David Allemann describes On's three-part approach to cutting shoe production's carbon footprint: switching uppers to recycled polyester, leasing Cloud Neo shoes made from ricino beans for refurbishment, and developing Clean Cloud, a material that turns captured industrial CO₂ into shoe components. He argues sustainability and performance reinforce each other.
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For us, it was super important as soon as we had solved the basic issues of producing shoes, because I can tell you, that was a big nightmare at the beginning. We started to think about what do we have to do to do that in a sustainable way. Because 98% of our CO2 footprint comes purely from product, so we have to solve it in production. And so we started to think across three horizons. First we said, hey, let's limit down the materials that we can use in creating shoes. And so our team reduced down only to recycled materials. And today of all our uppers, all our uppers are recycled. So fully recycled polyesters, polyamides, and we're increasing the recycled materials used in all our shoes. But then we said, hey, that's great if we have recycled materials in our shoes, but what happens if you then only use them for a certain amount of time and then they end up in a landfill? Couldn't we kind of borrow a little bit from the digital industry? Couldn't we borrow from Netflix and not kind of give you that shoe, but basically say it's a subscription model, you're never going to own it. So we created a shoe which is called the Cloud Neo that is fully made from beans, from ricino beans. And so it's bio based material, but then you don't own it, but you subscribe to it and you give it back. Once you have used it, you ping us, you get a new shoe and in the box that you get, you send the shoe backs so it becomes circular and thousands of people have signed up. It's really a large scale experiment. We don't know whether that's going to scale to 70% of our customers. Probably could just be for the hardcore customers that know that they're going to use shoes again and again and not just kind of see it as a special fashion items that sits in their, their cupboard. But we're very much on that journey. How can we make it circular? And the interesting thing is that we found out you can do very even a bio based material shoe that is actually really a great performer shoe. So that sustainability and performance is not in juxtaposition to each other, but they can be really synergetic. Now let's do a third dimension. How can we actually suck carbon emission from industry emissions and create a unique material out of that? And that's our third dimension. How can we use these carbon emissions? And we created a material called clean Cloud. So we suck carbon emissions from industry emissions and then through a fermentation process we get to ethanol, and then we can use that ethanol again to create materials. So that's eventually the dream, that it's not just recycled, not just circular, but eventually that on a large scale we can bring back carbon emission.
