BAM launches 'dare to wear longer' eco campaign

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jul 27, 2021

As brands continue to focus on eco issues in their marketing, Bamboo Clothing (known as BAM) is launching a new campaign that tries to convince consumers to wash their clothes less often.

That goes against what consumers have been told to do for years so it may be a big task. The company is getting the message across via a consumer challenge, in which it dares its customers to “to wear their BAM T-shirt for a week without washing it, to highlight the impact on the planet of customer laundry practices – and try and address habits of washing clothes after every time of wearing them”.

The thinking behind this is that a single wash at 40°C and tumble drying is the equivalent of driving 11km in terms of the eco impact on the planet.

And BAM said it has calculated that “a staggering 26% of the carbon emissions from its clothes’ lifetime (including growing bamboo, manufacturing and transporting) comes from customer comes from customer laundering habits”.

The message also neatly syncs with its bamboo-based products as the company also said: “A T-shirt starts to smell when air hits the moisture of your sweat. With a synthetic top, the air sits on the top of the fabric which is why it feels damp and it’s why it gets smelly. Cotton is a little better, but bamboo has a fibre structure which absorbs moisture really effectively (it’s 3 x more absorbent than organic cotton), which means the air can’t get to the moisture to do its thing - and so your t-shirt stays fresh.”

Launching on 2 August with the #daretowearlonger hashtag, the campaign is part of BAM’s drive to be “impact-positive by 2030”.

The company has for the past two years been measuring and offsetting the carbon emissions created created through every process in its clothing’s lifetime and said that every one of its garments is “now climate-positive, from forest to fabric to 50 washes”.