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 Toitū Envirocare, a New Zealand-based B Corp and carbon certification business.

Allbirds then collaborated with The New Zealand Merino Company to translate this farm footprint into a product-level 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, methane-capture 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.

M0.0NSHOT Zero shoes are priced at $200

www.allbirds.com