Adidas unveils collaboration with sustainable footwear brand Allbirds

Sportswear giant Adidas and sustainable footwear brand Allbirds have unveiled their new collaboration, a low carbon running shoe.

Named FUTURECRAFT.FOOTPRINT, at 2.94kg CO2 the running shoe represents a personal best for both brands as the result of a collective ambition to make a performance running shoe with no carbon footprint.

By comparison, the running shoe has 63% lower emissions than Adidas’s lowest carbon footprint performance running shoe Adizero RC3, at 7.86kg CO2.

The shoe will initially be presented with a 100-pair launch this month before a 10,000-pair release in Autumn and a wider release for Spring 2022.

Together, Allbirds and adidas across product design, material innovation, sustainability and supply chain studied every component and all aspects of the process with an analytical methodology. In under 12 months, they reimagined materials, manufacturing techniques and even packaging to reach the lowest possible footprint – whilst chasing the vision for a low-carbon shoe without compromising on performance.

The shoe has been created using sustainable materials used in both Allbirds and Adidas shoes, including Allbirds’s tree fibre and Sweetfoam (sugar cane), and Adidas’s Lightstrike EVA, a compression-molded EVA foam.

The shoe features no colour dyes, further reducing the energy and water used in production.

Brian Grevy, Executive Board Member Global Brands at adidas, commented: "Our partnership with Allbirds is a design of what can happen when competing brands from the same industry see the possibilities in coming together to design.

"By truly co-creating and providing each other with open access to knowledge and resources - such as Allbirds' knowledge of carbon calculation and experience with natural materials, and Adidas's capabilities in manufacturing and performance footwear - this is a call to action for other brands, and a milestone in the sports industry achieving carbon neutrality"

Tim Brown, Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Allbirds, added: "We believe that the challenge of solving climate change is the problem of our generation and solving it will not be done alone. We need to find new business models, new innovations and new ways of working together.

"Our partnership with Adidas is an example of that. Over the pst year, our two teams have raced as one to create a shoe as close to zero carbon emissions as we could possibly achieve. The results are an exciting step forward, and hopefully, an example for others to follow."