British brand Rapanui uses recycled cotton from own Remill T2T factory
Just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which now mark an entire week of discounts, British circular clothing brand Rapanui is offering a reminder that there is another way. Collections can be made from recovered cotton fibres, thus avoiding contributing to the growing mountain of textile waste. Eighty percent of all Black Friday purchases are thrown away sooner rather than later. According to findings by BBC Earth, three out of five T-shirts purchased end up in landfills within a year.
Rapanui was founded in 2009 as a fashion brand by brothers Mart and Rob Drake-Knight with just 200 pounds in a shed on the Isle of Wight. It relaunched in 2018 as the open-source platform Teemill to address the massive demand for T-shirts with a circular production model. The platform is now used by thousands of brands to create and sell sustainable clothing without holding stock or producing excess waste.
“Black Friday is a symptom of how waste has been woven into the way our world works. 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,” commented co-founder Mart Drake-Knight in a statement.
Remill offers take-back programme
The latest initiative, Remill, closes the loop with an open take-back programme that accepts clothing made from 100 percent cotton from any brand (excluding denim and underwear).
The returned items are collected, shredded and respun into new recycled products, which consist of 50 percent recycled cotton and 50 percent organic cotton.
Rapanui's latest collection is printed on T-shirts that use cotton recovered through Remill. They feature circular-themed nature designs – from the concentric rings of a tree trunk to the blossom of a dandelion – each reflecting the idea that materials should be reused and not thrown away.
Should these T-shirts also reach the end of their hopefully long life, they can be returned for recycling. To make this easier, each product contains a QR code that can be scanned for return information.
In 2025 alone, over 14 tonnes of cotton were collected in this way, and a total of over 102 tonnes since the launch of Remill.
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