‘Take Back Friday’ could be the new solution to your Black Friday woes

This Black Friday, clothing company Teemill is working with its community of 10,000 stores to ask customers to send back their Teemill-made clothes. The move is as part of the #TakeBackFriday campaign to reduce excess consumption, so that the returned products will be remade and repurposed into new pieces.

Teemill tells HUNGER that their “innovative Remill technology” will be used, and customers will be rewarded with “£5 credit to spend on future purchases of circular economy products”.

On the 25th of November, the products that will usually be discounted have been adopted by this new scheme. Teemill were unsatisfied with the use of products after they were worn out, with 1% of the world’s clothes recycled back into new items. 

Using their innovative Remill process, they 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. “Teemill was designed to solve that crisis by creating an open-access circular economy supply chain that could be used by anyone in the world”, they say.

Co-founder Mart Drake-Knight adds: “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.”

Using some of their 10,000 brands, including WWF, Greenpeace and BBC Earth, they will create ecommerce stores to create, sell or remake sustainable products. Influencers, artists and content creators can get in on it too, so the Remill process can continue over and over again.

Using natural materials and renewable energy, customers of the brand can scan a QR code on the label to send back, receiving the credit to spend on future essential purchases. They have already “diverted 30,000kg of organic cotton from landfill, avoiding 1 million kg of CO2e emissions, and saving 586 million litres of water”, an impressive feat so far.

But in their “goal to take 100m items back around the loop by 2027”, this new initiative proves an exciting move not just for Teemill, but for the future of how we view and approach Black Friday.