This is a post about a tiny island off the southern coast of England (offshore between Bournemouth and Portsmouth, if you must know). It’s the Isle of Wight.
And on that island is a company which makes … T-shirts. Teemill started out as a company to make T-shirts, but this is about much more than that. It’s about a mindset shift – a portfolio, if you will - to focused on sustainable practices and a circular economy. You may want to read on.
At the core of their idea is that all manufacturing is speculative. Products are made with the hope that someone will buy them. If they are not purchased, they sit on the shelf and cause economic waste, and job loss (social impact!) and when these speculations are wrong, and items are taken off the shelf and shipped back (ecological impact!) or sent to landfill (more ecological impact!).
What Teemill is up to is to manufacture in near-real-time. Products are made when the demand is there. They have brought in significant technology (each implementation a project) to accomplish this.
It’s really (trust me!) worthwhile to take a look at this short video by Teemill’s co-founder Mart Drake-Knight.
Good! You watched it. Didn’t you like the part about the 5-year old’s letter to “Mr. Bin Man”?
So Teemill started with clothing. Why?
60% of clothes are made from plastic.
99% of used clothing goes to landfill or is incinerated
40 tons of clothing are burned or buried every second
In the fashion industry, 40% of all production are never used
That’s in the talk. You remember, right? You watched it, right?
The young founders of Teemill realized that they would have to move away from a linear production model, which consists of these steps:
Extraction: Raw materials are extracted from the environment.
Production: The materials are transformed into products.
Consumption: Consumers purchase and use the products.
Disposal: The products are thrown away, often in landfills or incinerators
To do that, people would have to be able to make millions of decisions at the speed of light and implement them on machines and systems that could act on those decisions almost instantaneously. People simply cannot do that.
But computers can – especially networked, highly-capable computers, with outstanding purpose-built software.
And this is what Teemill does to make T-shrits. See it here in this video.
In Part 2 of this post, I will talk more about the circular economy and the projects that will help make that real.
