Around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, retailers’ websites all vie for attention, urging people to buy more stuff. Sustainable London fashion and lifestyle brand, Public Fibre, is too. But its “buy more” messages contain a twist. It is taunting people with the message, “buy more rubbish”.

The brand is using Black Friday to highlight people’s responsibilities around consumption. On November 27, it began “selling” the most commonly discarded items found in our oceans, including food wrappers, plastic bottles, plastic bags, plastic cutlery, straws, glass bottles, aluminium cans, 4 pack plastic rings, tyres and 2020’s new necessity, the face mask.

Buy any of these products and the proceeds will go to The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organisation developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of plastic.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s report in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), that by 2050 plastic in the oceans will outweigh fish, should have shocked people enough to make significant changes. The report also projected that the oceans will contain at least 937m tons of plastic and 895m tons of fish by 2050 and noted that part of the reason is that plastic use has increased 20-fold in the last 50 years, and is continuing to rise.

Public Fibre’s Black Friday undertaking is a call to action for consumers, highlighting both the overall problem of overconsumption and of the non-recyclable waste that its packaging generates on days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The campaign was created in-house.

Explore the products for sale here.