Brand teams with Teemill to produce t-shirt which it says will never enter landfill.
BBC Earth has teamed up with Teemill to propose a solution to one of the greatest problems caused by fast fashion – landfill.
The new #SustainableMe zero waste t-shirt presents an entirely new model for fashion by recovering and reusing discarded organic cotton garments mixed with 100% GOTS certified cotton, printed in the UK seconds after it has been ordered to create a high-quality t-shirt with a minimal environmental footprint. Best of all, it can be recycled over and over again and need never enter landfill.
Designed from the start to be returned once it has worn out, Teemill makes new products from the material that it recovers.
To enable this, it has created a unique recovery system where a customer can scan their worn out product with a mobile phone and activate a freepost code plus receiving £5 off a new item, to make recycling an old t-shirt free and easy.
“Slowing the fashion down doesn’t fix it. It makes much more sense to recover and reuse material than throw it away, so we built tech to power the reverse logistics of fashion,” explained Mart Drake-Knight from Teemill. “It’s not about doing less, our ambition is to redesign the industry.
“We’ve shown it’s possible to create a positive loop where people are rewarded for keeping pure material flowing.”
Julia Kenyon, global brand director for BBC Earth, added: “BBC Earth launched the #SustainableMe movement in the hope of inspiring change and this marks a giant step forwards.
“This isn’t just a t-shirt, Teemill have used creativity and innovation to present a solution to a major environmental problem and we’re proud to be partnering with them for this launch.”
The BBC Earth #SustainableMe t-shirt is available from www.bbcearth.teemill.com, priced at £20. A further t-shirt collection made from certified organic cotton and inspired by BBC Earth will also be available.
At London Fashion Week 2019, BBC Earth launched #SustainableMe to raise awareness of the need for sustainable fashion. The launch film revealed that over 100 billion garments are produced every year with three out of five items of clothing ending up in landfill within 12 months.
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