MYGroup and our material supply chain: Where waste becomes resource

ReFactory makes nothing from virgin material. Every piece of furniture, every object, every installation we produce begins life as waste – most of it bound for landfill before we get hold of it.

And when your entire range is built from recovered material, one thing matters above all: where it comes from.

Our supply chain is MYGroup, our parent company. MYGroup is one of the UK's most established operators in the sector, trusted by major brands and backed by 40years of hands-on material knowledge. The company runs four facilities across Yorkshire, processing up to 800,000 tonnes of waste a year, from agricultural, construction and clinical, to hazardous, cosmetics, food, textiles and plastic.

ReFactory serves as the final piece in MYGroup's circular system – the point at which recovered material ceases to be raw input and becomes a finished product.

Working with the ‘lost 25%’

A significant slice of UK waste falls outside conventional recycling. Mixed plastics, composite packaging, blister packs, treated timber, contaminated textiles. The material that's too awkward or too niche for standard systems to process.

MYGroup calls it 'the lost 25%' – the waste others can't or won't touch because nobody has a route for it. That's what arrives in our workshop. Material with a complicated past and – if we do our job properly – a considerably better future.

Most brands working with reclaimed material source through third parties. A supplier sends over a pallet of recovered material, the maker works with what arrives and the story behind the material gets vague around the edges.

Being directly integrated into MYGroup's recovery systems, we draw on the material as part of the chain, with no third parties or no hand-offs. We have a pipeline – consistent, sorted, tested and traceable raw material, fed by a company whose entire business is getting waste back into usable condition.

This matters both for transparency and provenance. We can tell you where a piece of ReFactory furniture came from, what it was before and every stage it passed through on its way here. It is also what sets our products apart. Because the material we work with can’t be easily recovered by any other provider, its transformation into new pieces is all the more remarkable.

A range built on the full spectrum of materials

The sheer breadth of what MYGroup recovers is also what makes our service range possible.

Recovered steel and timber feed bespoke commissions through ReSpoke. Post-consumer plastic packaging gets pressed into MYBoard and built into production furniture and fittings through ReTail, while higher-grade plastics are reformed into refined small-format objects through ReMould. Our ReStitch upholstery and interior items are drawn from creative use of recovered textiles and soft materials, while offcuts of waste that don't go into our own production end up in our Rag-N-Bone Shop.

One trusted source of recovered waste. Multiple ways to close the loop.

MYGroup's investment in cutting edge processes, whether fibre-to-fibre textile recycling or bio-derived materials, also means the range of recovered waste flowing into our workshop is widening, not narrowing. What we can make next year will look different from what we can make now. That's down to what MYGroup recovers next.

The connection to MYGroup is the single biggest reason ReFactory products carry the creativity and provenance they do. Four decades of recovery, feeding directly into everything we design and make. Materials staying in play. The chain staying under one roof.

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