Louder than Words Recycling
Thank you for being a positive particiPANT and recycling underwear with us at the B Corp Louder Than Words festival.
We really appreciate your support and you will be helping vulnerable people in the UK and globally, as well as saving lots of items from ending up in landfill.
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As a thank you for recycling your items, we're giving you 10% any orders placed until midnight on Sunday 15th September. Simply use this code at checkout:
BCORPLTW24
Recycling?
When we throw clothes 'away' they end up in landfill or get incinerated, adding to the world's waste problem and filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.
For clothes that are still wearable, donating is a much better option.
And if it's reached the end of its life, it's always worth checking if something can be recycled.
Your Donations:
In recent years, there's been a number of scandals surrounding in-store recycling bins, so when we set up our own scheme, we knew we wanted to work with reliable partners.
We did the leg work to find them so you don't have to! Donate lightly worn bras to Smalls For All, and send us your (clean) socks, tights and undies and we'll recycle them for you.
In 2023, we recycled or donated 282kg.
Thanks to our brilliant customers, our scheme is growing in popularity, and we have set a big ambitious goal of recycling or donating 563kg a year by 2027.
This will mean we're actively recycling or reusing more kg of underwear than we are using in terms of new organic cotton per year! And the good news is, we've almost matched 2023's total already this year!
Where your recycling donations go:
Cotton Lives On™ and Naturalmat
We collect your old cotton underwear and socks (any brand!) to recycle them through the Cotton Lives On™ recycling programme and Naturalmat, who will turn them into roll mats for community organisations.
The underwear will be shredded and reprocessed into a pad which Naturalmat will work their magic on to turn your old cottons into something brand new.
We need items with 85% cotton or more to turn them into roll mats, so check your labels and empty your drawers of doom knowing the items will be recycled to benefit others.
Where your recycling goes
Who are TerraCycle?
We recycle items that are made of more synthetic fibres (e.g. some underwear, tights & swimwear) using TerraCycle's textile recycling programme.
TerraCycle can collect and recycle almost any form of waste and so save millions of pounds of waste from landfill and incinerators every year.
Bras & new undies for
Smalls for All
All 'gently-worn' bras go to our main charity partner, Smalls for All. They distribute them to vulnerable people in the UK and across Africa, so just because it no longer fits you, doesn't mean it can't support someone else! We also collect new undies for Smalls, to give a bit of dignity to those who need it most.
Looking forward:
Although our current recycling programmes are working well, we're still looking to improve what we do and find an even more sustainable option to do our bit to end textile waste. Our end goal is to find a fibre-to-fibre recycling programme that will turn (y)our unwanted undies back into new fibres, but unfortunately as a small business it can be difficult to get the quantity and financing to do this.
We’re hoping to grow and improve our circularity as both our brand and the industry's innovation grows though, so we welcome any of your feedback or thoughts - or even help - on this.
We hope this is the first step of many towards a totally circular economy!
