The Reasons We Exist
Care for people + our planet
How many times have you received a branded t-shirt for a sporting, volunteer
or trade show event? Odds are your answer is so high you can't even come up with a number. Unfortunately, this is cause our planet and people major issues.
People
These shirts are often made overseas in factories with inhumane working conditions.
Planet
Typically, that shirt gets worn 2-4 times before getting donated. No one ends up purchasing the shirt so it eventually ends up in a landfill overseas.
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How are we different?
We are an ethical Canadian garment manufacturer using 100% premium cotton, natural and
eco-friendly fabrics to craft our products.
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THE LAB by LSA proudly crafts 100% recycled products from high-quality bolt-end material that was otherwise set for landfills overseas. THE LAB by LSA also offers 100% organic cotton, recycled poly/cottons and other natural fibres depending on client needs
What is bolt-end material?
Major fashion and fabric brands will donate or discard hundreds of metres of fabric that goes unused for reasons including overstock and discontinued styles. THE LAB by LSA will use this
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Discarded fabric contributes to the 92 million tons of waste produced by the fashion industry each year.
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According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the fashion industry is responsible for over 10% of the world's carbon emissions - more than the shipping and international flights combined.
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The average American throws away 70 lbs to 80 lbs of clothing every year.
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The fashion industry remains the second largest industrial polluter,
second only to oil.
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It's estimated that humans are using natural resources 1.7 times faster than ecosystems can regenerate. In other words, consuming 1.7 Earths.
Want to learn more? Visit our blog or reach out and we will be happy to connect!
The Environmental Affects of The Clothing Industry
The Clothing Industry: Safety and Human Rights Violations
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Fast Fashion refers to the clothing brands who outsource manufacturing of their garments with speed and cost at the forefront of their decisions. Often this means the health of humans and our planet is disregarded.
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In the mid 90s, the United States was producing 95% of their clothing. Today, they produce around 2% (Ndubisi & Nygaard, 2018). This shift came after the World Trade Organizations amended trade agreements, significantly reducing quotas on clothing (Taplin, 2014). Now, the three largest clothing manufacturers are China, India and Bangladesh.
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The industry boom that these countries faced required them to lower production cost and increase production time. We continue to see little industry regulations. Therefore, fair wages and workplace health and safety fall through the cracks.
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The Rana Plaza disaster of 2013 provides an example of human rights and workplace safety violations that come from poor regulation. Rana Plaza was an 8-story factory that collapsed, killing over 1000 workers. The plaza collapsed due to structural flaws. "While businesses in the building’s lower floors had immediately closed when structural cracks were discovered a day earlier, thousands of factory workers were forced — either directly by their superiors, or indirectly by the pressure to earn a day’s wage — to return on the day of the collapse, despite many of them raising concerns" (Holland, CNN Report, 2023).
