The best eco-friendly and sustainable t-shirts

If you’re looking for an easy upgrade to more sustainable swag, consider your next t-shirt order. We tested all the eco tees we could get our hands on to find the best ones that are made with lower impact materials to reduce water and waste without sacrificing quality.

T-shirts hold the number one spot in promo for a reason. They go everywhere, get worn on repeat, and deliver thousands of impressions long after the event ends, making them one of the most effective branding tools out there. By investing in better pieces, your brand stays in rotation longer while sustainability becomes a meaningful part of your story.

While often marginally more expensive, eco-tees tend to provide a premium experience to wow your audience. As described in our sustainable swag blog post, the goal of producing branded merch shouldn’t be to maximize quantity, but rather to provide an impactful experience to the people who receive the item. By doing this, you can improve your overall brand reach, even with a smaller product count. Shoot for a deeper, loyal relationship with your brand through swag.

At the end of the day, your goal with branded merchandise investment should be to create products that won’t be worn once, but rather stand as a wardrobe staple for years to come. This requires a higher initial investment, but this responsible spend will result in years of exposure with less environmental impact.

Look at the label of your shirt you’re wearing right now. What’s it made of? Chances are you’ll see familiar words like “cotton” and “polyester”, but there also might be terms you’re less familiar with – Modal, Monocel, Tencel, or even hemp. What’s this stuff doing in our clothes? Over time, for both economics and environmental reasons, the stuff to make our clothes has changed.

A quick history of fabrics: historians are fairly confident that we’ve been using textiles to make clothes for nearly 100,000 years and for much of the last 7,000 years or so, there were few innovations in the ways people made these fabrics. Linen, cotton, wool, and silk have been used by people across the world for hundreds of generations. Fast forward to much more recently, and now there’s an explosion of materials available. Even common household names like nylon and spandex didn’t exist just 100 years ago.

As time has gone on, we’ve begun to understand how these materials affect both the garments as well as the people who wear them. You can split these materials in two buckets: organic and synthetic. Organic material is derived naturally from plants and animals, while synthetic material is produced in a chemical process, often from uglier origins including coal or petroleum. However, just because something is grown doesn’t mean it’s inherently “greener” than a synthetic textile. Many plants, especially cotton, require tons of resources to grow.

For this SwagLab, we’ve leaned into our independent research as well as the Higg MSI index, which takes a holistic look at a specific material’s impact from conception to disposal.

• “Virgin”, or material that is brand new, is nearly always the highest impact material. It takes a ton of water and resources to grow things from scratch. However, virgin material is often the cheapest. This means that the basic heavy cotton tees that make up a large share of orders in our industry are causing more strain on the environment.
• Synthetic doesn’t equal bad; clothes made from coal actually have the potential to do a lot of good since they’re generally softer, more durable, and can withstand the test of time. Some materials that seem green (i.e. bamboo), have more impact on the environment due to high cultivation costs.
• Both organic and synthetic materials can be recycled. Investing in 100% recycled materials is the most effective way to mitigate your footprint when producing merchandise.
• Many of the newer materials (i.e. Modal, Tencel) are somewhere in the middle, more on those next.

The biggest criteria for the footprint of a shirt is the material it’s made of. Below, we go into detail on some of the most popular textiles from the shirts we looked at.

Cotton is still the most common textile in our clothes today. Last year, the United States produced 14 million bales of cotton (each bale can produce 1,370 tees) making America the largest exporter on the planet. The vast majority of cotton is sent to India and China where it is processed into a usable textile.

Cotton is versatile and relatively cheap and is the most common material in the majority of budget tees. Unfortunately, the accessibility and low cost of cotton doesn’t make it an eco-friendly material. Cotton requires a lot of water to grow, approximately 2,700 liters (713 gallons) per shirt. That’s how much water you drink every 2.5 years, all for a single tee.

The impact of cotton isn’t just one we’ll feel in the far future, it’s already here. In Central Asia, which now produces the majority of global cotton, the Aral Sea (previously the fourth largest saline lake in the world), has completely dried up as farmers siphoned water to feed thirsty cotton plants. Asian farmers, particularly those in India, have also been fraught for decades dealing with Bt cotton. This topic is beyond the scope of this SwagLab, but farmers have alleged for decades that this specific genetically modified strain of cotton (created by Monsanto) has caused serious health issues, including a disputed-claim of increased suicides by farm workers who handle the seeds.

Today, new techniques are being used to lessen the impact of cotton production, including the new trend of organic, USA cotton. These plants are grown in the United States, where environmental protection laws are somewhat stronger than abroad and are grown without the use of harmful pesticides. So, as a rule of thumb, invest in USA-grown cotton (bonus points for organic material) and if possible, lean into recycled cotton to reap the benefits of the textile without requiring additional material to be grown.

Polyester is a synthetic material, created by processing petroleum, air, and water. Like all materials, the environmental cost comes from both harvesting the raw goods (in this case, oil or coal) and through the industrial process. Despite being made from fossil fuels, which are clearly a negative as we move towards a greener future, polyester actually has a lower impact on the environment during production than many organic materials, including cotton.

Since polyester is a plastic, it feels a bit different on the skin than cotton. Polyester is often more breathable and lightweight than its cotton counterpart. If you’ve worn an athleisure item or jersey in the past, you’ll be familiar with the feeling of 100% synthetic material. Today, polyester is generally mixed with other organic and synthetic materials to create a blend (more on this shortly). Additionally, polyester is heavily used outside of apparel, especially for furniture and outdoor goods.

Like cotton, polyester can actually be recycled fairly easily and turned into new garments without the impact of new production. However, a major downside to polyester (and all synthetic materials) is its inability to breakdown fully. Plastic is remarkably durable: an upside during the useful life of a product, but a risk once it hits the landfill. Unlike cotton tees, which will eventually decompose like all organic materials, polyester will take far longer to fall apart (up to 200 years!). There’s also the risk of microplastics, which we do not yet fully understand. Recent studies have suggested that as many as a million fibers of small plastic may fall of each time an item is washed. Again, we don’t know exactly the long-term effects of this on our eco-system, but we should be wary of any product that introduces pollutants to our oceans and water supplies.

Enter the hybrid! Modal (as well as Lyocell, Tencel, and Monocel) is a semi-synthetic material that combines organic materials with chemical liquids used to break down the raw materials into pulps and fibers used to produce textiles. These days, all the rage is about Modal and its counterpart, Micromodal. Known for their unbelievable softness, both types of fabrics utilize beech wood, a material historically used for firewood, native to Europe, Asia, and North America.

Beech trees, like every raw material in the world, has its pros and cons. It uses 50% less water to produce than cotton and unlike the cotton plant, trees are generally carbon negative since they absorb carbon emissions created by other activities. To be clear, however, within the scope of harvesting trees for production in garments, modal is not carbon negative or even carbon neutral. It still takes more in emissions to grow and process this material than the absorption benefits from the tree. That being said, it’s estimated that Modal’s impact has 50% less of a carbon footprint to comparable materials, including cotton.

Modal is extremely soft and comfortable, even in low quantities. Our two top picks leverage modal for almost half of their raw materials, and they’re absurdly soft. As a result, modal is most commonly used in underwear and pajamas. Like cotton, modal products are biodegradable and unlike its fully synthetic counterparts, microplastics are not a concern.

Like any wood-based material, deforestation must remain a concern. The beech tree population has declined significantly due to disease and harvesting, and they take decades to grow to a useful size. Ensuring that a company is committed to replanting practices is a way to mitigate long-term risks. Tencel, a firm that produces large quantity of modal yarn, adheres to strict standards, so look for that brand name in the material list of your products.

As you consider the options, you’ll find that most shirts with an eco-focus aren’t made entirely from one material, but generally a blend of raw textiles. Both of our top picks use a combo of modal and cotton (as well as recycled polyester, for the Allmade shirt). By mixing numerous materials together, manufacturers are able to utilize the strengths of each, while mitigating the potential downsides by investing exclusively in a single material.

Blended shirts are often the softest and most durable, which is why they’re our favorite type of shirt. They tend to have a more heathered or weathered look than a solid shirt (which we enjoy for its fashion forward leaning but isn’t always what someone is in the market for). One drawback is the potential for recycling difficulties as some garment recyclers are unable to process and sort the varied materials in each blend and therefor send the shirt to the landfill.

A note on alternative materials (flax, bamboo, hemp) Cotton and beech wood aren’t the only materials you can grow to make shirts. Flax, bamboo, and hemp all make a nice t-shirt, and all have various levels of carbon footprints during their production. In this test, we only looked at a limited number of t-shirts, including one made from a bamboo/cotton blend. In the future, we look forward to testing additional products, especially those made from hemp, which shows a ton of promise in reducing impact. We will update our guides and recommendations accordingly.

To go deeper on design and decoration tips, we’re developing a guide on how to extend the life of your logo’d merch. In the meantime, as is often the case, “less is more”. Take a look at your t-shirt drawer. On top, there are probably a handful of shirts you wear a lot, and underneath are a pile of your forgotten collection. Do the ones on top have massive logos? Probably not. Let the message you’re promoting (or the brand you’re investing in) be the star of the show, and your logo be the supporting character.

When working on the graphics that will adorn your shirt, consider how it can match the tee’s eco vibe. Add a distress so the print is more faded. Choose colors that are more neutral or earthy. Go with a hand drawn style design (if you don’t have illustrators on hand for this, we do!)

We also love a good woven label. Even though it’s small and subtle, it adds a nice brand pop and raises the perceived value of the overall piece. Next time you’re wearing a fav brand, notice how well they use those small pieces of fabric.

A note on water-based inks

When it comes time to screen print on your shirt, consider something that pairs well with your eco shirt in both design and ink choice. We love to use water-based inks whenever possible. Unlike other inks (plastisol) that contain PVC and phthalates, water base ink uses 100% biodegradable pigments suspended in a water solution. Water base inks release far fewer emissions in manufacturing, require no harsh solvents in cleaning, and stay bound to the fibers of the shirt longer than any alternative ink. The best part is the print feels like it’s part of the shirt, soft to the touch.

We have a long history with t-shirts. For over a decade, they’ve been the bread and butter of our business and we’ve helped countless businesses tell their story by decorating tees. Over the years, we’ve produced and decorated well over a million shirts. As the need for sustainability has become more apparent, our business has fought for better to push further into sustainability.

Over the last year, we’ve created several recommendations to create more eco-conscious products for our clients, including a blog post and product guide and our print shop director was recognized for sustainable printing practices. Sustainability serves as a key part of our business that we hope to keep expanding on.