Allbirds has revealed the entire toolkit of its M0.0NSHOT shoe which boasts a carbon footprint of net 0.0kg CO2e.
Following the announcement of this carbon-negative footwear product earlier this year, Allbirds' co-founder Tim Brown took centre stage at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen recently to unveil the shoe and called on industry competitors to create their own versions.
Allbirds says it is open-sourcing the M0.0NSHOT methodology for the industry, via its ‘Recipe B0.0K’: a toolkit detailing each step of the shoe’s process, including materials, manufacturing, transportation, end-of-life, and carbon footprint calculation.
In addition to this, the retailer points out that the toolkit was distributed to thousands of Global Fashion Summit attendees and is also available on Allbirds' website.
Brown believes it could be a giant leap for the footwear industry if others join Allbirds.
He continues: "Unlike the space ‘race’, this is a relay – we’re all on the same side. 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."
Inception of M0.0NSHOT, the carbon zero negative shoe
Set to launch in Spring 2024, Allbirds highlights that M0.0NSHOT is the culmination of years of work and its focus on systematically reducing carbon in business and products since its founding.
The inspiration and information for M0.0NSHOT's new foam came from Allbirds' SweetFoam, a midsole foam created in 2018 and made with the carbon-negative, sugarcane-derived green EVA.
Design aspects of M0.0NSHOT:
- An upper made with carbon-negative regenerative wool sourced from Lake Hawea Station. The minimalist design approach heroes this supernatural material, a full-circle moment for the company founded with a wool shoe.
- A midsole featuring a specially crafted version of Allbirds’s SuperLight Foam, a carbon-negative bio-based midsole foam made with sugarcane and formed via supercritical foaming.
- Moulded components including a logo made with methane-capture bioplastic via a partnership with Mango Materials.
- Sugarcane-based polyethylene packaging — a carbon-negative material — reduces the weight and space required for transportation.
Jamie McLellan, design lead on the project at Allbirds, adds: "We didn’t just make the world’s first net zero carbon shoe. We also made the second, third, and fourth net zero carbon shoe, and so on, as we explored different prototypes to create an appropriate visual identity for this milestone. 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 reimagined the science of a sustainable shoe, we’ve reimagined the design, too."
Allbirds shares that its Futures Team — a cross-functional innovation team — took on the challenge to create a net zero carbon shoe in 2022, harnessing all of the brand’s previous learnings to design M0.0NSHOT.
