Better Thinking updates us on their
Quest to develop The Perfect T-Shirt

How happy can a colourful t-shirt make you? Tricky question, it depends on who you are and what you like. A better question might be how much happier can it be make you if it’s made in a environmentally considerate way? This month, we made it our mission to find out everything we possibly could about colouring a t-shirt. What’s surprising is that even though we still don’t know everything there is to know, we seem to be well on the way to uploading one of the most comprehensive documents on dyes and their environmental impacts onto the web.

We felt it important to research this issue because the negative impacts of dyeing take on many shapes and forms; conventional dyes are made from finite resources such as petroleum, require large amounts of water, pollute waterways and kill aquatic life, as well as presenting health risks to factory workers and end users. Not good. And sadly, this part of the story is often overlooked, even by traditional ‘eco’ clothing manufacturers. It felt especially important draw attention to the issues, find out what we could and share this knowledge with as many people as we can.

So we found out everything we could about every applicable dyeing method… direct dyes, fibre-reactive dyes, sulphur dyes, vat dyes, natural dyes, dirt dyes, naturally coloured cotton, sunbleaching, closed loop systems… and were disappointed to find out how few people could point us in the right direction. It’s understandable, given how little information currently available and how confusing all of it is. But knowing our t-shirt couldn’t be perfect unless we tackled the issues head-on, we had to do the best we could. Even though there wasn’t enough information to fully weigh up the pros and cons of every dye method, we feel we’ve come up with the most informed, considered approach offered by any garment maker to date.

This approach follows a rule of ‘the simpler, the better’. We’ve decided to offer a limited selection of colours, as the more colours available, the more complicated the footprint calculation and supply chain. We narrowed the choice down to three types of shirt: the first being for the most hardcore eco-types, avoiding the impacts of dyeing altogether by being completely undyed. For those with environmental interests but also aesthetic concerns, we want to offer one bright colour, such as deep red or sky blue. And for business or more formal occasions, we also want to produce a black version.

In terms of what to use to obtain these colours, a good principle to stick to seems to be keeping it as natural as possible. Even if it’s not perfect now, we’ll be providing a boost to this area, meaning it’ll improve and become a more viable competitor to scary chemical dyes in the future. With these decisions made, we can take on our next set of challenges: firstly, the most socially and environmentally sound way of producing and dealing with this dye. The next challenge is to work out how to make these colours stay bright or strong – they may be better in environmental and social terms but synthetic dyes still outperform them aesthetically. And the challenge after that challenge is who can actually dye the shirts for us – as we keep discovering, what’s theoretically possible, what’s actually possible and what’s realistic in the world of functioning businesses are many, many worlds apart.

The document’s not quite finished yet but you can send your email address to perfect@betterthinking.co.uk and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s done. And in the meantime, as per usual, if you have anything to add, we’d love to hear about it – this project’s all about improvement through involvement.

www.betterthinking.co.uk/perfect/