What Is SuperCircle And How Is It Changing Fashion And Climate?
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By Cassell Ferere originally published on Forbes.com
What Is SuperCircle And How Is It Changing Fashion And Climate?
85% of our wardrobes go to waste, likely without the intent to recycle them, and our disposed of clothing ends up in landfills. These include items we may have thought went on to be recycled - in some sustainable way. The complex and intricate problem of garment recycling has sparked SuperCircle, the tech and reverse logistics platform that bridges the gap between retail and textile waste through innovative business relationships that scale the recyclability of discarded textiles.
“We always had this intention of, and this realization very early, even before the launch of [Thousand Fell]. You can design for circularity but you really need to build this engine to power circularity. And that is the unsexy stuff - the take-back, logistics, and tech. What SuperCircle is and the way we describe it is the tech and logistics infrastructure to link the retail brands with the waste management industry” states SuperCircle co-founder Chloe Songer.
Recycling is in the DNA of the Thousand Fell brand, and its founders Chloe Songer and Stuart Ahlum are taking the same business plan and strategy for their footwear brand that has managed to recycle over 3,000 pairs of their shoes per quarter with a capacity for 6,000 at its start in May 2020. Songer and Ahlum have spent an additional 18 months in research and development of footwear, from uppers to soles, and for a recycling program that has been a signature to the Thousand Fell name.
Songer shares, “There are awesome recycling partners like the New Denim Project, Renewcell - as well as, established industrial recycling partners that already recycle massive tonnage waste industrially that you can plug into if you can get enough volume prepped the right way. Brands have the intent on recycling, but there has been no link. No link for how to get back post-consumer waste; how to get it back affordably? How do you sort it? Or, how do you trace and track it to know exactly what the item is? ”
What SuperCircle does for brands, including the Thousand Fell footwear brand, is manage logistics of the recycling process from waste to reusable material. There are three principal parts of this logistical acrobatics; tech, shipping, and warehousing. Each covers the broader pain points of the post-consumer fashion industry.
“One of the biggest problems right now is sorting because if you take a grab bag or a 'mass' bag and you don't know what's in it,” Songer explains. “Most of those items end up having to go through down cycling waste streams. So our tech systems solve a lot of that. We plug in with a brand partner's website. We pull in all order management history from stores and online. Based on a customer email, we can see what items they’ve purchased - and we know product data, the entire material breakdown. We are tracing them back to our warehouse [and] the system spits out a set of rules based on the product data, or the fiber data.”
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