All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Competition between running shoe brands is never-ending. Successful products don’t just boost profit margins, they help win medals, too, and manufacturers guard business secrets as fiercely as elite coaches protect their playbooks. However, the climate crisis is forcing change.
This new, shared – and frankly formidable – opponent has led two rivals, sports giant adidas and footwear disruptor Allbirds, to form an unlikely alliance and shoot for an unprecedented shared goal: to create the world’s lowest carbon footprint performance running shoe.
The Futurecraft.Footprint is a running shoe built to perform just like any other, but with a cradle-to-grave carbon footprint unlike anything that’s gone before – less than 3kg per pair. That’s roughly the equivalent of seven miles driven in the average car.
When you consider that the average pair of running shoes costs as much as four times that – anywhere between 12.5 and 13.6kg of carbon dioxide – it’s an impressive achievement.
Perhaps even more so when you consider that it was conceived, designed, developed and manufactured in just 12 months, through the mayhem of a global pandemic, across multiple time zones (and largely on Zoom). A traditional shoe can take two years to develop. The ground-breaking collaboration forced both brands to share information like never before, sharing their material developments and supply chains.
Each pair of the super lightweight (just 154g) shoes come with its carbon footprint stamped proudly on the side, broken down into each stage of its life: shoe making, packaging, transportation, use and end of life. It looks like a bold benchmarking exercise, a call to arms hoping others will follow, making carbon footprint labelling on products the new norm. Tellingly, however, adidas wouldn’t commit to when all of its existing shoes might carry the same labelling. Allbirds already provides this information on its shoes.
Across the industry there’s broad consensus that change is necessary. Running’s shoe addiction leaves a heavy environmental footprint that goes beyond carbon. In 2018, more than 1.2 billion pairs of ‘athletic shoes’ – of which running makes up 40 per cent – were sold worldwide. By 2023 that’s expected to rise to 1.37 billion.
The large majority of these are made almost entirely from non-biodegradable, petroleum-derived plastics and foams such as polyester, thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA). All used to create the comfy uppers and responsive superfoams runners swear by.
These fossil-fuel reliant materials are environmentally problematic. The EVA and TPU that makes your midsoles more responsive can survive up to 1,000 years in a landfill. With an estimated 300 million pairs of shoes discarded each year in the UK alone, that’s an ever-expanding pile of plastic waste clogging up the planet.
Allbirds and adidas have been frontrunners in pushing the sustainability agenda – adidas’ Parley shoes, – made from recycled, salvaged marine waste, targeted the hugely visible issue of ocean plastics. While its Futurecraft Loop shoes demonstrated the potential for so-called closed-loop shoes. Made from 100 per cent recyclable TPU, the Loop shoes are designed to be reborn as fully functioning running shoes. Though they still require some virgin plastics to retain their performance and can only be reincarnated once.
Launched in 2014, Allbirds built its brand as a direct-to-consumer business offering fashion sneakers that swapped traditional polluting materials for more sustainable alternatives. A hit with investors, it quickly achieved unicorn status and was recently valued at an estimated $1.7 billion. In the past two years it set its sights on expanding into the running shoe market, launching first the Wool Dasher and more recently the Dasher Mizzle.
Beyond these two brands, the industry has been waking up to its responsibilities, too, albeit slowly. Last year saw a slew of eco offerings. Swiss running shoe makers On announced its first recyclable running shoe, the Cyclon, based on a subscription retail model. Salomon unveiled the Index.01 – a shoe designed to be recycled. Like Allbirds, Brazilian eco-fashion footwear brand Veja also stepped into running with its bid to create post-petroleum shoes, the Condor, Condor 2 and more recently the Marlin.
So change is afoot, but the urgency for more rapid innovation was the catalyst for Allbirds and adidas’s increased openness and a deeper collaboration.
“When it comes to sustainability, we don’t see ourselves competing with one another, but competing for the future,” Allbirds cofounder Tim Brown told Fast Company. “If we don’t bring about change quickly, there won’t be a future to speak of.”
Adidas is no stranger to collaborations, of course, having worked with the likes of Stella McCartney and Kanye West. It also partnered with Allbirds previously on apparel. But for a brand whose tagline is ‘Impossible is Nothing’, calling in help from a rival shoemaker feels like an important admission. Adidas is, after all, the bigger player selling 11 million pairs of shoes in 2019.
The obvious question is why couldn’t they go it alone? According to Kimia Yaraghchian, adidas’s product manager on the project, it was about speeding up the process.
“If you want to find an accelerated way to create solutions, the best way you can do it is to get together with a peer from the same industry where you can learn from similar challenges they're already facing,” says Yaraghchian.
“Our industry has gotten good at high-level industry commitments looking to 2030 and 2050,” says Kajimura. “But what there isn't a lot of is urgent near term, on-the-ground sharing of information in an effort to win the race against climate change effectively. This partnership was proof that cognitive collaboration can get us farther than either brand could get alone.”
In essence, the collaboration creates a catalytic mix: adidas’s vast experience of creating performance running shoes and mass production, combined with Allbirds much deeper knowledge of complex carbon footprint and Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) and the use of natural materials. Not to mention its certified B Corp status adding some environmental credibility to the mix.
“No brand is perfect at everything or has excelled at everything,” says Kajimura. “We both brought unique strengths to the table and when we combine the things that we are really good at, it kind of forms the super team.”
Making the ‘super team’ function meant confronting some old business norms. “The kind of information required to do these types of carbon footprint calculations, where you're getting information from your suppliers around not just the components of issue, but what they're made out of, how much they weigh down to the ground, what kind of energy processes used to make them – all of that information has to be shared between brands,” says Kajimura. “Which is not something that we typically open up for another to see.
“When it comes to actual formulations of different components, you start to feel like, ‘Oh, is this this our secret?’ Was this their secret sauce? But ultimately, when it's in service of this low carbon footprint shoe, and really breaking new kinds of records in the industry, it's all worth it.”
When it comes to ‘greener’ running shoes, the focus for a long time has been on replacing polluting materials with less-harmful alternatives. Swapping virgin plastic for recycled, and sugar-cane rather than petroleum-based midsole foams. Not to mention cutting material waste in production.
Allbirds was one of the pioneers of addressing the overall carbon footprint of the shoe, already stamping the number on each pair of its Wool Dasher and Dasher Mizzle. For Allbirds, carbon footprint provides a useful target with a sustainability halo effect.
“Carbon is not the only metric to be tracking,” says Kajimura. “But it is one metric that kind of rolled up a lot of other things into it, whether we're talking about energy consumption, and end of life, manufacturing or transportation.
“It creates a unifying metric that's objective and scientific. That helps to clarify what can be an ambiguous or complicated topic, and, for now, it's the best first step.”
This collaboration took the carbon-cutting challenge further. To get the carbon cost down to 2.94kg CO2e/pair, the teams focused on five areas: Shoe making, packaging, transportation, use and end of life.
“At every step of that way, we flexed a different variable to see how the numbers would net out,” says Kajimura. “Maybe there was a more energy-intensive process, but it led to an actual lighter component and the end, so that was better for the carbon footprint. You can turn one knob and everything can go in the wrong direction, and you have to go back. But it was certainly an iterative process.”
So how did they do it?
(2.16kg CO2e/pair)
Manufacture – including raw materials, material manufacturing and assembly – accounts for the biggest chunk of carbon in a shoe’s lifecycle. Material selection plays a big part and in the Futurecraft.Footprint, the uppers use a mixture of natural materials such as Tencel and recycled polyester; the midsole is made from 18 per cent bio-based sugar cane with 82 per cent TPU Lightstrike foam; and the outsole uses 10 per cent natural rubber, blended with additional components in a compound structure that provides the necessary durability, but also allowed the designers to save weight and reduce carbon emissions compared to typical fully synthetic outsoles. The laces are made from 100 per cent recycled polyester. Cutting followed tangram tessellation principles to reduce scrap and waste.
Weight was also a key consideration, and to save it the team removed all internal reinforcements, using embroidered elements to add support only where necessary.
The midsole foam’s lightweight combination of Allbirds sugar-cane based foam and adidas’s proprietary Lightstrike foam, along with minimal rubber outsole pads protecting the key footstrike zones and that minimally-structured mesh, helped keep the shoe’s weight down to just 154g, among the lightest shoes going.
(0.32kg CO2e/pair)
The teams not only looked at the shoe box materials, selecting lighter cardboard, but also redesigned the shape of the shoe box itself into a cone to maximise shipping space. Compared to the Allbirds Tree Dasher, the Footprint achieved a 40 per cent reduction in total packaging weight, and the redesigned box means 30 per cent more pairs of shoes can be carried in each carton.
(0.09kg CO2e/pair)
According to the Futurecraft.Footprint team, the shipping for this shoe will be over sea, using bio-fuelled vessels “whenever possible”. The carbon calculation takes into account the true shipping method and biofuel credits were purchased for all inbound shipping, which reduces the carbon footprint of transportation.
(0.00kg CO2e/pair)
It’s understandably harder for brands to track what we do with a shoe once it's in our hands, but the Futurecraft.Footprint LCA states: “According to different guidelines for footwear, maintenance should only be considered when product care activities (such as machine washing and/or drying) are advised by the footwear brand.” For this product, none of those activities were considered.
(0.37kg CO2e/pair)
In terms of durability, the two firms say that Futurecraft.Footprint went through the same testing as every other running shoe either companies release and each pair is “expected to hold up similarly to other Adidas and Allbirds performance running shoes” – but that the “exact lifespan depends on wearer's level of activity”.
When they have run their last, the LCA says the footprint was measured based on “a conservative assumption for the product final destination (70 per cent landfill, 30 per cent incineration) and for the packaging (32 per cent landfill, 14 per cent incineration, 54 per cent recycling).”
While creating a limited run shoe with a low carbon footprint is an admirable achievement, such shoes are only likely to shift the needle if they meet three criteria. They need to perform as well as traditional shoes, have an affordable price tag and be widely available. As it stands much of that remains up in the air.
And if you’re wondering when you might be able to get your feet into a pair of the Futurecraft.Footprint, it could be a long wait. Initially only 100 pairs will be raffled through the adidas Creators Club in May 2021. The initial consumer launch will follow at the end of 2021, though it’s not clear how many pairs will be available. A wider release is set for in Spring 2022, and the price is yet to be confirmed.
As for performance, the shoe’s makers were keen to stress that the Footprint was benchmarked against a similar, lightweight trainer and racer, the Adizero RC.
“We wanted to make sure that we compared apples with apples, and not apples and bananas,” says Yaraghchian. “So we took the Adizero RC and we tested it alongside that product to evaluate how good the Futurecraft.Footprint is performing. In the end, it's actually performing the same.”
We’ve seen a prototype of the shoe up close, but sadly this wasn’t a run-ready model so we’re unable to confirm if it lives up to that billing. As soon as we get a pair to review we’ll let you know.
In the meantime, the Futurecraft.Footprint will perhaps have to serve as an important example of the kind of new thinking that might eventually bring us shoes that tread a little more lightly on the planet.
- 📚 The future of medicine, AI and climate change: get WIRED books
- DeepMind is turning its AI to football tactics
- The fight for quiet in a world full of noise pollution
- Take back control and organise your messy photos
- China is scrambling for semiconductor supremacy
- Lewis Hamilton opens up about activism and life beyond F1
- 🔊 Subscribe to the WIRED Podcast. New episodes every Friday
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
