Eco Friendly Merch

First things first, here's an interesting tip you can use in order to start shopping with more environmental consciousness at home pretty easily. If you use Amazon to shop at all, there's actually a filter you can use in order to filter your amazon searches to "climate pledge friendly". Meaning whatever you buy will be in the lines of what fits the “climate pledge friendly” guidelines. So, everything you buy uses fewer toxic materials, produces less of a carbon footprint, supports alternative sustainable materials, and all that good stuff. Mmmmmm, I love me some sustainable shopping options. Oh, speaking of which I went on a hunt to find some Eco Friendly and sustainable pieces of merch, that way the next time you shop for merchandise you can remember to help save the planet while you're at it.  

Before I do that though it's important to ask what defines eco-friendly merchandise and what musicians and artists can do in order to create their own. For the sake of the article, I should also define how I personally define eco-friendly products? Well, I personally define eco-friendly products as a thing that helps reduce or repair damage done to the environment during its lifespan or during production. So, products that won’t hurt the product if thrown out, products that were produced in a way that isn’t bad for the environment, products that help reduce the carbon footprint during transportation or creation...things like those are all good examples. The answer to thinking of products that help the environment really isn't that simple, sometimes it requires a lot of thinking outside of the box and getting creative for those things to be answered and for those problems to be solved. You’ll see what I’m talking about when you look at some of the examples below.  

Let’s start by saying that if you make your own merch or sell your own merch or have it outsourced to other companies there are options you can use in order to make your merchandise more sustainable and Eco-friendlier. Personally, I think that should be the only option but the world...disagrees, I guess. I’ll list some of my favorite examples to start with and you can look further into it if you want to.  

Ocean Bottle CO.

https://oceanbottle.co/ - Bottles made from recycled ocean Bottles 

What goes better together than a concert or a festival than water bottles? Literally everything...  

You aren’t allowed to take that into the venue sir, please leave that here or throw it away before you enter, thank you.  

That aside recycled bottles should be the norm, and it sucks that they aren’t because water bottles make up “269,000 tons” of ocean pollution at the moment. There are options for bottles and other types of plastic products that are made entirely of plastic that’s been recycled from the ocean or uses the profits to help fund cleaning up the plastic pollution in the oceans. Honestly one of my favorite plastic alternatives besides biodegradable plastics, because it actually recycles plastic. Just like how it should be.  

(Image Source: https://oceanbottle.co/en-us/pages/co-brand)

Bio Vinyl

https://www.optimal-media.com/en/press/biovinyl

This is a sustainable and eco-friendly Vinyl printing service; I just really enjoy the creativity and purpose of being able to create a piece of vinyl that’s also sustainably friendly. It looks good, it’s cool to have around the house, and its great merchandise for musicians. Vinyl sales have actually increased by around forty million sales per year over the past ten years. You can find more sustainable options for more things of course, but that’s just the example I’m using at the moment. Feel free to look up more options for your own sustainable and biodegradable products.   

(Image Source: https://www.optimal-media.com/en/press/biovinyl/ )

The 1975 Repurposed Merchandise  

In 2019 'The 1975' repurposed their old merchandise and used them in order to make new merchandise (that’s called recycling, winky face). Yeah, the ideas are pretty simple, but I imagine it will be a lot harder to execute than you would think. 1975 had a merch line that was made exclusively out of old merch and then repurposed into a new merch line. That is a sound concept, however, I imagine sourcing all the shirts for this type of thing would require a very proactive fan base or a lot of extensive sourcing. The shirts were sold  

The 1975 also sell branded water bottles in order to benefit climate activism. Basically, how it worked was that The 1975 would take old shirts and print the design over that, instead of buying new shirts with new materials. You also had the option to bring in a shirt of your choice to the Reeding and Leeds festival and then they would print over the shirt you brought there right on the spot. It’s overall a pretty genius idea. I had never heard of a repurposed shirt until I wrote about this...love it.  

(Image Source: https://www.optimal-media.com/en/press/biovinyl/ )

Lourde 

I didn’t know this but apparently Lourde is one of the artists that has really learned how to integrate sustainable and Eco-Friendly practices into her music merchandise. Usually, the move is just like organic cotton, but Lourde really seems to have combined this concept with most of her products that she has for sale. With her 2021 release of her album “Solar Power” she sold the music in “Solar Power Music Boxes” which were biodegradable & plastic free that came with a way to download the music. I really enjoy the creativity of that idea to be honest. It has a high degree of originality and that’s one of my favorite things to look for when I’m writing for this website. Her merch now in 2024 still focuses on sustainability. Using organic cotton, less energy consuming ways to produce the merch, and even recycled materials that would have been in a landfill otherwise. There’s only so many options for sustainable merchandise at the moment and I’m happy to see that Lourde seems to be implementing a lot of them. 

(Image Sources: https://lorde.store/ - - - https://lorde.store/products/solar-power-music-box-discless-product )

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I'm going to end of this article here and let me just say that I hope that you learned something. I hope that you take this short reminder to take care of the planet in creative ways to heart and remind yourself to shop more sustainably and to create more sustainably as well. There are a lot of ways to help the planet by consuming or sourcing responsibly, but at the moment you kind of have to put in the work to make sure that you’re doing that. Make sure to double check the certifications and make sure you trust the sources that are producing your merch if you have any. Remember shop eco-friendly, shop sustainable, and shop recyclable.