It's a rough estimate that it takes 2,700L of water to produce enough cotton to make one t-shirt. To produce 1,000 t-shirts you use enough water to fill an Olympic size swimming pool. (We're a small brand, especially by global standards. So just imagine the volume of water that's being pumped through to produce some of the gear for the big guys!)

The last few years has seen a lot of effort by apparel brands to reduce their overall footprint. It's a longtime coming. The Critical Slide backyard is being progressively cleaned up, season on season. We've swapped plastic poly-bags for corn-starch bags, we've moved our wetsuits to a plant based Yulex, doing away with petro-chemicals. However we feel the biggest move has been swapping all our t-shirts to recycled cotton jersey! Arguably the most environmentally sustainable jersey. There's the old adage, 'The best bits were left on the cutting room floor' and when it comes to producing t-shirts, that couldn't be more true! Our cotton jersey is sourced from the off-cuts, the overages from factories all across the globe. 

The jersey is then re-milled and turned into re-usable yarn. The yarn is then woven into jersey. 

We've given that jersey, that would have once ended up on the scrap heap or as a bag'a'rags, a new lease on life! 

'I was left hung out to dry. Shattered in pieces after being tossed away. And once again, I'm being left hung out to dry, but in a good way.'

'I started at the bottom now I'm here, from trash to t-shirt.'

'Stretched, pulled and re-milled into a whole new me.'

'I love to feel the sand between my fibres, and the water through my seams, oh how life could have turned out so different.' 

'I could have come back as a dog, but a t-shirt is a man's true best friend' 

'Everyone deserves a second chance, even a t-shirt.'

Photography by Jordan Malane