Wooden T Shirt

The Wooden T Shirt is made from eucalyptus wood pulp sourced from sustainably managed forests, and printed with wood ink made from waste wood – even down to the labels.

50 million tonnes of wood waste is created in the US alone every year. Instead of chucking it into landfill, leaving it on the side of the road to release carbon into the atmosphere, or burning it in a smokestack, we’ve used a 100% natural process to transform it into a high-performing black pigment.

The ink is produced through a closed loop, circular system of manufacturing that doesn’t harm the environment. No wood is burned in the process, so there’s no non-renewable emissions involved. Instead, the heat and biogas generated from the manufacturing process is used as a power source.

We’ve also blended the pulped eucalyptus and seaweed with a small amount of the world’s first 100% compostable stretch fibre. While the traditional elastane that’s found in most clothing can take up to 200 years to biodegrade, this compostable stretch fibre biodegrades within 6 months, and without releasing any toxins.

While the t shirt is highly technical to create, you wouldn’t know it just by putting it on. It’s a soft, comfortable t shirt with a great weight, that wears just like a regular t shirt.

Once the t shirt has been built and printed, the black wood ink continues to lock in the carbon dioxide that it absorbed when it was alive. And it will do this for 100 years. So the t shirt you’re wearing is storing carbon emissions. This is known as carbon capture technology and it means rather than producing emissions, the Wooden T Shirt does the exact opposite.

The colour black is everywhere. From our phones to our cars to the ink in our pens. But black has a dark side. Every black thing you own is likely to contain carbon black – a pigment derived from petroleum. The way carbon black is made isn’t sustainable. Vast tracts of land called tar sands are stripped of all life and vegetation to extract the heavy petroleum, while the production process creates significant greenhouse gases.

Unless you’ve spent your life on a desert island with no clothes and no possessions, you’ll run into carbon black every day. It’s in the ink in your black pen, your black phone case, and the tyres on your car. Carbon black is the pigment that’s used to make black things black. But we don’t question where it comes from because very few people know it’s even there.

The way carbon black is made hasn’t really changed for over a century. At mass scale the process begins with a fossil fuel like heavy petroleum which is fed into an industrial furnace and allowed to partly combust. This creates a black powder that looks a bit like soot. And this is carbon black. It’s then used to colour everything from inks, to plastics, to rubber, and you’ll find it everywhere on the planet.

There are lots of problems associated with carbon black. The manufacturing process creates greenhouse gasses which are released into the atmosphere. And the heavy petroleum needed to make it comes from places known as oil sands, or tar sands. These are barren areas of our planet that are stripped of all vegetation so that oil can be extracted from the ground. And as ecosystems are eroded more carbon is emitted.