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 it’s often overlooked, the use of color or more specifically, the use of dyes is of great environmental concern. In order to dye a garment, prevent it from bleeding when washed and keep colors vibrant for years to come, a range of different chemicals are needed to make that possible. The standard conventional dye process that exists today and dyed many clothes of our past, are made using highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals. These toxic ingredients have produced horrible environmental and health disasters in many textile producing countries.

Side Note: This doesn’t mean you should throw away your clothes, the main point of impact is at the production level and to the environment. In the end, it’s just a reminder that we need to do better moving forward.

At Soluna Collective, one of our primary goals, was to find better ways to dye 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 none of the wastewater is disposed of in local waterways or any other un-environmentally friendly way.

We want to be clear, low-impact dyes are not perfect because in the end, no dye is perfect. They are still synthetic based, petroleum 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, all our textiles dyed at Shivasakthi Fashions and Ero Dying are both GOTS and Oek-Tex certified.

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!

One of the other reasons we chose to work with undyed fabric is due to the environmental benefits from just not dyeing it. Besides the elimination of all chemicals from the process, it reduces the need for certain resources. By eliminating the dyeing process completely, we can reduce energy usage of our organic cotton garments by up to 25% and water consumption by more than 20%! Also, for our Sets 2020 collection, a few of our fabrics were made with undyed and untreated organic cotton which made them our first cradle-to-cradle fabric! We will be doing the same with alpaca in the future! Our goal is not to eliminate all other colors but rather make undyed a part of our color mix!