THE INTERVIEW
ou’re one of two brothers
who started a clothing
company from a shed on
the Isle of Wight, UK. How
was the idea originally born?
When I was five, we walked past an
overflowing dustbin and I started crying
because I couldn’t work out where
stuff from the dustbin goes. So I wrote
a letter to the bin-man. When we grew
up we were uncomfortable being
part of the problem, and we wanted
to make the sustainable products we
wanted to see in the world.
We started in our Mum’s shed in the
garden when we were teenagers, with
about £200 savings. If you’re small and
don’t have resources, you have to come
up with new ways of doing things. You
cannot afford waste, and designing a
business that is efficient is well-aligned
with sustainability too. Our team is
about 100 strong now, and we have
a wind-powered factory the size of a
football pitch.
Y
It’s fantastic that all your products
are plastic-free. But whilst cotton is
natural, it’s a water-intensive crop
that often is associated with a lot of
pesticide use...
The water issue depends a lot on where
you grow it. Ours is grown in the north
of India in the wet season, so it’s just
a really rainy place. In the dry season
they grow onions. They’re able to do
this because the farms are organic.
Often farmers spray on insecticide and
use fertilisers that are not sustainable,
but organic farms are really simple. It’s
just cow poo and clever farming. The
best bit is how dense the air is with
life. When you walk around organic
cotton farms the ground is damp and
warm, and there are insects everywhere
making a racket. And as you’d expect,
following the bugs are the birds. It’s
actually scary coming home as the
fields are noticeably silent here in
comparison. Because the cotton grows
slower, it’s higher quality and results in
longer strands. This means a really nice
soft product, so actually farmers get
more revenue per acre even though the
farms are less productive by weight.
For someone who has bought clothing
produced by Teemill, can you explain
how else you have aimed to limit its
environmental impact?
From the farm to the factory, we look
JUL-SEP 2019 • BIRDLIFE
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at the entire product life cycle and look
for positive solutions. For example,
wastewater from dye-house effluent
is a major source of pollution in the
clothing industry. Where the BirdLife
fabrics are dyed, the water is recovered,
cleaned and recirculated and used
again. At the end, the water coming
out of the filters is crystal clear; there’s
a video of me drinking it. Further down
the line, we have some cool tech that
manages our supply chain, basically an
AI, that speeds up decision making and
prediction accuracy for stock so much
that we don’t need to use planes to run
our freight; we use boats instead.
You recently launched a ground-
breaking innovation in the clothing
Material from worn out t-shirts is
recovered and turned into new products
All photos via Teemill
industry that looks like a promising
solution to fast, wasteful fashion. What
do you mean by ‘circular economy’?
If you think about it, the economy is like
a production line. We take resources
out of the ground, turn them into
products that we then throw away. It’s
a conveyor belt that extracts resource
and makes waste. We’re talking about
bending that line and making it a circle.
It’s not about turning waste material
into compost. It’s about designing
the product from the start to come
back, and developing a system to
re-manufacture worn out material into
a new product. Every product we make
is designed to come back when it’s
worn out. The instructions are inside on
the wash label. We give the user money
“The economy is like a production line – you
turn resources into products then throw
them away. We bend that line into a circle”
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