Any 100% cotton garment — Teemill-made or not — gets a free returns label, a second life, and store credit toward your next shirt.
A worn-out t-shirt is worth more to the loop than it is to a landfill. Take It Back is the customer-facing edge of Remill — the bit where the material comes home. It costs you nothing. You get store credit. The shirt gets a second life.
Three steps, no postage
Every shirt we sell has a small QR code printed inside the wash-care label. The code is your ticket back into the loop:
- Scan it with any phone. The link opens a page on Teemill’s site that recognises the garment.
- Print the label the page generates. It’s a pre-paid postal label — Royal Mail in the UK, USPS in the US, DHL elsewhere. Tape it to the shirt or to any envelope it fits in.
- Drop it in the post. Standard collection or post office, no special service required.
The garment travels back to the factory, gets sorted, shredded, blended, respun. (Mechanics: see The Remill loop.) You get store credit in your account — a fixed amount per garment, usable against your next purchase.
The credit is small in absolute terms, but it’s enough to make the trip to the post box worth it. That’s the entire point.
You don’t need to have bought from us
In 2023 Teemill opened Take It Back to any brand’s 100% cotton clothing. You don’t need to have bought from us. The shirt at the back of your drawer from a holiday in 2017 — the kids’ shirt that no longer fits — the promotional tee from a half marathon — all welcome. All become someone’s next shirt.
The exclusions are technical, not arbitrary:
- Denim: indigo dye and the chemical finishes used on denim weaves complicate the shredding process; the recovered fibre wouldn’t meet the GRS certification standard.
- Underwear and socks: typically contain elastane or polyester, which mechanical recycling can’t separate out.
- Blends: cotton/polyester mixes can’t be recovered as pure cotton on the other side of the loop.
If the label says 100% cotton, send it. If it says anything else, your local council’s textile recycling stream is probably the right home — but be aware that most household textile collections still go to downcycling (insulation, rags, padding), not back into new clothing.
100% cotton clothing welcome — not just Teemill's own. The loop is bigger than us.
The wardrobe is part of the loop
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2024 estimate is that the global fashion industry produces 92 million tonnes of textile waste per year, on track for 134 million tonnes by 2030 if nothing changes. 73% of that ends up in landfills or incinerators. Less than 1% becomes new clothing.
That 1% figure stays at 1% because the chain almost never closes. Most “textile recycling” actually means downcycling — old cotton becomes insulation or stuffing, never another shirt. Once the loop opens, it doesn’t close. The fibre exits the apparel system permanently.
Take It Back closes the loop. Every shirt that posts back is one less garment in the landfill statistic, and one more set of fibres that stays inside the apparel cycle instead of leaking out of it. It only works if customers participate. The QR code is the smallest piece of technology in the whole supply chain; it might also be the most consequential.
the rate at which textiles enter landfills or incinerators globally — Ellen MacArthur Foundation
