About BlueBuck

Climate Friendly underwear

Using only organic cotton

Using renewable energy

Minimizing our cotton miles

Minimizing our ‘cotton miles’

by growing our cotton in Turkey and manufacturing in Europe, instead of the Far East, we drastically reduce the distance our underwear travels and nothing is transported by plane.

What’s behind the ‘Made In’ label of many clothing brands?

A garment’s ‘Made In’ label can be very misleading. It indicates the country in which a garment has been assembled into a finished product, but says little of the supply chain that got it there. Many stages will have preceded the final assembly stage: growing the cotton, spinning the fibre into a yarn, knitting the fabric, dyeing and finishing the fabric, and cutting the fabric etc. And it is not unusual for each of these stages to take place in a different country.

Based on the ‘Made In’ label alone it’s impossible for a consumer to know the complete history and provenance of a product. Consider this: it’s possible to have a garment made with cotton grown in Turkey, spun in Thailand, made into a fabric in China, cut and assembled into a final garment in the US, and sold in a shop in Europe. The garment would carry a ‘Made in USA’ label, but would have travelled 40,000 km around the world, across three continents.

Yet, generally, the farther a garment travels during the production process the greater the fuel consumption, and therefore the release of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Bluebuck underwear is entirely produced in Europe

To minimise our impact on climate change Bluebuck avoids a far-flung supply chain. Instead, we employ one in which the links are relatively close together.

Here’s how it works:

• Our organic cotton is grown in Turkey, the closest cotton-growing country to Europe.
• The raw cotton is then shipped by road to Porto in Portugal to be spun into a yarn.
• The yarn is also made into a fabric and dyed in Portugal.
• The elastic waistband is made in Austria and shipped by road to Portugal.
• The two cotton labels (the logo label at the front and the care label inside the garment) are made in Italy and shipped by road to Portugal.
• Finally the fabric is cut, the pieces are assembled, and the labels are sewn in – all in Portugal.
• The finished underwear is then shipped by road from Portugal to a warehouse in the UK.

So the total distance travelled by our underwear, from the raw cotton in Turkey to storage in our UK warehouse, is about 6,000km.

You may have noticed that all our undies are transported by road, never by air. That’s because, on average, road transport creates 75% less CO2 emissions than short-haul air transport. As a comparison, that means that road transport of a pair of Bluebuck briefs over 2,000km (the distance from Portugal to the UK) generates 95% less CO2 than flying the equivalent garment from Asia to the UK!