Allbirds says its net

Jul 05, 2023

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By Bella Webb

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Carbon has been the North Star of Allbirds’s sustainability strategy since the brand’s inception in 2016, but creating a net-zero carbon shoe has remained elusive — until now, it says.

Today, the San Francisco-based brand unveiled M0.0nshot, a sneaker with a net footprint of 0.0 kg of CO2 emissions. Instead of controversial carbon offsetting, the shoe relies on three materials Allbirds says are carbon-negative: regeneratively farmed merino wool, a sugarcane-based EVA foam and a bioplastic made from methane by US startup Mango Materials. According to Allbirds, the carbon sequestered in the production of these materials counters the residual impact of manufacturing, transportation, product use and end of life. The first prototype will be revealed at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen this June, with a commercial launch to follow in 2024.

Allbirds says the average pair of sneakers has a carbon footprint of 14 kg of CO2 emissions; its own previous record was 2.94kg of CO2 emissions — the result of its 2020 partnership with sportswear giant Adidas. One of its landmark sustainability commitments is to cut its carbon footprint in half by the end of 2025, and get it to near zero by 2030. It’s not the only brand choosing to reduce its direct emissions. Levi’s is working with the International Finance Corporation to help factories and mills reduce energy and water use; Ganni is building a solar plant with a longtime Portuguese supplier; and brands from Mara Hoffman to Sheep Inc. are using regeneratively farmed wool that can potentially sequester more carbon than its production emits.

By Christina Binkley

While the true potential of regenerative agriculture to sequester carbon is a subject of intense debate, the practice is unquestionably better than conventional industrial farming when it comes to emissions as well as soil health, water quality and other issues. Still, experts have raised concerns over carbon tunnel vision, and its potential to overlook other critical issues such as land and water use, biodiversity and chemical pollution.

“M0.0nshot isn’t a silver bullet for the climate crisis,” says co-founder and CEO Tim Brown. It’s simply the latest in a line of about 20 projects Allbirds has been pursuing in the last year, which it says have helped bring its overall emissions down by 12 per cent.

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By Amy Francombe

The net-zero carbon shoe launches at a time when the company is up against financial pressures. It went public on Nasdaq in 2021, part of an IPO boom that also included Poshmark, Rent the Runway, Thredup and Zegna. However, its results since filing have disappointed analysts, and shares are down 52 per cent this year. Net revenue decreased 13.4 per cent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2022, and net losses reached $24.9 million, compared to $10.4 million a year prior. The company appointed new chief finance officer Annie Mitchell in early March, as well as a strategic transformation plan to reignite growth and drive profitability.

“From the beginning, this has been about the intersection of purpose and profit, building a 100-year brand that proves these things can not only co-exist, but they’re essential to each other,” says Brown. “We’re just over a year into being a public company and there are challenges all over the place, all over the world. Allbirds is extremely focused on our customer and delivering products that consistently meet their needs and expectations. Carbon is our North Star, and M0.0nshot is a great example of what that can deliver.”

To make the net-zero carbon claim, Allbirds is using its internal life cycle assessment (LCA) tool, developed and verified by a third party in 2020, which calculated the footprint of materials, manufacturing, transportation, product use and end-of-life as approximately two kilograms of CO2. New to M0.0nshot, Allbirds is factoring in on-farm carbon sequestration, which is not covered by the original external verification of its LCA tool and deviates from standard industry practice, but the brand says is more comprehensive. This additional variable is a form of insetting, explains head of sustainability Hana Kajimura. “Historically, when you calculate the carbon footprint of something like wool, you’re just looking at emissions. But today, there are farms implementing regenerative practices, reforesting their properties and trying to make their farms into carbon sinks. In those cases, we have to figure out a new way to quantify and value those efforts.”

The regenerative merino wool used for M0.0nshot is sourced from Lake Hawea Station in New Zealand, which is working with the brand and the New Zealand Merino Company to develop a new method of quantifying a product’s carbon footprint. This method accounts for carbon sequestration and apportions credit between brands and suppliers, so that farms can be recognised for their investments in more sustainable practices. The farm-level carbon footprint of Lake Hawea Station was verified by Toitū Envirocare, a New Zealand-based B Corp and carbon certification business.

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“Most growers are already removing carbon through vegetation on farms, but they are limited by the constraints of current carbon footprint standards and the lack of connection to experts who can help growers accurately measure and estimate their removals,” explains Donna Chan, regenerative transformation manager at The New Zealand Merino Company. “To make regenerative farming possible for growers we need widespread adoption of net-carbon emissions reporting, so their efforts can be acknowledged, and we need to remove as many roadblocks as we can when it comes to cost, complexity and accessing expertise. This will only happen with support throughout the value chain and brands who recognise the value of low-, no- and negative-carbon wool.”

The new M0.0nshot shoe from Allbirds features a regenerative merino wool upper, sugarcane-based foam midsole, and bioplastic eyelets.

There is no common global metric for measuring carbon sequestration, says independent regenerative agriculture expert Emma Chow, although the Global Farm Metric Coalition is hoping to change this. Nor is there a common standard for what regenerative agriculture must look like, and the amount of carbon a farm can store. “We live in a world where we want quick and easy stats but it’s inherently complex and patient when you’re working with nature,” adds Chow. “For example, it’s important to communicate with consumers that sequestered carbon doesn’t just accumulate year-on-year, it also cycles back out into the atmosphere. That needs to be part of the measurement too, but there are a lot of variables.”

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“We could spend decades debating the finer points of carbon sequestration, or we can innovate today with a common sense approach,” says Allbirds’s Kajimura.

Allbirds is planning to make its formula for net-zero carbon shoes open-source, as it did with its sugarcane EVA SweetFoam in 2018, the life cycle assessment tool it uses to calculate product-level carbon footprints in 2021, and its Plant Leather in 2022. The brand says SweetFoam has since been adopted by over 100 brands, including Puma, Reebok, Ugg and Timberland. Allbirds will also be pursuing brand partnerships to turn the M0.0nshot materials and tools into other products that appeal to more fashion-forward consumers, but Brown is tight-lipped about the contenders.

Such a tight focus on carbon inevitably means trade-offs in other sustainability and design metrics.

The SuperLight midsole uses a similar process to Allbirds’s sugarcane-based SweetFoam, but builds in more of its carbon-negative resin input. The new method is similar to a Sodastream, explains vice president of innovation and sustainability Jad Finck, applying heat and pressure to infuse the material with bubbles through a supercritical process. The resulting foam is lighter than its predecessor, which also saves on transportation emissions. “There is certainly energy used in this process,” says Finck. “The main thing we need to do is use renewable energy to get the carbon intensity down.”

When it comes to transportation, Allbirds will be using biofuel powered ocean shipping, and electric trucking from port to warehouse. This is a significant stepchange from traditional transportation, but there could still be improvements, says Chow. “There can be destructive practices in the production of biofuel, and the only truly net-zero form of shipment is wind sailing,” she explains. “A few companies offer this now but it’s still very novel.” Allbirds says its biofuel is derived from waste or residue feedstocks, and it will roll out additional low-carbon transportation options as they become available at scale.

There are other limitations, says Kajimura. “We’ve managed to make a shoe with a net-zero carbon footprint, but there’s still a cost at the end of life. In the early phases, we discussed making this product fully circular, but the limitations on construction and materials made that very difficult — you would likely need to use just one material.”

“We need to play the game of inches and decimal points to reimagine every product and service that we use.”

Still, the design has been streamlined to reduce additional emissions, says Finck. The three materials outlined above make up around 90 per cent of the shoe, but other inputs were unavoidable at this stage, such as recycled synthetics for smaller pieces that enable structuring and durability. “We were able to make the foam suitable for ground contact, as well as being comfortable for the cushioning, and we used the knitting arrangement to add structure where you would otherwise need additional parts to reinforce it, so we could cut down on extra components there,” he explains. “It’s one thing to get the carbon footprint down on a part, but another thing to be able to remove it entirely.”

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Prioritising carbon isn’t necessarily a limitation, says François Souchet, global head of sustainability and impact at comms agency BPCM. “When you are overhauling a system, it can be useful to have a strong starting point and iterate from there. When Adidas launched the Futurecraft.loop running shoe in 2019, the idea was to create a fully recyclable shoe, but at the time, it required virgin materials and initial carbon footprint was not as low as it could have been. But, you need to riff off your North Star in later iterations.”

Producing a net-zero carbon product is undoubtedly a step forward, but brands need to think systemically if they want to enact true change, says Souchet. “The danger of positioning products as zero-carbon is that consumers interpret the claim as guilt-free,” he explains. “The prospect of zero-carbon products should not discount the importance of decoupling growth from resource consumption.”

For Allbirds, growth is not a dirty word, says Brown. “We need to consume less, without question, but it’s naive to think that’s the only answer. We also need to play the game of inches and decimal points to reimagine every product and service that we use. To do that, you need a very measurable, quantifiable and universal system of creation. That’s what M0.0nshot is.”

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