The Story Behind Our Carbon Footprint
Since we started Allbirds in 2016, the environment has been our most important stakeholder. And in that spirit, all the work we’ve done throughout the last four years has laddered up to a single mission: to help people tread lighter on the planet. With the introduction of our products’ Carbon Footprint earlier this week, we’re sharing something we’ve been striving towards for a good chunk of our short business life.
Taking the initiative from a pie in the sky idea to a reality has been no small undertaking. Measuring our carbon footprint, labeling our entire product portfolio, and answering our customers’ question of “what the hell is a carbon footprint?” has definitely been an all hands on deck situation around the office. We couldn’t track down all the hands that helped shape this thing, but we caught up with four of the hands. That’s two sets, and they belong to Hana Kajimura, our Sustainability Lead and Julie Channing, our VP of Marketing.
Hana, Sustainability
How did you come up with the idea of labeling products with their carbon footprint?
We’re a carbon neutral business by offsetting our emissions, but our goal is to emit nothing in the first place. You can’t reduce what you don’t measure, so we’ve been calculating the carbon footprints of all of our products for some time now. But when I started looking for other products’ carbon footprints as a reference point, it was really difficult! I would find a number that a brand mentioned in a news article back in 2008, with no trace to their website. Or an academic study done by a graduate student in 2012, but the link to the PDF is dead.
As a society, we’re at a moment in time when carbon footprints of products should be as ubiquitous as nutrition labels on food. How can we expect people to make better decisions about their climate impact when they have zero information besides marketing slogans? So we knew if we were going to do this, it wouldn’t be a marketing campaign saying “our shoes are better than their shoes, so buy ours and feel great about it!” Rather, we wanted to ask, “isn’t it crazy that no one tells you the environmental cost of the things you buy?”
We want to take a really complicated, emotional issue, and make it simple. Our average product carbon footprint is 7.6 kg CO2e. One day we want it to be 0. And we want you to be able to follow along on the journey to get there. It’s a mechanism for you to hold us, and for us to hold ourselves accountable.
How do you calculate these footprints?
In practice, it’s all made possible by a close partnership between our Sustainability team and our suppliers. They collect extra information for us, like energy used to power machines and a material breakdown of components. For each product, they send us all of the individual components, which we weigh on a scale that’s accurate to the centigram, so we can measure things like a single eyelet! Then we plug all of the numbers into our LCA (life cycle assessment) model, vetted by a third party expert.
We measure five different things to get the numbers that end up on our products: materials, manufacturing, transportation, product use, and end of life — we report transportation separately, since it varies so much from customer to customer. For materials, we measure emissions at the component level — so for each component, we’re tracking weight, waste, and material composition. Working with our manufacturing partners, we track energy use (in kWh) for each step of the manufacturing process, then account for where that energy is coming from, with a goal of always finding the cleanest option (think coal = dirty, solar = clean). For us, the product footprint doesn’t end at point of sale — since our products are machine washable, we also track the emissions associated with our customers washing them. And finally, we account for what happens to our product once it’s had its day in the sun, assuming the most conservative approach, which is that our customer puts their shoes or socks in the trash bin when they can no longer wear them.
What were some of your biggest challenges?
For one, I keep hearing the excuse that we don’t have enough data. And it’s true, we don’t. We don’t know with certainty how many kWh it takes to sew a t-shirt, or how the carbon footprint of wool grown in New Zealand differs from that of wool grown in South Africa. But we can’t let that tie our hands. Let’s start creating numbers, publishing them, and making them better. We can’t be so precious — a number that’s 90% right is better than no number at all.
Why is carbon a good scorecard for environmental impact?
Taking a step back, climate change is the most important issue of our time. Full stop. And greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide, trap heat in the atmosphere, which causes climate change. Carbon emissions aren’t a perfect metric, and of course there are many other aspects of sustainability that we’re thinking about, but right now, it’s the single best scorecard we have.
Julie, Marketing
What’s the biggest challenge of communicating what the carbon footprint label means to consumers?
Carbon emissions can feel like an intangible concept. It’s not like recycled plastic or water waste, because there isn’t a visible thing for consumers to wrap their minds around. And people aren’t in the habit of counting their carbon — they don’t have a sense of what’s a lot and what’s a reasonable amount. So for us, it was vital that we contextualized the numbers that we put on our products so our customers knew how to interpret them.
Another complicating factor is that we actually offset 100% of the carbon we produce as a company. It was tricky to find the balance between communicating the carbon emitted during the production of our products, while also reassuring consumers that we’ve found a way to neutralize their environmental impact.
Did you test out different strategies for the Carbon Footprint? What were some learnings from earlier approaches?
When we started Allbirds back in 2016, we always said: “people don’t buy sustainable products, they buy great products.” We still believe the heart of that statement is true, but the landscape has changed quite a bit in the last four years. Consumers are starting to demand more information about how businesses are impacting the planet. But given the lack of understanding around the topic of carbon emissions in general, combined with the multifaceted nature of our solution to it, it was definitely important for us to test a few different messaging strategies.
We wanted to tell this story in the most simple yet impactful way possible. And while we knew that education would be key, our first attempt overestimated the amount of familiarity people have with carbon and its connection to climate change. Before we can even begin getting into how much carbon is harmful, we first needed to explain why carbon is harmful. We tested some strategies that didn’t connect enough dots and left them confused. And then we also overcorrected and got too scientific and in-the-weeds. Finding the balance between providing enough context and not overwhelming customers with too much information was a real challenge.
What are some usual missteps with “sustainable” marketing?
“Sustainability” has become a buzzword — so many brands have started to make “eco” claims as a way to attract new, ethically-minded consumers. It’s led to a lot of confusion around which brands people can trust and who’s actually doing their best to address this issue. That said, talking about climate change too often makes people feel hopeless. So in contrast, we’ve tried to maintain a more optimistic, personal tone — even though this is a serious issue, it’s also a solvable one. We also always aim to focus on what can be done to make it better, rather than stoking fears.
There is, however, a sweet spot between the doom and gloom we often see in the climate conversation and language that can feel flippant or dismissive of the scale of the issue. We’ve had to walk that line especially carefully here. At the end of the day, if a “sustainable” program just exists for its marketing potential, then it’s probably not holistic or particularly authentic. Rather than tacking on sustainability jargon or making unsubstantiated claims, we invest heavily into environmental programs that can have a real impact. Our job as marketers should simply be to effectively tell the story of sustainable innovation, not to pull it out of thin air.
What do you think the takeaway of the Carbon Footprint will be for other brands and the industry at large?
While we’re still a small brand, we know we can have an outsized impact by continuing to push the envelope on sustainability. Ultimately, we want consumers to start asking more questions about the impact of the things they wear and buy — and as a result, that brands become more accountable for the pollution they produce. Our hope is that one day (soon!), shoppers will compare carbon footprints at the mall like they do nutrition labels in grocery aisles.
