It’s such a cool privilege to be able to be a part of such an iconic festival.  Our official merch booth was serving up classic old school Lolla designs printed on site for the psychedelic crowd!  We had a range of tye dye shirts and retro festival designs to choose from, but the really cool tie in was that Lollapalooza setup a “Rock and Recycle” booth.  Attendees were able to get a garbage back that they could fill with recyclables from around the park.  Once full they brought it back to the tent and got a token that they could bring to our printing booth and get a special edition shirt with the lineup on the back.

If you’ve hosted and event with merch before you know that people LOVE free swag.  Lollapalooza did an amazing job of leveraging that desire to help ensure that the park and it’s fans were taken care of.  It really was a win win!

The post Live Printing -Lollapolooza Rock and Recycle first appeared on Barrel Maker.

Our sustainability team meets every week to discuss our most detrimental environmental pitfalls and then collaborate on how we can flip those into our strengths. For example, up until recently our printers used baby wipes to clean the screens. The convenience and affordability made it hard to want to switch, but after doing some research and experimenting with reusable cloths, the printers actually prefer the effectiveness of the new material. Looking forward to transitioning all of our printers to these as we are finishing up experimenting with them. Imagine how many baby wipes we can now keep out of the landfills!

Another more long term goal we have is figuring out how to utilize our misprints in a more meaningful way. As of right now our printers use our misprints as testing fabrics and when there is no more space to print on them, they even use them to clean screens until they can no longer be used. At the end of the day, they do unfortunately still end up in the landfill. We are in the process of brainstorming how we can shred our prints into material that can be used for creating insulation, making mattresses for the homeless, or even dog beds for shelters.

Consider researching companies and look into their mission statement and operational sustainability before giving them your business. Making conscious environmental decisions is not something we have to do, it’s something we want to do.

The post We aren’t babies, no more wipes! first appeared on Barrel Maker.

Online stores were one of the major success stories for our business and our local community last year.

When faced with the pandemic, like other Chicago businesses, it wasn’t easy for us to figure out what we could do to help ourselves and what the future held. To be honest, it’s difficult to entirely remember the day-to-day of what we went through.

But one thing is for certain: the online shirt fundraisers that we hosted for local Chicago businesses were a huge success. The city of Chicago came out in a big way to support their local businesses and we raised $71,000 for the organizations that participated.

Here is a video with an explanation of our stores and interviews with small businesses that were part of the program.

Online t-shirt stores have been one of our core services for years. Our customers love it because there is no risk for them or upfront costs. We host the store, print the shirts, and fulfill all of the orders. What’s not to love about that?

COVID 19: Hurting us, our customers and our communities.  As small businesses we need to stand together!

TL;DR – We will set you up with a fundraising store online, selling shirts and other swag. You give the profit to your employees to help cover them during these times. We can offer gift certificates and you can include a gift too!

The post Chicago Small Business Fundraising Stores (COVID-19) first appeared on Barrel Maker.

At the end of each job, we almost always have leftover ink. If this is the case, we simply scrape it off the screen, and put it right back into the jar that it came from. But sometimes, there isn’t really enough ink to warrant saving for a new job, and that’s when it just gets disposed of, even though it’s still perfectly good. But once we started analyzing our processes, this seemed like one of the easiest things to change!

So we set up dump buckets around the shop so they can be reused, and also mixed together all our low inks that would have otherwise been thrown away. In order to get colors that aren’t just brown or grey, we decided to separate them into light colors, and dark colors, and also differentiate between cool and warm colors as well. After just a week, we now have three new shades of economy ink for our customers to choose from, and here are the closest Pantone matches:

To be honest, they ended up being much nicer colors than we expected them to be, so that was a pleasant surprise. To try and get this new ink off the ground, we’re offering 15% off on printing for customers who order shirts including these inks for as long as they last, so tell your friends! We’re diggin’ the earthy vibes of these tones, and we think you will too!

The post Introducing: Eco-friendly Economy Inks! first appeared on Barrel Maker.

When we all got together and went over what we had worked on from the previous meeting, we had already ran into some roadblocks. The first being, our garbage/recycling company totally ignored our requests. Womp womp. But it’s okay, because we have the power of the internet and can press on. So we took it upon ourselves to find the best recycling guidelines. Now of course, these guidelines vary city by city, but here’s what we found for our shop in Chicago:

First up, here’s what not to recycle – it’s important to pay attention to these common problem items, because often if you have even one or two of these items in your bin, the company will simply throw all your items away:

• Plastic bags — not even to dispose of other recyclables (please don’t bag your recycling!)
• Shredded paper — the little pieces get stuck to other items and can clog machines. Don’t do it!
• Pizza boxes — the grease is the issue here. Either put the entire box in the garbage or tear off the greasy part before recycling.
• Styrofoam — aka No. 6 plastic
• Coffee cups
• Electronics
• Clothing
• Potato chip and other greasy snack bags
• Toys and other odd-shaped plastics like laundry baskets
• Stringy things like garden hoses, cables/cords and Christmas tree lights that can wrap and jam up sorting equipment

Now, here’s what you can recycle, and keep in mind all must be clean and empty! You don’t have to scrub them, but a quick rinse will go a long way:

• Bottles, glass or plastic – keep the lids on!
• Mail, including envelopes with plastic windows
• Cans, even empty aerosol cans
• Boxes – only CLEAN boxes
• Cartons
• Jugs

Keep in mind, these are just the rules for Chicago – want to check out the rules of your city? A great site for reference is https://www.recyclebycity.com – we are also in the process of working out a great new option to reuse our ink – stay tuned!

The post Sustainability #2 – Upping our Recycling Game first appeared on Barrel Maker.

We also want to make the process as helpful and transparent as possible, so we’re going to document it here on our blog. We’ll update you every two weeks after each meeting, and let you know what we’re thinking, what our action items are, and most importantly – if it works. Any successes we have we’d like to share with other shops to help the practices catch on, cause let’s face it – if the head of the EPA doesn’t believe in human-driven climate change, we all need to crank up our responsibility by 300%. So here’s what we came up with on day one:

Our biggest goal for the first day? Start small. Leave the meeting with specific, manageable action items we can put into effect immediately, and assign each person a task. Then move up from there each meeting.

1. Recycling – We definitely recycle, but like everything else, we know we can do better. Everyone can. It’s sadly common that recycling companies have to throw entire bins of recyclables away simply because the items haven’t been properly cleaned or sorted, and we don’t want to be that guy. So first, we’re starting by contacting the garbage and recycling company to see if they can send us any guidelines on what we should be recycling and how. We are also going to purchase 3 more bins, one for the kitchen to replace the tiny one we have that fills up too quickly, and two to put back in production since we’ve realized that many of our printers do not walk all the way to the bin in the kitchen to recycle properly.

2. Signs – We’re going to make detailed signs for all three recycling locations that contains the info we received from the recycling company to be sure everyone else has friendly reminders to help us do the best that we can.

3. Dishes – We already have a bunch of Barrel Maker mugs for coffee, but we’d like to take it a step further by purchasing real dishes and silverware to replace all disposable cutlery, cups, and plates that we normally purchase several times a month. This will also probably result in another sign reminding people to wash their dishes after they use them, cause you know, we’re not their moms.

4. Looking forward – We are also going to take the next week to observe how the misprint shirt flow occurs from beginning to end, and come to the next meeting with an overall process for us to discuss and amend so that we are more effectively re-using our shirts. We already use misprints as rags for cleaning screens, but we’d like to go past this and find an even better way to recycle and maybe reuse the rags as well. We also agreed to think on a better way to organize our ink dump buckets to create a recycled ink color, and maybe find a way to donate or market shirts to charities and organizations for free using this ink as well as the extra shirts we have lying from years of running our company. But, more on that after our next meeting.

Our next meeting is Thursday, 10/12, and we’ll send over more updates then! In the meantime, stay green folks!

The post Our First Sustainability Meeting first appeared on Barrel Maker.