Impact Positive by 2030

Our ultimate goal is to have a net positive impact, on people, nature and the climate. We’re doing everything we can to achieve this by 2030. These are ambitious goals. We call them BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals) and yes, we don’t know exactly how we’ll achieve them all yet, but we truly believe this is what a sustainable clothing brand should look like, and BHAGs inspire us to keep pushing forward. Keep reading to learn more about our goals, how we’re working towards them and what progress we’ve made so far.

People

Fair wages & treatment throughout the supply chain.

Discover more

Nature

A fully circular range which conserves natural resources, protects biodiversity, eliminates harmful pollution and closes the loop at the end of use.

Discover more

Climate

Remove more carbon from the atmosphere than the emissions we create.

Discover more

People

Fair wages & treatment throughout the supply chain.

Discover more

Nature

A fully circular range which conserves natural resources, protects biodiversity, eliminates harmful pollution and closes the loop at the end of use.

Discover more

Climate

Remove more carbon from the atmosphere than the emissions we create.

Discover more

At BAM we’ve always believed in building long term partnerships with our suppliers which means we understand what conditions are like on the ground – and we choose to work with suppliers who share our values. More than 80% of our products are produced in factories we’ve worked with for 5 years or more. But we know if we want to have a net positive impact on our people, there’s more we need to do, looking beyond our suppliers and further back along the supply chain

Improving wages and addressing power imbalances in our industry is a huge and complex challenge which will require alignment from brands, governments, suppliers and even consumer expectations. That’s why we’re joining forces with other brands and working with The Fair Wear Foundation. It’s not sexy attention-grabbing stuff. There’s no big headline. It’s slow, steady work but it’s the only way to create a fairer industry.

The Goal: Fair wages & treatment throughout the supply chain.

How we’re working towards it:

1. Bringing full traceability & transparency to our customers for every single item through digital BAM DNA product passports.

2. Supporting fairer wages and treatment by adopting the Fair Wear approach and looking beyond tier one garment factories.

3. Ensuring every team member thrives & benefits from the success of the business.

Successes so far

B-Corp certified

We became a certified B-Corp in 2023. We’re incredibly proud to be a part of a growing movement of businesses with purpose, committed to balancing our profit with our impact on people and planet.

B-Corp assesses us against 5 key pillars: Governance, Workers, Environment, Community and Customers. Our current score is 87.1(you need to score over 80 to certify), We’ll aim to increase this when we re-certify in 2026.

We chose to become members of the Fair Wear Foundation in 2021 for three reasons:

  1. We recognised we needed a more robust system to monitor conditions in our growing supply chain.
  2. We appreciate Fair Wear’s approach of shared responsibility between brands and suppliers. Fair Wear brands are expected to recognise the impact of their purchasing practices and work to address the root causes of any issues.
  3. We believe in being part of a bigger movement striving to create industry-wide change.

We became an accredited living wage employer in 2019.

We launched our employee ownership trust in 2021 to ensure every single one of our fantastic employees shares in BAM’s success.

‘‘anyone anywhere should be able to find out how, where, by whom and under what conditions their clothes are made”
Fashion Revolution

We believe transparency is key to real accountability and change in this industry. We started mapping our supply chain beyond tier one five years ago and we’re now able to share what we know (where there are gaps, we’ll be honest about them, and tell you what we’re doing about it). This has led to us launching BAM DNA as a pilot in 2022 and we’re now rolling it out across our entire range. By scanning the QR code on your care label (or clicking here) you can find out everything there is to know about how your clothing was made.

Nature was the inspiration for Dave Gordon, BAM’s founder when he started the business, and it remains a vital part of who we are today. In order to have net positive impact on nature, we must conserve natural resources, protect and restore biodiversity and eliminate harmful pollution and clothing waste. In 2018, we recognised that creating a fully circular range would be crucial to achieving our goal.

This means looking at every stage of our product life cycle. We’re choosing nature-based, lower impact and innovative materials and using those materials to develop unique, next-generation activewear fabrics. We’re tracing our supply chain and working with experts to measure manufacturing impacts and improve processes. And we’re keeping products in use longer through our resale and clothing donation partnerships, as well as creating recyclable clothing with a certified end-of-life solution and free take-back-scheme.

The Goal: A fully circular range which conserves natural resources, protects biodiversity, eliminates harmful pollution and closes the loop at the end of use.

How we’re working towards it:

1. Developing and utilising ground-breaking new materials which maintain the high-performance levels customers expect but which are lower impact and get us closer to fully circular.

2. Ensuring products are processed by factories focused on continual improvement and committed to zero discharge of hazardous chemicals.

3. Taking responsibility for our product’s end-of-use by verifying that they are recyclable or biodegradable not just in principle but in practice.

Successes so far

Choosing lower impact materials from day one

Since day one, lower impact raw materials like bamboo and organic cotton have accounted for more than 80% of our fibre usage.

As of 2022, 95% of the fibres we use are bio-based, organic or recycled. Our goal is 100% by 2030.

Read more about our fibre sourcing strategy here.

BAM has recognised that transitioning towards a fully circular range will be necessary if we are to truly protect the planet’s natural resources, biodiversity, and climate. 73% of clothing ends up in landfill or incinerated. We want to get that to zero.

That’s why in 2021, we launched our award-winning 73 Zero Jacket, developed in collaboration with a textile recycler. Since then, we have expanded our 73 Zero circular range to include more outerwear, fleece, knitwear and denim – all made with lower impact materials and processes, certified recyclable by the Circular Textiles Foundation and offered with a free take-back scheme.

Our 73 Zero collection now accounts for 7% of our range. We’re aiming for 25% by 2025.

Sharewear is a charity on a mission to eliminate clothing poverty and reduce clothing waste in the UK. When we met them in 2020, we were shocked to learn about the scale of clothing poverty in this country. It’s especially shocking given what we already knew about the scale of the clothing waste problem.

In 2022, we offered customers a postage-paid donation bag at checkout. The response was phenomenal leading to over 4000kgs of high-quality clothing being donated throughout the year.

The service is on pause now due to a lack of volunteer availability to receive and sort donations. If you’re interested in volunteering with Sharewear or sending a donation directly to them (they are based in Nottingham) please contact [email protected]

Ensuring safe viscose production has been one of our highest priorities for many years. The bamboo viscose in our products is sourced from two nominated producers. Ranked joint 3rd best on the Canopy Hot Button Index, both have achieved level 3 (the highest) OekoTex SteP certification and are engaged with the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals Foundation MMCF module.

Safe chemical management and waste treatment is an important topic throughout textile supply chains. It impacts fabric dyeing and finishing all the way to fibre and raw material production.

The Roadmap to Zero Programme, by ZDHC (Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals Foundation) is leading the fashion industry to eliminate harmful chemicals from its supply chain by building the foundation for more sustainable manufacturing to protect workers, consumers and our planet’s ecosystems. 

We signed up in 2020 and have been using the ZDHC tools and resources to monitor the wet processors (suppliers who use chemicals and water in their processes) in our supply chain and encourage them to engage in the ‘Roadmap to Zero’ programme.

Canopy Style includes more than 500 brands committed to protecting ancient & endangered forests through their packaging and fibre sourcing. Signatories are encouraged to adopt meaningful policies and targets, work towards greater traceability and transparency in their supply chains and support the adoption of next generation and innovative materials.

Read our commitment here.

The reason we’re not Impact Positive now is (among other things) that the solutions we need to create a fully circular range, and a truly sustainable industry, just don’t exist yet. As part of our goal, it has to be our responsibility to invest in developing new technologies.

We’re currently supporting research into a new bio-based approach to textile recycling with part-funding and by providing materials and access to our industrial network and processes. If successful, this could create an end-of-life solution for a huge portion of our range made from mixed fibre blends.

"We’re searching for innovative solutions to the textile crisis. Bio-based processes could be the break-through we need and we’re delighted to be working with BAM."

Dr Alexandra Lanot, Senior Researcher, University of York.

Bioremediation (using a fungus to eliminate pollution) could be a part of the answer to the millions of tonnes of clothing waste already in landfill. That’s why in 2020 we funded a researcher to spend a year in the lab developing a system to trial different fungi to see how well they can break down our textiles. We continue to provide materials and support for this on-going research and are really excited about how it’s developing.

"We will continue the pioneering work BAM has enabled us to begin."

Suzy Moody MRSB, Lecturer in Microbiology, Kingston University

When we started out we really didn’t know how we’d do it so we took a bold step and more than offset all our emissions from the field to the factory to the first fifty washes.

Today, having spent years creating certified recyclable clothing, launching innovative fabrics, investing in scientific advances, and collaborating across the industry for fairer conditions for garment workers, we’re starting to see a clear path to Impact Positive. It’s time to go all in on investing both our time and money on the initiatives that will make a permanent difference. That’s why we’ve decided to step away from a significant carbon offsetting program so we can concentrate on these game changers. This is backed up by our continual focus on measuring and reducing our footprint through the way we design and make our products.

The Goal: Remove more carbon from the atmosphere than the emissions we create.

How we’re working towards it:

1. Reducing our carbon footprint by using less energy and reducing the use of fossil fuels as fast and as much as possible.

2. Promoting carbon removals with the choice of natural raw materials - such as bamboo - that suck CO2 out of the air and store it in the soil, roots, forests and the fibres that we use.

Successes so far

Working with experts to measure our impact

The most effective way for us to reduce our impact is simple – we need to lower product emissions. The first step is to understand those emissions. We started working with Green Story in 2020 because we wanted to work with 3rd party experts to help us measure the impact of our products and then communicate the impact savings for our clothes when compared to conventionally made products. You can now see that information on each item’s product page and via our digital product passports (BAM DNA).

More recently, we’ve been piloting a new technology from Green Story that will allow us accurately forecast the impact of our choices about supplier, fibre, processes, in fact everything, before we place an order. This will empower BAM’s designers, buyers and merchandisers to make lower impact decisions before they place an order. This has the potential to transform not just our impact but that of the industry.

Bamboo is an amazing raw material when it comes to the climate. Here are some of the reasons we love it:
1. It grows incredibly quickly, sequestering carbon as it grows (around two thirds of which are stored in the roots and soil).
2. Its rapid regeneration means it can be harvested annually, this high yield means less land is needed to produce the same amount of material (compared with hardwood trees and cotton).
3. It can be harvested without disturbing root systems (unlike hardwood trees and cotton), meaning the carbon and biodiversity stored in the roots and soil is protected. One of the problems with modern agriculture is the degradation of soil health over time. Bamboo not only avoids this problem, but it can actually help to regenerate damaged soil.
4. It requires little to no irrigation or pesticides to thrive.

The majority of a product’s associated emissions happen during product manufacture, early in the supply chain. For BAM and companies like us, choosing to work with the right partners is how we’ll reduce our impact.

BAM maintains long term partnerships with key suppliers. And we choose new partners very carefully to ensure they share our values, understand our impact goals and are willing to work with us to achieve them.

3 of BAM’s tier 1 garment factories have installed solar panels on their roofs in the last 3 years.

1 of BAM’s key supplier partners recently became a certified B-Corp.

Between 2019 and 2022, we offset more than our entire carbon footprint including product manufacture and business operations. We even offset 50 customer washes per item, making us a climate positive company through the use of offsetting. We supported some fantastic projects during this time that made a real difference not only to the climate but also to communities, such as the water boreholes project in Kenya.

In 2022, we made the decision to move away from offsetting. We did this so we could invest more of our time and money into the initiatives that will make a permanent difference to our impact. That means we no longer call ourselves climate positive. But that’s ok. Because instead of offsetting our emissions, we’re actively reducing them.

Read more about how here.

Latest news

We’re B-corp certified.

If you’ve heard the term before but are not sure what it’s about, here’s what...

Read more
Going all in on reducing our emissions.

There are some exciting changes afoot! Like all the best ambitions, when we set our...

Read more
Stepping up for the Forests of the World

Every year, three billion trees are cut down to produce paper packaging. Three billion trees...

Read more
How we’re ensuring safe viscose production.

At BAM, we believe that working with bamboo is good for the planet, and better...

Read more
The difference between recycled and recyclable and why it matters

This AW21, we’re launching our fully circular 73 Zero insulated jacket. That means it’s both...

Read more
Why isn’t every jacket like our 73 Zero insulated jacket? A circularity story.

Our 73 Zero insulated jacket is completely circular: it’s made from recycled materials; it’s 100%...

Read more
What is circularity and why is it so important to us?

A circular economy in very simple terms means a less wasteful one, but of course,...

Read more
No Wear to Run, by Louise Cooke; CEO of Sharewear Clothing Scheme

#noWeartorun If there’s one feeling that has bound everyone together in the last year it’s...

Read more

Impact Positive by 2030

Our ultimate goal is to have a net positive impact, on people, nature and the climate. We’re doing everything we can to achieve this by 2030. These are ambitious goals. We call them BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals) and yes, we don’t know exactly how we’ll achieve them all yet, but we truly believe this is what a sustainable clothing brand should look like, and BHAGs inspire us to keep pushing forward. Keep reading to learn more about our goals, how we’re working towards them and what progress we’ve made so far.

People

Fair wages & treatment throughout the supply chain.

Discover more

Nature

A fully circular range which conserves natural resources, protects biodiversity, eliminates harmful pollution and closes the loop at the end of use.

Discover more

Climate

Remove more carbon from the atmosphere than the emissions we create.

Discover more

People

Fair wages & treatment throughout the supply chain.

Discover more

Nature

A fully circular range which conserves natural resources, protects biodiversity, eliminates harmful pollution and closes the loop at the end of use.

Discover more

Climate

Remove more carbon from the atmosphere than the emissions we create.

Discover more