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Teemill to pay consumers to send return old clothes this Black Friday

Chloe Burney
17 November 2022

The world’s largest circular economy platform, Teemill, has commenced the #TakeBackFriday campaign to reverse the environmental impact of Black Friday, encouraging consumers to ‘be part of the solution, not part of the problem’.

Teemill is working with a community of 10,000 stores to ask customers to send back Teemill-made clothing they no longer wear. In exchange, participating consumers will receive a £5 credit to spend on future purchases.

On Black Friday (25 November) thousands of retailers use discounting to entice consumers to purchase new products, negatively impacting the environment.

The initiative was designed to repurpose clothing using Teemill’s Remill technology, resulting in reducing the number of materials ending up in landfills.

Currently, less than 1% of the world’s clothes are recycled back into new clothes once they are worn out. The company aims to help solve the crisis by creating an open-access circular economy supply chain.

Each of their garments are made using natural materials and renewable energy, so when the item is worn out, customers can scan a QR code to send them back.

The campaign is backed by global organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace, Surfers Against Sewage, Marine Conservation Society, and BBC Earth. It encourages brands, influencers, artists, and content creators to participate in a circular supply chain, so they can create, sell or remake sustainable and circular clothing products.

Teemill have already diverted 30,000kg of organic cotton from landfill, avoiding 1 million kg of CO2e emissions, and saving 586 million litres of water. Their goal is to take 100m items back around the supply loop by 2027.

Mart Drake-Knight, Teemill’s Co-Founder, 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.”

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