Returned items are recovered, shredded, and respun into new recycled products.
Just one per cent of fashion items are recycled back into new clothing globally, leaving the vast majority to become waste in landfill.
Millions of tonnes of Christmas impulse buys, including t-shirts, end up in landfill every year, despite being made from materials that could be reused.
Rapanui, the British leading circular clothing brand, is now turning that waste into a new collection made from recovered cotton fibre. You can see the Rapanui collection here.
Waste
Mart Drake-Knight, a co-founder, told The Ecologist: “Products have been designed to be thrown away, meaning the only way to create growth is make and sell more products and create more waste. We built Teemill to solve that issue.”
The company was founded in 2009 by brothers Mart and Rob Drake-Knight with £200 in a shed on the Isle of Wight.
The brothers went on to develop the circular manufacturing model Teemill — a platform now used by thousands of brands to create and sell sustainable clothing without holding stock or producing excess waste.
Pandas
To close the loop, the brothers also created Remill, an open take-back programme that accepts 100 per cent cotton - excluding denim and underwear - clothing from any brand.
Returned items are recovered, shredded, and respun into new recycled products made from 50 per cent post-consumer recycled cotton and 50 per cent organic cotton.
In 2025 the programme recovered over 14,000 kg of cotton, bringing the total to more than 102,000 kg since launch — equivalent to the weight of 887 adult giant pandas.
Dandelion
Rapanui’s newest collection is printed on t-shirts that use cotton recovered through Remill. They feature circular-themed nature designs each reflecting the idea that materials should return, and not be thrown away.
The designs include the concentric rings of a tree trunk to the bloom of a dandelion.
After a long life of wear, these t-shirts can be returned for recycling. The wearer can simply scan the QR code inside the product or request a returns label at remillfibre.com. Participants can also receive Rapanui store credit for any 100 per cent cotton product they send in.
This Author
Brendan Montague is an editor of The Ecologist. The Ecologist sells a range of t-shirts with Teemill, which can be found at www.ecologist.teemill.com.
