John Lewis launches buyback clothing scheme to cut waste

By

Barbara Santamaria

Published
Jun 18, 2018

John Lewis is trialling a clothing buyback scheme to help reduce the thousands of tonnes of unwanted clothes that are sent to UK landfills every year.

In collaboration with social enterprise app Stuffstr, the service allows customers to sell any unwanted clothing worth back to the department store, if it has been purchased from John Lewis over the past five years.

Shoppers can sell clothing bought online or in store, regardless of its condition, but need to make bundles worth at least £50. They can use the Stuffstr app to calculate how much they can receive for each item, and a courier collects the products from their house.

"We already take back used sofas, beds and large electrical items and either donate them to charity or reuse and recycle parts, and want to offer a service for fashion products,” commented Martyn White, sustainability manager at John Lewis.

“It’s estimated that the average UK household owns around £4,000 worth of clothes, but around 30 per cent of that clothing has not been worn for at least a year, most commonly because it no longer fits.

“We hope that by making it as easy as we possibly can for customers to pass on clothing that they’re no longer wearing we can ensure that the maximum life is extracted from items bought from us."

The project is being tested by 100 John Lewis customers, and any items bought back are resold, mended or recycled into new products.

"Every item has value, even old socks, and we want to make it as simple as possible for John Lewis customers to benefit from their unwanted clothes,” said Stuffstr chief executive John Atcheson.

The app services has previously partnered with H&M and The North Face on similar projects.