Color is multifaceted. It can alter your mood, make a statement and be authentic to who you are. It’s an extended representation of your style, personality and in many cases, what you stand for. Ultimately, color your attitude and we love that! A world full of color is a world that we want to be a part of and at Soluna Collective, we are devoted to keeping color a part of our world but in an environmentally responsible way.

Environmental Concerns

While often overlooked, the use of color, particularly through dyes, has raised significant environmental concerns over the years. To achieve any color, prevent it from bleeding and keep the color vibrant for years to come, a range of different chemicals are needed to make that possible. Despite significant achievements in the fashion industry, outdated “conventional dyes” using highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals persist in today’s system. These toxic ingredients have produced horrible environmental and health disasters in many textile producing countries.

Side Note: While your old clothes were produced with many of these toxic chemicals, according to multiple studies, the health impacts of wearing them are close to none. The primary health concerns pertain to the development of the garment. In many cases, workers handled these materials without any protective gear. Additionally, these dyes were dumped into rivers used by local communities for consumption, sanitation and agricultural purposes. Many of these communities reported higher rates of cancer and severe health concerns compared to similar areas without wastewater dumping. In summation, no need to throw away your old shirt, it’s simply a reminder that we need to do better moving forward.

At Soluna Collective, one of our primary objectives was to find better ways of dyeing our garments. In the end, we landed on two methods.

Low-impact

As mentioned, dyes have their problems. However, not all compositions are created equally. As the world of sustainable fashion has grown, so has our outlook on conventional dyes. For us, that meant focusing on low-impact dyes. As the name suggests, these dyes were designed to limit their impact by eliminating the toxic and carcinogenic chemicals found in conventional dyes. This limits the impact to the people dyeing the garments, the end consumer and the environment. Also, all of the wastewater from the dyeing facilities are treated at a wastewater treatment plant before returning to the water cycle. Absolutely no wastewater is disposed of in local waterways or any other harmful way.

We want to be clear, low-impact dyes are not perfect because in the end, no dye is perfect. They are still petroleum based synthetic dyes but are composed of chemicals that are less harmful to people and the planet. We want color to be part of our world and low-impact dyes give us a way to do that! We promise to continue to learn, grow and be better. Nothing is perfect but we will strive to be!

Lastly, in order to verify that low-impact dyes are used in our production process, we only work with GOTS and Oeko-Tex certified facilities. Below is a list of all our dye hubs and locations.

• Shivasakthi Fashions - Erode, India

• Ero Dying - Erode, India

• La Colonial - Lima, Peru

Undyed/Natural

We have always loved the natural color variations of undyed organic cotton, linen and alpaca. Their natural earthy tones have us mesmerized and provide a dynamic addition to our color profile!

Another reason we chose to work with undyed fabric is due to the environmental benefits from simply not dyeing a garment. Besides the elimination of all chemicals from the dyeing process, it reduces the need for certain resources. By eliminating the dyeing process completely, we can reduce energy consumption of our organic cotton garments by up to 25% and water consumption by more than 20%. Additionally, all of the fabric for our waffle pants were made with undyed and untreated organic cotton which makes them our first cradle-to-cradle fabric! Our goal is not to eliminate color but rather incorporate undyed as part of our color mix! A list of all undyed pieces below.