Sustainable footwear and apparel brand Allbirds has "completely reimagined" the way it makes products by creating the world's first net zero carbon shoe, the M0.0NSHOT, with 0.0 kg CO2e versus an industry average of 14 kg CO2e.

The new footwear, according to Allbirds, "may be one tiny step for a shoe, but one giant leap for the shoe industry," paraphrasing Neil Armstrong's famous quote.

When Allbirds debuts the sneaker at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen in June, the footwear will officially go on sale. The company announced that it will also open-source the technology that helped get M0.0NSHOT to zero, encouraging others to take similar actions.

Tim Brown, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Allbirds, said that building a net zero carbon shoe that is commercially viable and scalable is the conclusion of their whole back-catalog of effort. M0.0NSHOT is not a panacea for climate catastrophe, but it is evidence that they can achieve amazing achievements when they take sustainability seriously and are laser-focused on reducing carbon emissions.

The pinnacle of years of work and Allbirds' dedication to steadily decreasing carbon in its operations and offerings since its foundation is M0.0NSHOT. Allbirds developed SweetFoam, its first carbon-negative material, in 2018, and it served as inspiration for the new foam utilized in M0.0NSHOT. The company started labeling its products with carbon footprint information in 2019.

Most recently, the company disclosed a collaboration with Adidas to create the Adizero x Allbirds, which had 2.94 kg CO2e and at the time, was the world's lowest carbon sneaker.

In collaboration with Lake Hawea Station and The New Zealand Merino Company, Allbirds is setting the standard for a novel approach to calculating a product's carbon footprint that takes into consideration both carbon-capturing and -emitting materials and processes.

The new approach of quantifying accounts for the fact that while some components of a shoe's construction may release carbon, others may actually trap it. In this case, this results in a net zero final M0.0NSHOT product.

Hana Kajimura, Head of Sustainability at Allbirds, added that they believe this will revolutionize the path to net zero, and act as rocket-fuel for the entire industry. They might debate the specifics of carbon sequestration for decades, or they could invent now using a common sense strategy. Progress, not perfection, is what matters. Now that the scientists have demonstrated what is feasible, it is up to the fashion industry to forward the open-sourced lessons from M0.0NSHOT.