Composting our Tee

Composting a T-Shirt is not something you can do with everyday cotton / cotton lycra, polyestor Tees. This is why.

To be able to compost you want to make sure there is no trace of polyestor, lycra or harsh chemicals entering your compost bin. The importance of keeping our soil high quality for growing is vital.

At RMIT, while pursuing sustainable textile design, I was tasked with finding answers to Australia's textile waste dilemma. The solution I came up with? A compostable T-shirt. 

It was simple: design with the garment's end-life in mind.

In order to grasp how manufactured garments and fibers decompose in landfill, I started to dissect my own T-shirts and compost their pieces.

Upon realizing that even T-shirts with a mere 5% blend of lycra or polyester failed to compost, we started to build our product. The real challenge was to choose fibers that go easy on Mother Earth, ones that are grown and treated without harsh chemicals.

One must ask what kind of harmful substances are sprayed on these fiber crops?

What chemicals are involved in making the fibers ready for spinning and weaving?

What synthetic colors are used to achieve the latest fashion trends?

Where does all the dye end up post the dyeing process?

And finally, how can a garment filled with so many chemicals break down?

The answer is, it doesn't. So where does it end up?

Many of us are oblivious to the fact that we are literally wearing a cocktail of chemicals on our bodies.

We brought our prototype to life. It was important to now compost it whole as it would be received by landfill. We documented the time it took to decompose and the process. Now we have a product designed and built through evidence-based testing with the environment and people at the forefront of its design. I believe this is a huge success for the textiles industry.

We did it!! Australia’s first compostable T-shirt