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  We think green is great, but love makes the world go round. For Lovemore, living green is an expression of choosing love more, a decision that we believe is the starting place for most everything that makes us and our surrounding environment better. Our hope is that the beautiful, eco-friendly Lovemore offerings will make healthy living—day in and day out—a little easier and a whole lot more stylish and fun. And with your thoughtful use, reuse and eventual recycling of your Lovemore gear at the end of its lifecycle, each of the products we offer becomes that much greener!
There are lots of fabrics with some eco-benefits out there. Perhaps most talked about is organic cotton, but we are playing around with the idea of some bamboo items, hemp is great for some things, even coconut fibers are featured in some textiles. Recycled fibers are pretty exciting too and have the bonus of bringing some of the wearability benefits we have gotten used to from fabrics like poly and rayon. But conventional fabrics still have the lion's share of the market, so we come back to having to make choices...
Conventional cotton is considered one of the most chemically dependent crops in the world. Cotton production consumes 10 percent of all agricultural chemicals and 25 percent of the world’s insecticides—in the U.S., one-third of a pound of chemicals are needed just to grow enough conventional cotton for a regular T-shirt.
These chemicals can directly impact the health of the cotton farmers, local water quality, and community health. They can also remain on the products made with the cotton for up to several washes. Since five of the top nine pesticides used on conventional cotton are known cancer-causing chemicals (cyanide, dicofol, naled, propargite, trifluralin), buying organic makes a lot of sense.
Of course there are considerations in fabric choice beyond just chemicals, like crop water consumption and resources required for processing and shipping. All in, even organic cotton is not perfect—but neither are we so we'll take the benefits of organic over conventional when we can, flaws and all. The bottom line is, at Lovemore we choose the best fabrics we can from an eco- and health-perspective for each item we produce, knowing that all the organic shirts in the world won't make a difference if they aren't good-looking, comfortable, affordable, and durable enough to actually make it into consumers' closets and wardrobes.
All of our screen-printing is done using environmentally friendly water-based inks and certified phthalate-free plastisol inks. It is important to us that no one is working under unsafe conditions while making Lovemore products (that wouldn’t be very Lovemore) so we visited our screen printing partner in their shop and were impressed to find no overtly chemical or noxious smells. Equally impressive, the printing is done in a space with a big open garage door, so the folks work their screen printing magic with fresh air and a view of blue sky. They use industry-standard or better processes for reducing waste and protecting the water supply during clean up.
Lovemore bottles are BPA-free, phthalate-free, and PVC-free food-grade stainless steel. No plastics that leach harmful into your beverage, and no aluminum taste.
...is you! All of the reusable water bottles and shopping bags in the world won’t help the cause when they are forgotten at home and you find yourself thirsty or empty-handed on a shopping trip. Because we know it can take some time to really get these habits ingrained, we hope these good-looking and functional solutions for minimizing waste help us all get there a little more quickly and with a little more joy. In the meantime, remember it’s about practice, not perfection.
Fast facts: Some estimate that a high-quality reusable bag can replace 300 to 700 disposable bags a year. Also consider that nearly 90% of plastic water bottles are not recycled and end up in landfills where it takes thousands of years for them to decompose.
In addition to the products we create and the partners we have chosen to work with, here are just a few examples of how we at Lovemore choose love more at work. We package our apparel to for shipping in earth-friendly ‘bio-bags’ made of plant material that easily breaks down rather than industry-standard plastic bags. We use washable glasses and mugs, choose recycled papers, and print judiciously to be thoughtful about our office resources and waste. We take advantage of our city of New York by getting around on the power of our own two feet and public transportation whenever we can. Lastly, we are always open to hearing your ideas about how we can all love more as we use our work and choices to improve the world around us. Drop us a line on our Contact page!
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