Every Brand Should Board This 100-Percent Carbon Neutral Flight
Allbirds are not actually birds, it’s important to note, and they don’t have wings. They are shoes for your feet. Do they make you believe they can fly? Debatable. So they may not have wings, or in fact be alive at all, but the people at who make them seem to care a lot about the fact that actual living things with actual wings have clean air in which to fly. And that other living things with fins have clean water in which to swim. And that other living things with legs or suction-cup-covered tentacles or hooves or sharp talons or, well you get the idea. They want to do their part to clean up this planet we all share.
So when the company announced the Allbirds Carbon Fund on Earth Day it was a doubling down on leaving this world better than it was when they found it. Maybe you know that its commitment to sustainability is woven into the fabric of its wool uppers, which are made from New Zealand family-farmed merino wool. And as Allbirds found Tim Brown told us, the company will keep “finding better ways to make shoes.”
Already Allbirds had made great strides in reducing its carbon footprint (there’s a double whammy of a pun in there for you somewhere), and as they put it, “Where others see plastic bottles, we see recycled laces; where others see plants, we see green shoe soles. Next up, we’re working to remove the small amount of virgin plastic in our supply chain.” And now the company is taxing itself.
Maybe you know that its commitment to sustainability is woven into the fabric of its wool uppers.
The Allbirds Carbon Fund is an effort to go all the way. Through the a self-imposed internal carbon tax which funds emissions reduction projects Allbirds says it will be 100% carbon neutral. “For every tonne of carbon we emit as a business,” they promise, “from the sheep on our farms to the lights in our headquarters—the Allbirds Carbon Fund will support verified emissions reduction projects like planting trees that capture and store carbon and building wind energy to replace dirty fossil fuel energy.”
Hopefully more brands—the footwear industry alone emits 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year—follow its example and this idea really takes flight.
