Why We Do What We Do
Did you know that a truckload of abandoned textiles is dumped in landfill or incinerated every second? Or that it takes 2700 liters of water to make a cotton t-shirt? That’s enough water for a person to drink for two and a half years. Crazy to think we use this much water for one t-shirt when millions of people are going without.
The fashion industry, particularly fast-fashion, is wasting on a massive scale. 98 million tonnes of non-renewable resources are used in fashion production each year and just 12% is recycled.
If these figure shock you, they should. We want consumers to question their choices when filling their wardrobes. Just like many do when filling their fridge.
Speaking of food. Did you know that food production also has a major, negative impact on the environment? One-third of all food produced globally by weight is lost or wasted between farm and fork. That’s 1 billion tonnes of food thrown away annually.
Food is intense on the environment, it produces a major amount of greenhouse gases, from the animals we rear to the trucks that are used to deliver our ingredients. In fact, if food production was a country, it would be the third largest polluter on the planet.
A Sustainable Solution
It’s with all this in mind that we launched Terratela. A sustainable fabric company with the idea of counteracting the negative impacts of both Food and Fashion.
We design our garments from food loss and regenerative foods. Our latest, SoyFibe™ t-shirt uses byproduct from tofu production.
We use closed-loop processes in all our production. All our t-shirts are 100% biodegradable and even our hang tags are packed with seeds, designed to be planted and grown.
Like a good restaurant, we work very hard on traceability. Visiting our suppliers in Iceland, our production factories in Portugal and providing a QR code on every garment we sell so you can see the journey your t-shirt has taken.
We are totally transparent about our costs, our mark up is low and we refuse to follow the usual sales trends of most fashion houses. Instead, we give you an honest breakdown of every t-shirt we sell. We also give back 10% of our proceeds to organizations fighting food loss and waste.
We make meaningful materials that matter and we do that so you, our community, can dress with purpose.
Listen to our founder, Natalia, as she explains the Terratela story on the New Worlder podcast.
Read more about our story in this blog article.
Photo Credits: Arlei Lima, Filippo Mazzaia.