Footwear company Allbirds has a history of giving away intellectual property about materials or approaches it believes could help other apparel and shoe companies move toward lower-carbon designs more quickly.
Now, the San Francisco-based company, originally born in New Zealand, is giving away the emissions reduction secrets behind an entire product. Moonshot is a high-top shoe the company claims has a net-zero carbon footprint. The name is written as MO.ONSHOT, to play up the “zero point zero” claim.
The Moonshot shoe upper is made from merino wool sources from regenerative sheep-raising operations in New Zealand. The mid-sole is produced from a derivative of a carbon-sequestering material called Superlight Foam, an evolution of SweetFoam, developed by Allbirds in 2018 using parts of sugar cane that would otherwise be tossed out and now used widely across its product lines. SweetFoam is another example of innovation that Allbirds decided to open-source. It is made by Braskem, a Philadelphia-based biotech company. Other components in Moonshot are made through an agreement with Mango Materials, which uses captured methane as a feedstock for creating bioplastic.
If you do the math, the actual production and logistics processes that go into making Moonshot have a footprint of around 2 kilograms. Allbirds actually claims an emissions reduction related to the wool, since it is produced on a farm that uses regenerative agriculture. (See the chart below.) That’s one of the ways it gets to zero, without having to count on carbon offsets.
“Unlike the space ‘race’, this is a relay — we’re all on the same side,” said Allbirds co-founder Tim Brown, in a statement. “Moonshot is Allbirds’ 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.”
The recipe distributed this week at a design summit in Copenhagen includes information about the processes by which Allbirds selects materials, evaluates them for emissions impacts, incorporates them into the manufacturing process and transports them from one place to another. Allbirds believes that by sharing that information, developed by a cross-functional innovation team, it will accelerate adoption of these ideas and help lower costs of the materials for all manufacturers. “We’re in a moment now where we need action and hopes and solutions that scale,” said Aileen Lerch, sustainability senior manager at Allbirds.
So far, Allbirds has had discussions with a handful of companies interested in the design, but Lerch wasn’t prepared to share specifics. Right now, some components that will make up the Moonshot shoe aren’t exactly in ready supply, though, which would make it difficult for any given shoemaker to ramp up production quickly. For example, the merino wool in the upper can only be sourced from certain farms under the ZQRX program, which uses ethical and regenerative practices to raise the sheep providing the raw materials. The sole being provided by Braskem is poised to scale more readily, Lerch said.
Another area in which Allbirds doesn’t have ready answers relates to what happens to these materials at the end of life. While the product footprint includes considerations such as emissions related to sending a product to landfill versus recycling, Lerch said the infrastructure to recycle footwear “doesn’t really exist right now,” and acknowledges that circularity is a work in progress.
Like many other apparel and footwear companies, Allbirds offers a recommerce program (called Allbirds Rerun) that puts gently used products or those with slight defects back into circulation. But most of its programs are very early-stage, Lerch said.
The company hasn’t disclosed the markets in which Moonshot will be first available, nor was Lerch prepared to discuss the price.
Allbirds has been pushing the envelope when it comes to incorporating lower-carbon design elements in its products since its founding about eight years ago in 2016, with a focus on using natural materials.
The Allbirds Flight Plan calls for the company to halve emissions for its product portfolio by 2025 and to push the actual footprint per pair of shoes below 1 kg by 2030. When I spoke with the company earlier this year, an executive said the emissions for an average pair of athletic shoes is 14 kg, while the Allbirds average is 10 kg.