Our Mission
Who we are
Stainable Ink. strives to make buying new goods the last-ditch solution.
Today, we are tackling the t-shirt, an item which:
- is produced by some of the most exploitative means humans have come up with
- is no small part of the estimated 92 million tons of clothing that ends up in landfills every year
- has incredible non-virgin supply (name a garment that is taken and discarded more easily)
- has the single highest commercial demand of any garment
AND without us, there is no sustainable option. (don’t get me started on organic or ‘recycled’ t-shirts)
What do you mean ‘rescued’ ?
How are you actually sustainable.
Rescued means shirts that were otherwise destined to be clothing waste:
- Second-hand
- Company overstock/deadstock/old stock
- Factory rejects
Finding these shirts, inspecting them to ensure they meet corporate standards, and providing them in a format so they can replace the demand for new shirts is the highest and best use for shirts that have made it past wholesale.
Tell me much more about why these shirts are sustainable.
To be fully transparent, I use the phrase ‘otherwise destined to be clothing waste’ very liberally here.
There are other people doing this work, getting value from the resource that is ‘after market’ clothing, such as you at the thrift store.
Even after it’s pulled from the shelves at the thrift store, it passes through many hands to be resold by the shipping container to places such as Antofagasta, Chile. Here, our clothing waste is sorted and baled based on resale value.
Low value garments there are then sold by the bale to places such as Kantamanto market in Accra, Ghana where the clothing is again sorted based on resale value.
All along our discarded clothing’s journey, our clothing isn’t truly waste. It clothes people along its path, and gets resold fueling the local economy.
Unfortunately, along this path, the goods that cannot be resold end up as pollution for these communities. [Atacama Desert] [Accra, Ghana]
So should we buy more clothes and donate them unworn to thrift stores to fuel the massive second-hand economy?
Instead of reducing clothing waste, is Stainable Ink. simply denying resources from others less fortunate?
Would these shirts have found a use anyway without anyone’s help?
WRONG! YOU BOZO!
Our use of these garments directly replaces the demand for new garments.
The fact that the fashion industry is making people make their living by polluting their homes is the problem, not the solution
Beyond the shirts, Stainable Ink. runs on second-hand goods.
From the 90% PCR hang tags, to the 100% PCR shipping labels, to the shipping label printer, to the second-hand packaging, to the inventory racks, to the company computers, to the tables in the shop, to the heatpresses, to the chairs, to the ventilation system, to the screen printing equipment, to the shop lighting, to our webcams for meetings, to our hand tools, to the office supplies (even our tape)!
The one thing we haven’t cracked is the shirt prints.
We have yet to find any shirt printing solution that is remotely sustainable.
Please let us know if you find a sustainable shirt printing solution, we would love to hear about it (but don’t tell us about algae ink, the pigment isn’t the problem).
Our mission is providing sustainable t-shirt blanks and we do it better than the rest, and we’ve learned that shirt printing is part of the gig.