Are Your Tattoos Locally Sourced?

July 31, 2015

by Dale Shoemaker

At the Screaming Crow Tattoo shop in Pittsburgh, tattoo artist Brett Rude Scott is getting ready to cover a customer’s unwanted flower tattoo with a purple and green cupcake.

Cover-ups are a routine job for Scott. What's unusual, is where all the supplies at Screaming Crow are coming from. All of the ink, needles and tubes that hold the ink are locally sourced; they come from Jolly Roger Tattoo Supply, which is about seven miles from the shop. For Screaming Crow owner Eric Corbin, his choice to buy local is deliberate. It’s his way of giving back to the community—and for Screaming Crow, community is important. Corbin buys his coffee from a cafe a few doors from his own shop, and is a part of a community organization that supports local businesses.

Back in June, Corbin registered his tattoo shop with Sustainable Pittsburgh, a city-sponsored organization that promotes sustainable business practices. The group helps shops like Corbin’s receive a sustainable small business designation. Corbin filled out a literal checklist to earn his—checking off the boxes that said he recycles, cuts energy costs where he can and buys local.

“I go a little bit out of my way to do it, but it’s the right thing to do for me,” Corbin says.

Corbin also bought something called an autoclave to sterilize the equipment. It allows the shop to reuse the steel tubes that hold the ink.

“A lot of our guys are old school. They like the steel tubes and things like that so we clean them, we sterilize them, reuse them,” he says. “A lot of artists are using disposable tubes where you use it once and throw it away. That’s a lot of plastic going out the door.”

After businesses fill out the checklist, they get a ranking: bronze, silver or gold. The Screaming Crow got a silver ranking. About 90 other businesses are going through the process.

Sustainable Pittsburgh’s  program manager Matt Mehalik says when the tattoo shop buys its steel tubes, it not only reduces waste. It can also help other businesses and their workers.

“There’s probably a group of employees working here, rather than that whole thing being outsourced somewhere else,” Mehalik says. “If you purchase at a local business, that local business owner is usually the person that supports the girl scouts or the little league team or makes a donation to the school.”

Though buying local is often folded in with the general concept of sustainability, it doesn’t always have a direct impact on the environment. Specifically, for many products—from steel tubes to food—most of their carbon footprint comes from production, not transportation.

For example, in a 2008 study, Chris Weber and fellow researcher H. Scott Matthews measured how much carbon dioxide farms and food companies produced when food was grown, and when it was shipped. They found that producing some foods, like beef, creates a lot of CO2. But whether that food was trucked across the country—or just around the city — didn’t make much difference.

“The carbon footprint of producing the food is much more important than where the food comes from. Or, in short, what you eat matters more than where it comes from, from a carbon footprint standpoint,” Weber says.

And, Weber says, the same can be said for many products, like steel tattoo tubes.

But this doesn’t mean buying local isn’t sustainable. Rather, Mehalik says, the concept of sustainability is much broader than just environmental. While Sustainable Pittsburgh’s checklist for businesses includes things like efficiency in transport, energy, and water usage, Mehalik says those aren’t on the list to help the environment. They’re just good business practices.

“You can call [being sustainable] a movement, as more and more people become aware of it, on the corporate side, on the management side. It’s strategy,” Mehalik says.

But whether they’re helping themselves, or their community, the guys at Screaming Crow are glad to be recognized as a business trying to help the city and its people, in a lasting way.

“This is what we’ve been doing for years,” Corbin says. “And what we’re doing is working for us.”