Sustainability
Get Fresh. Do you dare to wear longer?
Do you dare to wear longer?
We’ve become so used to thinking that we must wash our clothes after every single wear that few of us even question it.
Would you dare to wear longer? How long do you think you could go?
With our Get Fresh campaign, we’re challenging people to wear their T-shirts for up to a week. But why?
Why do we care?
There are the obvious benefits that if you wash your clothes less often you’ll have a lot less laundry to do. But we’re not here to help with the household chores.
We’re committed to getting the carbon footprint for our clothes to zero. When we became Climate Positive, we offset our carbon footprint we offset the impact from the moment our bamboo is harvested right through to you buying and washing your BAM kit.
Offsetting is a good first step but our goal is to reduce our carbon footprint to zero.
We’re working with everyone in our supply chain to achieve this. But as washing has such an impact on our clothing footprint, we also want to encourage our customers to wash their clothes less.
Does washing our clothes really have a serious environmental impact?
We worked with industry experts to calculate the carbon footprint of our clothes. That revealed that an unbelievable 14.8%* of the emissions created throughout a T shirt’s lifetime are created by sticking it in the washing machine.
A single wash at 30°c uses 46 litres of water and creates 600g of carbon emissions. Up to 700,000 micro-fibres are released. And while bamboo is biodegradable, so you don’t have to worry about plastic making its way into the oceans, microfibres are still released.
Washing at 40°c and tumble drying multiplies the carbon emissions to 2.4kg of carbon emissions. That’s four times the impact. You could drive eleven kilometres instead.
Washing at 30°c and line drying is good practice. But we could still halve our impact by simply washing every second wear.
So do you dare to wear longer?
We don’t want you to lose friends over this. But the good news is, you really don’t need to.
It helps to know why our clothes get smelly. A T-shirt starts to smell when air hits the moisture of your sweat. With a synthetic top, the moisture sits on the top of the fabric. It’s why it feels damp and it’s why it gets smelly.
One of the reasons we love bamboo is that it has a fibre structure which absorbs moisture really effectively. It’s 40% more absorbent than organic cotton. As the air can’t get to the moisture (your sweat), the odour causing bacteria can’t do its thing and so your T-shirt stays fresh. As do you.
Can you wear your bamboo T-shirt twice before washing? Three times? Dare you wear it a week?
When it comes to finding small changes that make a big difference, there are few changes that require less effort than this. And the impact is huge.
So one more question. Are you in?
*Based on BAM’s 2019 footprint calculations using 50 washes at 30°c in an average size modern washing machine
**Washed at 30°c and line dried
