American firm Allbirds unveils net zero carbon shoe's design

The high-top shoe boasts a landmark carbon footprint of net 0.0 kg CO2e. Carbon negative, regenerative wool wraps the entirety of the M0.0NSHOT for a striking, uniform look, the company said in a media release.

Allbirds’s co-founder Tim Brown took to the stage at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen to unveil the shoe and call on industry competitors in the audience to create their own versions. To help them do so, Allbirds is open-sourcing the M0.0NSHOT methodology via its ‘Recipe B0.0K’: a toolkit detailing each step of the M0.0NSHOT’s process, including materials, manufacturing, transportation, end-of-life, and carbon footprint calculation.

The toolkit was distributed to the thousands of Global Fashion Summit attendees and is now on the Allbirds website for anyone to download – and hopefully, implement.

“This is one small step for Allbirds – but it could be one giant leap for the footwear industry, if others join us. Unlike the space ‘race’, this is a relay – we’re all on the same side,” said Brown. “M0.0NSHOT is Allbirds’s greatest achievement, but it’s meaningless without others taking action: which is why we felt compelled to open-source our learnings, so others can pick up the baton and take us forward.”

Launching commercially in spring 2024, M0.0NSHOT is the culmination of years of work and Allbirds’s focus on systematically reducing carbon in its business and products since its founding. In 2018, it created SweetFoam — a midsole foam made with the carbon negative, sugarcane-derived green EVA — which informed the new foam used in M0.0NSHOT.

Then, in 2020, Allbirds became the first fashion brand to label products with carbon footprints. A year later, the brand announced a partnership with Adidas to collaborate on what was, at that point, the lowest carbon shoe in the world: the Adizero x Allbirds.

After that project, shooting for a net zero carbon shoe became the natural next step. The Allbirds Futures team took on that challenge in 2022, harnessing all of the brand’s previous learnings to design M0.0NSHOT.

The net zero carbon shoe, M0.0NSHOT, is made possible by various sustainable elements. It features an upper made of carbon negative regenerative wool sourced from Lake Hawea Station. The midsole is crafted from SuperLight Foam, a bio-based, carbon negative material derived from sugarcane. The shoe also includes moulded components, such as the logo, made from methane-capture bioplastic in collaboration with Mango Materials. Additionally, the packaging is made from carbon negative sugarcane-based polyethylene, reducing weight and transportation space.

“We didn’t just make the world’s first net zero carbon shoe. We also made the second, third, fourth net zero carbon shoe, and so on, as we explored different prototypes to create an appropriate visual identity for this milestone,” said Jamie McLellan, design lead on the project. “As we thought about this ‘shoe of the future’, we were clear that M0.0NSHOT couldn’t look like something from the past. We’ve not just re-imagined the science of a sustainable shoe, we’ve re-imagined the design, too.”

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)