With a limited edition run of just 500 pairs, Allbirds
carbon negative M0.0NSHOT Zero sports shoes are
now available to buy for the first time at its select stores in
Dubai, London, New York, Seoul and Tokyo, with each pair
labelled with a unique production number.
The shoes are a testament to the work Allbirds has done
over the past decade to systematically reduce the climate
impact of its products, pushing beyond any of the brand’s
previous creations in both sustainability and design.
Instead of constantly trying to reduce, however, the
Allbirds design team has utilised a greater share of wool in
its design to lower the style’s carbon footprint.
“M0.0NSHOT Zero represents the ultimate pursuit of
product purity, stripping away everything superfluous to
allow the wool to be the hero,” says Allbirds designer Jamie
McLellan. “We needed to find ways to use more
regenerative wool to help us counter other more stubborn
parts of the carbon equation. As a result, we used wool to
wrap the entire upper and the midsole, giving the shoe a
modern and monolithic look that feels fitting for footwear of
the future.”The regenerative wool is exclusively sourced
from New Zealand’s Lake Hawea Station (LHS), a farm
that sequesters more carbon than it emits due to
regenerative practices like native plantings, protecting
large areas of regenerating forest and new pasture species.
LHS is among the leaders in the movement to return to
regenerative growing techniques used for many millennia,
working in harmony with nature to improve human, animal
and environmental outcomes.
Allbirds began by working with The New Zealand Merino
Company’s ZQRX regenerative wool programme to source
M0.0NSHOT’s wool from Lake Hawea Station and
calculated the specific farm-level carbon footprint. The
organisational carbon footprint that forms the starting
point for the allocation was developed independent of this
project and verified by Toit? Envirocare, a New Zealandbased
B Corp and carbon certification business.
Allbirds then collaborated with The New Zealand Merino
Company to translate this farm footprint into a productlevel
wool material carbon intensity for M0.0NSHOT.
This new wool carbon intensity is used to calculate the
product’s carbon footprint using the Allbirds Life Cycle
Assessment (LCA) Tool, with modifications. The initial
Allbirds LCA Tool was third-party verified against the
requirements of ISO 14067, which specifies principles,
requirements and guidelines for calculating the carbon
footprint of a product.
The carbon footprint of M0.0NSHOT accounts for on-farm
carbon sequestration, in addition to emissions, which is a
deviation from standard industy practice. As a result, the
calculated carbon footprint for M0.0NSHOT, unlike
Allbirds’ standard products, is not fully aligned to ISO
14067. However, Allbirds believes this wool carbon
intensity value captures a more comprehensive model of the
total emissions fluxes happening on-farm.
For brands looking for help or resources to follow suit,
Allbirds has published an open-sourced, free toolkit that
uncovers key innovations that made the milestone possible.
It details currently leading-edge methodologies and
materials including bio-based midsole foam, methanecapture
bioplastic, sugarcane-derived, carbon-negative
green PE packaging and more. The toolkit is available on
the Allbirds website for anyone to download and hopefully
implement
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