Circular economy fashion platform reverses Black Friday with ‘TakeBackFriday’ campaign

As part of Bdaily’s latest feature, Retail Week, we hear from Teemill, the “world’s biggest dedicated circular economy platform”, which is working with its community of 10,000 stores to ask customers to send back Teemill-made clothing they no longer wear as part of its #TakeBackFriday campaign.

Currently, less than 1 per cent of the world’s clothes are made back into new clothes once they are worn out. Teemill was designed to solve this “crisis” by creating an open-access circular economy supply chain that could be used by anyone in the world.

Teemill enables users, from global organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace, and BBC Earth, to brands, influencers, artists, and content creators, to create e-commerce stores connected to a circular supply chain, so they can create, sell or remake sustainable and circular clothing products.

All Teemill products are designed to be remade. It uses 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.

Using its “innovative” Remill process, the platform turns returned products into new ones, 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.

The company’s goal is to take 100 million items back “around the loop” by 2027. Thus, this Black Friday Teemill is encouraging people to look in their wardrobes and turn worn out products back into store credit and useful material.

Teemill co-founder Mart Drake-Knight commented: “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.”

The campaign has the support of organisations including WWF, BBC Earth, and Surfers Against Sewage.

By Matthew Neville – Correspondent, Bdaily

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