At better thinking, we’re always learning about products, services and companies that have improved their social responsibility or lessened their environmental impact. It’s great to see people taking ethical issues seriously, but we always find there’s something that could be improved. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” we thought, “if there was a product that was as ethical as can be at every turn? That wasn’t only less bad, but was absolutely the best it could be?”

We’re not about to go into the t-shirt making industry - the project exists because we want to set a challenge and a standard to businesses and industry, to share knowledge of best practice, to engage as many people on the street with the issues as we can and to end up with more than blue sky thinking at the end of it all. We made the vehicle the humble t-shirt because it means something to everyone, engaging with experts at the forefront of sustainable design, high street clothing manufacturers, squatters in Amsterdam and grannies in Scotland. It also aims to highlight and tackle some of the problems created by one of the world’s most environmentally damaging industries.

The t-shirt is a complicated beast, with infinite possible combinations of production, use and disposal options that all affect its impact. We are far from experts in the field of sustainable textiles and your knowledge is as good as, if not better than, ours: tell us the name of the innovative eco-fabric you’ve just discovered, the cut and colour you simply cannot live without, the phone number of your dad’s mate who runs a more ethical garment factory, the considerations we’ve left out that you think are blindingly obvious.

The perfect t-shirt is something of a controversial title: until every material, tool, energy source, transport method and person involved in the project has an environmental footprint of zero and an impressive social record, the t-shirt will be responsible for some kind of impact . Accepting this, we’re going to consider every impact the t-shirt could have, so we can justify every decision we made, showing how it results in the lowest overall impact. OK, so maybe a more fitting title would have been ‘the considered t-shirt’, but ‘perfect’ sounds so much sexier – and will inevitably spur us on to get as close as we possibly can to meeting an impossible expectation.