Walking the Walk
Circling back to our original, seemingly straight-forward business concept that went something like - “Sell t-shirts to raise awareness about the health of our oceans and donate a portion of the proceeds to organizations that support ocean conservation.”
A quick dive into the logistics of this proposal revealed that there was so much more to consider. Not only did we have to “walk the walk” on Our Personal Journey, we also needed to do so on our business journey. If the Maristella Mission vision was to create clothing and products to help save our oceans, these products had to be created with the utmost concern for the health of the environment, especially our oceans. While there were many crossroads and countless learning experiences, we made two very important decisions to stay true to our mission and provide you with an uber eco-friendly product that you can wear responsibly and proudly.
1. First, we made a decision to provide you with the most ECO-FRIENDLY BASE APPAREL we could find.
To date, our shirts are sourced from a provider of 100% organic cotton. The organic cotton selection process, interspersed with seemingly endless research, went something like this …
· T-shirts are abundant and can be found in most any style or color. Let’s find a vendor with great prices and cool colors.
· Most shirts are made of cotton or polyester or a blend of the two. What should we choose? Wait, polyester is a form of plastic and will be on earth for perhaps hundreds of years. Let’s go with cotton then.
· Hold on, what about polyester made from recycled plastic bottles – it really is a thing. Hmm, very cool and awesome to recycle plastic bottles into something to be reused, it seems best to recycle into something other than apparel since with each wash, recycled plastic apparel continues to shed microplastics into our waterways.
· Ok, so back to cotton – seems like a good choice.
· Hold on – while cotton is biodegradable and less harmful to our environment, cotton farming uses pesticides and other chemicals that are harmful to the farmers, to the land, to the environment, and to us.
· Decision Made – Organic Cotton seems to be the most eco-friendly choice for our base apparel. While organic cotton is a little more expensive and colors are not as prevalent, these are compromises we are willing to make to “walk the walk”.
2. Secondly, we chose to have our apparel designs printed with ECO-FRIENDLY PRINTING.
After much research, we decided that printing with water-based ink was true to our environmentally conscious mission.
Without getting into too much detail, most shirt printing is done with plastisol inks. Plastisol is a type of ink made from plastic and often associated with PBCs, dioxins and phalates; all considered to be harmful to our environment and to us.
Water-based inks are gentler on the environment. They are made by suspending a biodegradable pigment into a water base. They do not contain PVCs or phalates, nor do they require special chemicals for cleaning since they are water based. While it’s still important that the water-based inks are cleaned and disposed of properly, we felt water-based inks were the best fit for Maristella Mission and for our customers.
Rest assured that we will continue our efforts to “walk the walk” from a personal as well as from a business perspective. In so doing, we will research and investigate the newest shirt materials and printing practices so that we can continue to bring you eco-friendly products that you can wear responsibly and proudly.
Thanks for "walking the walk" with us!