employed in India.

Cottonseed farmer Talari Babu, who insists that he no longer employs children, told reporters that children make great employees because “They worked fast, much faster than the adults, and put in longer hours and didn’t demand long breaks. Plus, I could shout at them and beat or threaten them if need be to get more work out of them.’ He could also tempt them with candy and cookies and movies at night.”

Pesticides and child labor make for a bad combo. The Forbes magazine article continues -

“Their (the child laborers) bodies are no better at withstanding the poisons. At least once a week, says Davuluri Venkateshwarlu, head of Glocal, farmers spray the fields with pesticides like Nuvacron, banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and endosulfan, methomyl and Metasystox, considered by the EPA to be highly toxic. Venkateshwarlu ticks off the effects of overexposure: diarrhea, nausea, difficulty in breathing, convulsions, headaches and depression.”

There are organizations out there, like the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production (WRAP) that can certify that a facility adheres to ethical standards of employment. WRAP certifies Sattler Clothing and we post their certifying book online so you know exactly what it means to be WRAP certified.

What about other eco-friendly fabrics like hemp and bamboo?

As we’ve mentioned before, like here, and here, we don’t sell any bamboo clothing products because of the chemical intensive process of converting bamboo to a textile. Read more about bamboo clothing here. We discovered a little while back that Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard feels the same way. Hemp can make some great products. If we could find some hemp products that could provide us with organic and fair labor certifications than we would consider introducing it into our eco-clothing product lineup. Until then we will continue trying to provide eco-friendly style for the masses with products that are certified organic cotton and fair labor.

Sattler Eco & Fair Labor Clothing

http://www.sattlerclothing.com

Bamboo Clothing.

One month after we launched Sattler Eco-Clothing we posted our take on the good, bad, and ugly of using bamboo to make clothing or any other textile for that matter. Though bamboo has many great characteristics as a clothing product the process to turn it into a textile is very chemically intensive. We spent a very long time researching our supply chain to determine what products we would sell and where we would source the clothing. We wanted a very holistic understanding of any product we would provide and use only certified organic cotton and fair labor clothing that we knew was eco-friendly. When we were introduced to bamboo, as excited as we were, our research indicated that the process to turn bamboo into a clothing is actually very chemical intensive and for that reason we chose to not sell any bamboo clothing. A few months later we found out that we had come to the same conclusion as a guy named Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia. (Read it)

Now that is not to say that bamboo is evil. In late January we wrote about some of the very cool eco-friendly building materials out there and bamboo was one of them. In particular we talk about what the guys over at Smith & Fong are doing with bamboo – flooring, paneling, cupboards and plywood. Another local company, Sustainabuilt, makes some beautiful custom furniture out of bamboo and was actually the first company to take the Sattler Green Pledge and outfit his team with Sattler eco-friendly apparel.

We also did a little piece about a bamboo umbrella a few weeks back. So, that just goes to show that we are not bamboo-haters. As we’ve mentioned, we will not follow eco-trends but rather we’ll take a very holistic approach to try to understand every step of the birth of the textile and product before we put it on the shelf.

“But my bamboo item is such and such certified” - for more info about varying bamboo clothing certifications and more general info on bamboo clothing read here. To see everything we ever said about bamboo type in “bamboo” in the search box at the top.

Eco-Friendly & Fair Labor Clothing
http://www.sattlerclothing.com

According to the annually released National Technology Readiness Survey (NTRS), “Americans’ appetite for environmentally friendly technologies and consumer products is grossly underserved, with a potential $104 billion in sales this year. The annual survey — sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and technology research firm Rockbridge Associates Inc. — found that 71 percent of adults are interested in green technology, but there is a large gap between the number of products consumers own now and the number they say they would like to own.

The $104 billion market opportunity represents the annual sales potential of the 11 product categories measured in the NTRS. More than half, $54 billion, is the potential for sales of eco-friendly vehicles, including high-mileage, hybrid fuel, biofuel, and alternative-fuel vehicles. Researchers measured respondents’ interest levels for each of the eco-friendly product categories and calculated market value based on average selling prices.

“The key to tapping this huge potential market is targeting and appropriately addressing the green consumer,” said P.K. Kannan, director of the Center for Excellence in Service. “Our research found that green technology trends are led by a small, yet powerful group of influencers that actively act as evangelists to a secondary group of adopters.”

The NTRS classifies respondents into six segments based on their commitment to green technologies, their influence on others on being green, their skepticisms about green and their interest in technology. The survey finds that those most committed to the environment — 10 percent of adult consumers — are also very enthusiastic about technology. These “green tech leaders” are the same consumers who are often approached by others for advice on technology and the latest gadgets and devices. The researchers urge marketers to target this segment when introducing green products and services.

“There is a great opportunity for firms to not only target these green tech leaders to adopt their eco-friendly products and services, but also use them to get the word out,” Kannan said. “This market segment tends to be younger, heavier users of online social media and more enthusiastic about technology in general. They write blogs and advise others, and they also create a strong social networking effect that is critical for diffusing green technology to the larger market.”

“Marketers also need to be mindful of their message,” said Charles Colby, president of Rockbridge Associates. “Consumers are quite sensitive to companies that don’t follow through on their promises. Firms that misrepresent or exaggerate the benefits of their eco-friendly technology may find it backfires with consumer hostility or rejection.”

2007 NTRS Findings

- 83 percent of adults want to preserve and protect the environment

- 42 percent of adults said products and services that help the environment are hard to find

- 59 percent of adults say they like trying new technologies that help the environment

- 56 percent of adults say gadgets designed to help the environment would be fun to own

- 68 percent of adults like to do business with companies that are environmentally responsible

- 72 percent of adults say they resent companies who say they care about the environment but are not sincere

Eco-Friendly & Fair Labor Clothing
http://www.sattlerclothing.com