Adidas and Allbirds team up to create the greenest shoe
Collaboration is key! All hail trainer brands Adidas and Allbirds who have teamed up to make a running shoe with the ‘lowest recorded’ carbon footprint
They say to truly know someone, as the saying goes, you must walk a mile in their shoes. Well, on the basis of these shoes, here’s someone we’d consider a good egg. Two running shoe manufacturers have joined forced – or maybe that should be linked laces – to create a prototype of a trainer with a carbon footprint of less than 3kg of CO2e. To put that into perspective, the average running shoe has a carbon footprint of 13.6kg of CO2e, and are notorious for being the fashion sector's highest carbon and one of its hardest-to-recycle items.
The running shoe, called FUTURECRAFT.FOOTPRINT, took months of collaboration (Adidas and Allbirds first announced their project in early 2020), before its unveiling on 12 May. It will initially have a limited run of just 100 pairs to Adidas Creators Club members later in May, while another 10,000 pairs will then be on offer to all in the second half of 2021 – right on time for those early-morning jogs as the weather warms up.
Adidas and Allbirds have not yet revealed full details about the materials used in the shoes, but said in a statement that they had “opened up their materials, supply chains and innovations” to each other, developing a lighter weight shoe with fewer components, made using low-carbon materials. Aside from materials, the main sources of emissions for footwear are design and manufacturing, so innovation has also been applied at these stages.
With a carbon footprint of just 2.94 kg of CO2e, this is a first for Adidas and Allbirds, who have never before produced a running shoe with such a footprint before. The shoe, they say, is “as close to zero carbon emissions as they could possible achieve”.
While Adidas is committed to a 30% reduction in its footprint by 2030 (and achieving total carbon neutrality by 2050), Allbirds, a B-Corp wants to achieve net-zero status – even developing a Life Cycle Assessment tool to examine the carbon impact of every process across their chain, prior to the partnership.
Said Adidas’s executive board member for global brands, Brian Grevy, “Our partnership with Allbirds is a beacon of what can happen when competing brands from the same industry see the possibilities in coming together to design… By truly co-creating and providing each other with open access to knowledge and resources – such as Allbirds’ knowledge of carbon calculation and experience with natural materials, and Adidas' capabilities in manufacturing and performance footwear – this is a call-to-action for other brands, and a milestone in the sports industry achieving carbon neutrality.”
Commented Allbirds’ co-chief executive Tim Brown, “There is an urgent need to reduce our global carbon number, and this mission is bigger than just Allbirds or Adidas. Whether we realise it or not this is a race that we are all running together as a planet and it is one that trumps the day-to-day competition of individual companies.”