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Vollebak’s latest t-shirt design absorbs CO2

The innovative men’s apparel brand has partnered with US biomaterials company Living Ink to design a t-shirt dyed with black algae that will continue to absorb carbon dioxide as the consumer wears it.

‘Sustainable fashion’ is complex and although major brands often use environmentally conscious marketing, it doesn’t necessarily mean their products are truly helping to lower the industry’s carbon footprint.

Vollebak – an innovative men’s apparel brand founded in 2016 – is attempting to differentiate from the competition by creating a new generation of genuinely natural fabrics.

With a dedicated focus on using sustainable resources that can decompose quickly, it’s made minimising the environmental impact of alternative, eco-friendly materials its main focus, creating some of the world’s most technologically advanced clothing.

How? By using unconventional raw materials like algae and plants.

It’s a business model that’s becoming increasingly more viable as consumers begin to consider the entire life cycle of the garments they’re purchasing, from creation to end of wear.

This is because traditional manufacturing methods, as we know all-too-well by now, have caused serious harm to our planet’s ecosystems, polluting our oceans with microplastics and contaminating our water with harmful dioxins like chlorine and arsenic.

‘Humanity has already achieved the pinnacle of biodegradable clothing. The question is, what’s the modern version of that?’ explains the company’s co-founder, Steve Tidball.

‘On a long enough timescale, everything on Earth will biodegrade. What’s hard is making something that biodegrades very quickly, leaves no trace of its existence, and uses as little energy to create in the first place as possible.’

Despite the challenges, Vollebak succeed in launching a compostable t-shirt last year that transforms into humus without polluting the soil, as well as a hoodie designed to completely break down within a maximum of three months when buried underground.

It has now just unveiled a t-shirt dyed with black algae that continues to absorb carbon dioxide as the consumer wears it.

Appearing in everything from classic tees to LBDs, black has long existed as one of the most popular colours utilised in fashion. The truth is, however, that most black pigment traditionally derives from a material known as carbon black, made by partly burning heavy petroleum.

This process, of course, comes with a pretty sizable environmental price tag. Despite its contribution to global warming, the ingredient has been the global standard for a century.

Looking to change this, Vollebak has introduced a black-algae dyed version of this sartorial staple that’s crafted from sustainably and ethically sourced pulped eucalyptus and beech.

To create this technology, it partnered with US biomaterials company Living Ink on a special thermo treatment that renders black algae into ink which is then printed onto each shirt.

This allows the t-shirt itself to actually make a difference.

‘After it’s harvested, the algae by-product is heat treated to concentrate it into a black powder, which we use as pigment,’ states Vollebak’s website.

‘This treatment seals in carbon dioxide which has been absorbed by the algae during its lifespan, preventing it from making its way back into the atmosphere. The black powder is then purified and mixed with a water-based binder to create black algae ink.’

While heavy petroleum requires vast tracts of land to be stripped of all life and vegetation to extract, you don’t need to dig up the earth to find black algae. Vollebak grows it in huge open-air ponds in California, where it thrives by feeding on sunlight, water, and nutrients.

Algae-Shirt-1

Pretty cool, eh?

Conscious consumers think so, as the t-shirt’s ability to absorb CO2 through photosynthesis while producing oxygen is a convincing reason for an industry-wide phase-out of carbon black.

It’s also UV resistant, which means it’ll retain its dark colour without ever fading or degrading. Oh, and as an added bonus, the t-shirt can biodegrade entirely within 12 weeks (if you choose to discard of it in your garden), so there’s no risk of it sitting eternally atop a landfill once it’s time is up.

As it stands, the only downside is the price ($110), but how much is too much when it involves safeguarding the future of our planet from the current climate crisis?

‘I get that creating a few thousand pieces of clothing will not change the world,’ finishes Tidball. ‘But maybe brands and consumers will start looking into where their black dye is actually coming from.’

It finally seems like we could be on the verge of a fashion industry that doesn’t rely on environmentally unfriendly practices to meet insatiable demand. Here’s hoping.

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