Gone are the days when eco-friendly shirts were scratchy and stiff, had limited sizes or colors, or were cost prohibitive. 

Every day, we print shirts that are better for the environment. If you're looking for shirts for your brand that are soft, fit well, and earth friendly, we can help.

Not only do we use eco-friendly shirts made of recycled plastic for our retail line, but we print these same shirts for custom screen printed orders, as well.

Our Favorite Eco-Friendly Shirts

We've been printing custom shirts for over ten years now. In that time, sustainability has become a priority for more people and as a result, there has been an increase in requests for eco-friendly shirts. 

Fortunately, the options for eco-friendly shirts have increased as well. You have more made-in-the-USA shirt options, shirts made of recycled material or organic cotton, and more environmentally friendly production practices. 

Here is a short list of our favorite eco-friendly and sustainable shirts to use when we print custom shirts for our customers:

1. Allmade 
2. Alternative Apparel
3. Econscious
4. Royal Apparel

1. Allmade Apparel

We like Allmade Apparel so much that is the primary blank that we use for our retail brand. It's soft, available in a lot of colors, prints well, and is reasonably priced. For these reasons, Allmade shirts have become a fast favorite among our customers. 

Allmade's success seemingly happened overnight. And it's not a surprise either. It was founded by a group of screen printers who wanted to make a better shirt. So it's only natural that they are so great to print on.

Allmade has made a better shirt by using 50% recycled polyester, 25% Tencel model sourced from sustainable beech trees, and 25% organic cotton. They did all of this while maintaining a comfy fit and feel. 

The AL2004 is their tri-blend tee that you will find on our retail shirts. We can't recommend it anymore. 

Check out the details about the Allmade AL2004:

• A 50/25/25 tri-blend shirt: 50% polyester from recycled plastic bottles, 25% organic cotton, 25% Tencel™ Modal
• Saves an average of 145 gallons of water, reduces 4 kg of CO2 emissions, uses an average of 6 water bottles
• Available in 15 colors and available in sizes XS-4X
• Calculate your positive impact on the environment by switching to this shirt with Allmade Apparel's impact calculator

2. Alternative Apparel

Alternative Apparel has been committed to making sustainable clothing since its inception. When we first started screen printing, they were one of the only options available in this space. They have consistently made comfortable clothing with eco fabrics and organic materials. 

Alternative Apparel is one of the few brands our customers request by name. It's popular in the yoga crowd for its flowy styles, comfy fabrics, and casual style.

As a leader in using sustainable fabrics and manufacturing processes, Alternative Apparel is a great choice to meet your sustainability goals. 

In addition to their t-shirts, we're a big fan of their eco-fleece. They make the softest hoodies, crews, and sweatpants. 

3. Econscious

Econscious is a clothing brand built on sustainability. 

With a name like Econscious, it's no surprise that they made the list. 

Econscious is widely available through wholesale clothing distributor, AlphaBroder. This fact is important because it's a sign of their success. 

While other sustainable t-shirt brands have come and gone, Econscious has produced a consistent and quality product for years. 

These shirts are great for both decorators and their customers because they are comfortable and well-fitting. Their most popular shirt is the EC1000 which is a 100% organic cotton tee.

In addition to organic cotton, Econscious uses hemp and recycled polyester fabrics in their clothing.  

Econscious also manufactures eco-friendly headwear, sweatshirts, and tote bags. 

4. Royal Apparel

Back before I started screen printing my own shirts, fancysweetstx was just a little retail brand that made shirts for the Ohio State University. Those first graphic t-shirts I made were printed on Royal Apparel. 

In those days, there weren't many brands making soft, fashion-forward shirts. Royal Apparel checks those boxes as well as being made in America and having a long line of organic apparel. 

Their commitment to sustainable fashion is just as strong today. Royal Apparel has a full line of organic clothing that is made, at least in part, with organic cotton.    

Here are more details about Royal Apparel:

• Organic cotton uses 90% less water and greenhouse gases to produce
• Use of RPET cotton, a fabric made from recycled plastic bottles, saves 2 million single-use plastic bottles from being thrown out each year.
• Full line of clothing is manufactured in the USA

What Do You Do With Old Shirts?

One of the toughest parts about making the apparel industry more environmentally friendly is figuring out what to do with old clothing.

A complaint in the promotional industry is that t-shirts are considered one-time use. They are made, printed, worn once, and then discarded. 

One way we try to make a difference at fancysweetstx is with our trade-in program, Reuse.

We offer customers of our retail brand the opportunity to return old, well-worn fancysweetstx shirts and receive a $5 credit on their next order. Sorry, this is not available for our custom screen printed shirts.

Order Custom Printed Eco-Friendly Shirts 

At fancysweetstx, we have a lot of experience screen printing custom shirts. 

We love that so many of our customers are choosing eco-friendly and sustainable shirts for their custom projects. 

The long-term impact of this trend will be significant. As more people adopt sustainable shirts and clothing, the more common, practical, and cost-effective they will be. 

The sustainable shirts mentioned above are going to match all of the important aspects of a shirt that you want in your standard shirts. They are: 

• Soft and comfortable material
• Quality construction
• Well fitting

If you’re on the team that is working on a new shirt project for your brand and you're looking for a screen printer who has the experience to print on eco-friendly shirts, get in touch with fancysweetstx today.

Here’s what Michael had to say after ordering custom screen printed shirts:

“Very impressed by the speed and quality of my company's shirt orders. They got our order done in less than a week (70+ shirts) and they came out perfectly fabulous. Thank you for your customer service.” 

Especially when the textile industry has gained notoriety as “the world’s biggest polluters.”

However, the textile industry can also be a crucial part of sustainable solutions for the environment. That’s right, your T-shirts can help save the planet.

Take Repreve T-shirts, for instance. If you’ve never worn one, you’ll find it hard to believe that the soft and silk-like garment comes from recycled plastic.

This sourcing provides plastic waste with an alternative destination to landfills and the ocean and is one of the ways by which your Repreve T-shirts can help save the planet.

Repreve is also considered a renewable material because old fabric is used to make new fabric. This recycling extends a fabric’s useful life while limiting the resources needed to produce fabric, such as energy and water.

We’ve gathered four renewable materials that can be used to make sustainable T-shirts. As we delve into their sustainability and benefits, you’ll also learn:

• How organic cotton uses less water than conventional cotton
• Why Repreve manufacturers use both open and closed-loop recycling
• Why organic cotton makes stronger fabric than conventional cotton
• Why some sustainable T-shirt designs use a blend of renewable materials
• Where to find top-quality sustainable T-shirts with customizable branding

1 - Organic Cotton

Sustainable T-shirts are made using organic cotton in order to eliminate the reliance on toxic chemicals, such as pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, in their value chain—the organizational activities that go into producing and delivering a product to market.

Unlike its conventional alternative, organic cotton relies on natural farming practices, which are far less damaging to the environment and far more sustainable, such as:

• Weeding over herbicides
• Compost over synthetic fertilizers
• Crop rotation over chemical-dependent mono-cropping

These chemical-free farming practices improve soil quality and promote biodiversity in their respective ecosystems.

Organic cotton also conserves water by eliminating the need for the 150 liters/kilo of cotton fiber that goes into processing conventional cotton. A staggering amount of water is necessary for processing regular cotton because it has such a high chemical content.

Every nine ounces of conventional cotton consists of 17 teaspoons of chemical fertilizers and a teaspoon of active ingredients, such as insecticides, herbicides, and defoliants.

Benefits of Organic Cotton T-Shirts

• Hypoallergenic: The lack of toxic chemical residues in organic cotton means that their T-shirts are less likely to trigger allergic reactions.
• They lack chemical residues, such as defoliants (used in regular cotton farming), which are notorious irritants for the upper and lower respiratory tract.
• Durability: Organic cotton T-shirts last longer than regular cotton T-shirts because of how their raw material is harvested.
• Organic cotton is hand-picked, which is less impactful to the crop’s fiber structure than machine harvesting. Hand-picking keeps the fibers from breaking and fraying, resulting in a longer and stronger cotton structure.

2 - Repreve Recycled Polyester

Repreve recycled polyester is a renewable material that is used to make sustainable T-shirts.

It’s part of a green initiative that provides plastic waste with an alternative destination to landfills, averting the environmental issues caused by such disposal methods.

This recycling process involves an open-loop system where plastic waste from other value chains becomes a raw material for another production system. So, waste bottles, for instance, turn into raw materials for your sustainable T-shirts in the form of Repreve fiber.

Alternatively, Repreve polyester is made through a closed-loop recycling system where old and worn-out Repreve fabric is used to make new fabric.

The Open-Loop Recycle Process

The entire process begins with converting plastic waste, such as bottles, into flakes by grinding.

The ground flakes are then converted into chips or pellets through depolymerization. This process breaks down the polymers in the flakes into simpler forms, called monomers, using solvents (much like digestion).

The chips (now monomers) are then heated into molten polyester through re-polymerization and extruded onto spinning machines that turn them into yarn.

Re-polymerization uses heat and a catalyst to melt the monomer molecules and form new polymer chains that become molten polyester.

Benefits of Repreve T-shirts

• Sustainability: Repreve T-shirts become sustainable when they’re part of a closed-loop recycling system where your old and worn-out shirts serve as raw materials for new ones.
• This cycle limits the environmental impact the T-shirts have by greatly reducing production inputs and waste generated post-production.
• Versatility: Repreve T-shirts mimic the look and feel of natural fabrics while boasting additional features, such as wrinkle resistance and water resistance.
• These extra features stretch the garment’s application potential, allowing you to wear Repreve T-shirts under various environmental conditions.

3 - Tencel Modal Fabric

Tencel Modal is a natural fabric that’s popular when it comes to sustainable T-shirts.

It’s popular because the fabric is extracted from beech wood pulp through a closed-loop process that limits environmental impact.

This closed-loop processing involves capturing and reusing extraction solvents rather than releasing them into the environment (solvent spinning). Reusing the solvents reduces water and energy demands and lowers the overall cost of production to mother nature.

Another reason for Modal’s popularity in sustainable T-shirt manufacture is its biodegradability.

This organic fabric is 100% biodegradable and compostable under home, industrial, and marine soil conditions. This attribute is particularly important considering that textile products eventually end up in landfills.

Benefits of Tencel Modal T-Shirts

• Highly Absorbent: Tencel Modal T-shirts absorb 50% more moisture than cotton shirts, keeping the fabric dry and ventilated.
• This moisture-wicking property prevents bacterial growth, especially at the armpits, making it the ideal fabric for healthy skin.
• Durability: The Modal fibers of your sustainable T-shirt have a strength that’s comparable to that of synthetic fibers.
• The fibers have a dry strength of 42 centinewton (cN)/tex and a wet strength of 37 cN/tex, which is comparable to polyester. The following table compares their dry and wet strengths.

Source: (Goswami et al., 2004, pg 64)

4 - Cotton-Repreve-Tencel Blends

Sustainable T-shirts can also contain multiple blends of renewable materials in their design. For instance, cotton-Repreve-Tencel blends.

This practice helps manufacturers avoid reliance on one material whose supply could be limited.

Renewable materials, such as organic cotton, often suffer supply constraints because of their dependency on non-industrial processing practices, which avoid machinery and chemicals.

As such, the global average yield of organic cotton is 924.27 kg per hectare, which is 1.38 times lower than conventional cotton with 1230.47 kg per hectare.

Material blending also allows manufacturers to combine the individual strengths of each fabric into one hybrid package. So, your tri-blend T-shirt gets the absorbent qualities of Tencel Modal, the toughness of Repreve polyester, and the softness of organic cotton.

Here’s an example of a T-shirt from fancysweetstx that’s 25% organic cotton, 50% Repreve polyester, and 25% Tencel Modal.

This combination gives the T-shirt an ultra-soft feel and the sustainability of recycling six poly water bottles. It’s also durable and fully customizable with various screen print design options available.

Here’s another print style and color from fancysweetstx on a similar tri-blend T-shirt.

This is the standard shirt that we use for our line of Midwest clothing and we also offer it for custom screen printing, as well.

Let’s Help Your Brand Become More Sustainable

And there you have it: four renewable materials that are used to make your sustainable T-shirts. With them in mind, are you looking to make your brand more eco-friendly?

We’d love to help.

Our team at fancysweetstx is experienced in designing sustainable products and branding them. We’ve made branded pencils from denim, eco-friendly notebooks, and T-shirts from recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles.

Our products are top-quality and our designs are unique. Our prices are also friendly so you won’t feel the pinch of going green.

“The T-shirts are wonderful quality with unique designs and the route to go for personal or gift reasons. You'll even save yourself a few bucks.”
— KK, United States

Contact us today and tell us more about your project.

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Participate in Earth Hour! 

Earth Hour takes place Saturday, March 27 at 8:30pm!

If you haven't heard of Earth Hour, it is a worldwide event where everyone turns off their lights for an hour as a symbol of unity, hope, and power in collective action for nature.

For more information on Earth Hour, visit earthhour.org.

If you want spread Earth awareness on a t-shirt, check out our Earth Day inspired collection in stores or online.

Last year we made several decisions to reduce our waste. The apparel industry is well known for lacking sustainable and environmentally practices.

One of the biggest changes we made was switching the blank shirt we use to Allmade. These shirts are made in a Fair Trade facility and each shirt contains fabric made from recycled plastic bottles.

These shirts have the same great fit and feel that you've come to expect from us. It wasn't an easy decision to make, but we figured that you care enough about where and how your shirt is made that this would add value for you.

It's a small change but we think it can have a big impact in the long run. 

If you have any other great ideas on how to improve our sustainability efforts, we'd love to hear them!