Isle of Wight company, Teemill, have launched a campaign today in which they plan to reverse Black Friday (25th November) to create Take Back Friday.
They say that instead of discounting to encourage customers to buy new products, they will be asking them to send back their old Teemill-made clothing so it can be made into new products – and they will be paying them to do it.
Drake-Knight: It fuels climate change and destroys nature
Teemill co-founder Mart Drake-Knight said,
“Black Friday is a symptom of how waste has been woven into the way our world works.
“Products have been designed to be thrown away, meaning the only way to create growth is make and sell more products and create more waste. It fuels climate change and destroys nature.
“We built Teemill to solve that issue. Our products are designed from the start to come back and be remade, and that means that instead of creating waste we create new products from it.
“Doing the right thing shouldn’t cost the earth, so we made the platform free because we want to encourage everyone who cares about these issues to have the chance to co-create a more sustainable future with us.”
Teemill say that currently, less than one per cent of the world’s clothes are made back into new clothes once they are worn out.
Those how have heard about the company before will know that it was designed to solve that crisis by creating an open-access circular economy supply chain that could be used by anyone in the world.
What is Teemill?
With more than 10,000 brands using it, Teemill – who say they are the world’s biggest dedicated circular economy platform – have bases in Freshwater and East Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
Teemill enables users – from global organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace, and BBC Earth, to brands, influencers, artists, and content creators – to create ecommerce stores connected to a circular supply chain, so they can create, sell or remake sustainable and circular clothing products.
Products are designed to be remade
All Teemill products are designed to be remade. Natural materials and renewable energy to make clothing on demand and when items wear out, customers scan a QR code on the label to send them back.
In return, they get £5 credit to spend on the future purchase of a circular economy product.
Innovative Remill process
Using our innovative Remill process, we turn returned products into new high-quality products, all of which can go through the same process over and over again. To date, Teemill has diverted 30,000kg of organic cotton from landfill, avoiding 1 million kg of CO2e emissions, and saving 586 million litres of water.
Our goal is to take 100m items back around the loop by 2027 and we need as many people to help as possible, so this Black Friday we are encouraging people to look in their wardrobes and turn worn out products back into store credit and useful material – it’s a way to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. We’re calling it Take Back Friday.
Supporting the campaign
Among the organisations backing the campaign are Isle of Wight fashion brand Rapanui, BBC Earth, WWF, Marine Conservation Society, the Wildlife Trusts, Shark Trust and The Lion Whisperer.
To send back items visit the Website to find out more.
News shared by Sofia on behalf of Teemill. Ed
