#TakeBackFriday
As Black Friday looms, we chatted to the team at Teemill about their #TakeBackFriday campaign, taking a stand against the weekend of hasty over-consumption of new products by highlighting their fibre-to-fibre circularity.
Here they share with us info about the campaign and their journey to circularity…
The marketing industry might tell us that Black Friday is a special moment in the calendar, but the reality is it’s just business as usual on steroids.
80% of purchases made on Black Friday will end up in landfill, incinerated or downcycled – a staggering figure that reveals the way waste is woven into the fabric of today’s economy. Take a resource, turn it into a product, throw the product away after a short life… it’s take, make, waste, on an epic scale.
Pic credit: Teemill
But it doesn’t have to be. There are already solutions that can help to turn that straight line into a circle.
This year we have launched our biggest ever effort to reverse Black Friday. Our #TakebackFriday campaign is focussed on keeping valuable materials in the loop and out of landfill, by incentivising customers to send back their worn out clothing so we can turn it into new clothing.
The journey to get to this point started with the creation of Rapanui in 2008, a fashion brand built on a circular model, with products made to last, made from safe and renewable materials, and made to be made again. Rapanui has grown to become one of the most trusted fashion brands on the market, but we knew a single brand was not enough to change an entire industry.
That’s why we launched Teemill in 2018. Teemill took all the lessons we learned and the solutions we developed and made them available to anyone, anywhere. Now we have a community of 10,000 stores on the Teemill platform, each using it to design and sell circular and sustainable clothing.
Every product designed and sold through Teemill is made from either 100% organic or Remill cotton created from old products. That means when we get it back we can turn it into new products.
Pic credit: Teemill
The same cannot be said for the vast majority of the fashion industry. Less than 1% of clothing will be turned back into new clothes when a customer has finished with it. Almost 75% will end up being landfilled or burned, while around 12% will end up being turned into things like rags, mattress stuffing or insulation. The impact of all that waste is massive. In 2015, greenhouse gas emissions from textiles production were higher than all international shipping and flights combined.
On the flipside, creating a circular economy for fashion could play a pivotal role in addressing global challenges like climate change.
By using our Remill process, to turn returned products into new high-quality products, all of which can go through the same process over and over again. Every Remilled product means one less item that needs to be made from scratch.
We can take the benchmark water and carbon impact of a raw cotton product and multiply that by 95% (5% of the fibre is lost during recycling) to see how much we have saved through remilling. This gives us a figure that quantifies the impact of the circular economy on climate change and the water cycle.
Approximately 7.23kg of CO2 and 4478 litres of water is saved per tee that has been Remilled. For items that are returned to us that are still wearable, we work with local charity partners to ensure they go back on to the market for resale.
Pic credit: Teemill
Our hope for #TakebackFriday is to get back in one weekend what we might expect to get back in a month. In the long term our goal is to take 100m items back around the loop by 2027 and we need as many people to help as possible.