Environmental Effort
Our Environmental Effort
If you’ve clicked on this tab, you obviously care about what kind of effort businesses are making to be more sustainable. Or in other words, you give a shit about where you shop, and how that impacts the earth.
Let me give you the inside scoop of how we at Lively Vibes reuse, repurpose, and recycle every little possible thing we can.
1. Organic cotton: We now offer the option to buy most of our shirts in organic cotton. It’s only $5 more. We make no extra money off of this, we actually lose some. That $5 extra you would be paying is going straight towards the cost of the shirt. That’s one coffee, one snack at the gas station that you probably don’t need. All to help stop supporting cotton farmers that still use a ton of pesticides. Not only is using pesticides leading to health issues in these farmers, it’s putting tons of unnecessary chemicals into the soil and is slowly but surely making that land an unsuitable place to grow anything. By choosing our organic cotton option, you’re supporting the farmers that are out there doing things the right way. The hard way. All for a better Earth.
2. Low Carbon Footprint Packaging: We use Smart Mailers for most of our small orders. Smart Mailers are made from 100% recycled materials. Yes, we pay more for them. No, you don’t pay anything more for them. Smart Mailers can be recycled with plastic bags at some major grocery stores. You can research on Google to find where you can recycle plastic bags in your area. With larger orders, we use boxes and paper tape. Cardboard is infinitely recyclable as long as it stays clean and isn’t contaminated with food, chemicals, etc. We are lucky enough to live very close to a post office, so we walk our packages to the post office every day. Yes, even in the winter. If you would rather have your order shipped to you in a cardboard box than a smart mailer, please let us know in the notes section when you place your order.
3. Saving Utilities: Most of our shirts are made to order. What this means is that we aren’t using energy (electricity, water, ink, etc) to produce shirts that *might* be ordered someday; we produce most of our shirts as we get orders for them. This eliminates having an overabundance of back-stock laying around just waiting to be purchased. We also hang dry all of our shirts. This might be why when you receive a shirt from us at first it might feel stiff, that’s because we live in Colorado where it’s extremely dry. Hang drying shirts is not only better for your tie-dye, but it saves so much energy and money on your utility bill.
4. Repurposing Dye containers: Did you know that plastic can only be recycled a few times before it inevitably ends up in landfill? For this reason, it’s more important than ever to try to avoid buying plastic wherever you can. Try to go for a glass or aluminum container when you can. Unfortunately, no matter where we purchase our dye from, it all comes in a plastic container. We’ve contacted each company we purchase our dye from to see if there was a more eco-friendly way to send the dye in, such as a compostable container or something, but there just isn’t something quite like that out there yet. And these companies don’t have the facilities to try doing a bottle return system quite yet. For all of these reasons, we decide to reuse and repurpose these containers as much as possible before recycling them. We use them for plants, hardware, organizing, storage, stacking containers for our son, and we even bring them to our local refill store to fill with goodies such as epsom salt to give to our loved ones for gifts.
5. Thrift, Thrift, and More Thrifting: I kid you not when I say almost everything in our studio that we have purchased is used. We are avid users of Facebook marketplace, Offer up, eBay, and anywhere we can find used goods. Not only are we saving money as a small business, but we are doing the Earth a favor. Our direct to garment printer is used, our tables we work on are used, our shirt racks are used, some shelves are used (some we did buy new, some I used materials others were going to throw away to build new shelves), our plastic hangers we have are all used, and we will keep buying used things for as long as Lively Vibes is a thing.
6. Reusing Plastic Bags: A tie-dyed shirt has to cure in a plastic bag for 24 hours after being dyed. We have been using the same plastic bags over and over again since 2015. We clean and re-use them. If any of the plastic bags have reached the end of their life (too torn, weak, or ripped too small) I save them for crocheting. If you haven’t heard of crocheting with plastic bags you should check it out!
If you have any questions for us about our sustainability journey please contact us! We hope that our efforts encourage you to research about the businesses you're buying from, before you buy from them. How businesses treat the Earth matters, and how you treat the Earth matters.