PRESS RELEASE 20.6.2023 Infine Oy, Tiina Saukko
Natua Organic Branding Oy, a company specialising in sustainable printed clothing, submitted its products for evaluation by Infine, a Finnish company specialising in analysing the sustainability of products and services. These products performed exceptionally well.
Natua, a local specialist in sustainable printed garments, has years of experience in the pitfalls of sustainability. While a garment made from recycled fibre is inherently more sustainable than Natua's preferred virgin cotton, the printing of the garment changes the outcome.
Natua's entrepreneur Miitre Virtanen presents the company's most popular products, printed hoodies and t-shirts. With Secure's hoodie and Kotipizza's t-shirt are typical examples of holistically sustainable printed garments. The garments are made from GOTS-certified organic cotton and recycled polyester. The prints are made with water-based, environmentally friendly inks.
- Recycled fibre usually contains more or less polyester. It depends on the quantity and quality of the polyester whether anything can be printed on the shirt in a good quality way or not. Printing with water-based inks is usually impossible without polyester blockers or other chemicals underneath the print. The ecologically unsustainable oil and plastic-based inks used by typical shirt printers work on recycled fibres, but even then only in quite thick layers, says Miitre Virtanen, an entrepreneur at Natua.
- We believe that the long life of a printed garment determines its ultimate ecological credentials. That's why we prefer garments that can be printed in a sustainable way, without oil-based inks. For printed garments commissioned by companies in particular, durability is of great importance.
The hoodie made by Natua for the scouts is made of GOTS certified organic cotton (85%) and recycled polyester (15%). To prioritise sustainability, the hoodie is made with eco-friendly inks. According to Virtanen, it is typical that similar prints are almost exclusively made with oil-based inks, which in his opinion "makes no sense" when the garment itself is sustainable.
Infine has developed an AI-based software that constructs a comprehensive sustainability analysis of the product based on information from different sources. In addition to its large customers, such as R-kiosk, smaller operators are also interested in sustainability and Infine's services.
- Sustainability of clothing is not an either/or issue. We assess all products against nine dimensions of sustainability, and getting good results is not simple or easy. Natua's products performed very well, although there are a few areas for improvement, says Tiina Saukko, CEO of Infine.
Infine's sustainability analysis compares a product with other products in the same category, meaning that the result of the analysis tells us how sustainable the product is compared to a product that meets a similar need.
- In the case of clothing in particular, the production chain of the material itself can be very long before any stitching is done. Post-processing - such as printing - adds another dimension to the whole. We believe that the customer has the right to make choices - sustainability first. Our job is to deliver that information quickly and at a smart cost, concludes CEO
Further information
Natua Organic Branding Oy
Miitre Virtanen, yrittäjä
+358 40 837 8770
miitre@natua.fi
Infine Oy
Tiina Saukko, CEO & perustaja
+358 40 509 59 09
tiina@infine.fi
Finnish
English