Preferred materials
Footwear brand New Balance is using data from LCA exercises to reset its environmental targets and its definition of ‘preferred materials’. This is already informing changes to product design.
Because it wants to “keep pushing forward”, athletic footwear brand New Balance is moving the goalposts on itself, amending the environmental goals it has in place and setting more ambitious targets for the rest of this decade.
Collecting accurate data to measure its performance is the only basis for framing these objectives, according to the company’s environmental impact assessment lead, responsible leadership and global compliance manager, Nicole Sala. “The route to decarbonisation starts with corporate assessment,” she says. “There is a lot of old data in our supply chains; collecting better data is a good place to focus our efforts.”
In its most recent sustainability report, published in summer 2024, New Balance highlights six points to focus on, which it refers to as “areas of meaningful change”. This article examines the company’s efforts to make improvements in two of these, energy and materials.
Energy boost
The “aggressive goals” (its own term) that arise from its focus on these subjects include the aim to source from renewable resources 100% of the electricity it consumes in the facilities that it owns. By the end of 2023, it calculated that it was 90% of the way towards meeting this target. Another positive result is that it had completed 59% of the journey towards its target for reducing emissions from scopes one and two, which is to say emissions from its own facilities and from the energy those facilities consume. Compared to the levels for 2019, it wants to bring those emissions down by 60% by 2030.
For scope three, though, which is the indirect emissions that occur upstream in the supply chain, for which the goal is a reduction of 50% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels, there is plenty of work left to do. In the newest sustainability report, New Balance said it made progress towards this of only 3%.
Meaningful changes
It is from focusing on this, Nicole Sala points out, that energy and materials have emerged as particularly interesting areas in which to try to make meaningful changes. These two aspects of the business present a specific challenge in the upstream supply chain. After collecting and analysing the data, the company found that 71% of impact came either from the energy that suppliers’ production processes consume, or from raw materials.
Leather is one of the key raw materials in its portfolio and, therefore, a key feature of the scope-three picture for New Balance. It had been working towards a target of sourcing 100% preferred leather by 2025. By the end of 2023, it was 94% of the way towards achieving this. It came up with its own definition of preferred leather, initially stipulating that the material should be sourced from tanneries with a ‘gold’ rating from multi-stakeholder initiative the Leather Working Group (LWG). It also said at first that the leather it used had to be either chrome-free, or sourced from ranches practising regenerative agriculture.
Aim low
In 2024, though, the company decided to add new aspects to its definition of preferred leather, expanding what can constitute approved material. It has now decided to include what it calls low-emission leather. For the amended target, 100% of the leather it sources must, by 2030, be chrome-free, regenerative or low- emission. Of course, what low-emission means needs nailing down, too. The company will consider leather to be low-emission if the tannery that supplies it has completed a lifecycle assessment (LCA) exercise and can show its leather to have a carbon footprint of less than 18 kilos of CO2-equivalent per kilo of leather.
The LWG ‘gold’ stipulation remains, but only for tanneries that have an annual production capacity of more than 1 million square-feet of finished leather. Leather manufacturing facilities that have a capacity of under 1 million square-feet must also engage with LWG, but completing an audit with the organisation will be enough to clear the New Balance hurdle. Again, by 2030, all New Balance leather must meet whichever of these two criteria applies to the supplier.
These changes have come about because the shoe company now has more in-depth knowledge than it did before about its leather supply chain and the material’s contribution to its overall carbon footprint. “We know where the CO2 emission impacts are in leather,” Nicole Sala says. “The processes for retanning hides and finishing them at our tier-two suppliers account for between 10% and 30% of our leather’s impact, and between 70% and 90% comes from the upstream phases, up to and including wet-end tanning.”
Knots in the cotton
New Balance has other preferred materials, too. It has work to do on sourcing preferred cotton, which is cotton that either comes from the programmes run by sustainability initiative Better Cotton, or from certified organic sources. The target is to have 100% preferred cotton by the end of 2025, but the most recent sustainability report put the figure for 2023 at only 38%.
This was “a significant decline” from the proportion of preferred cotton that it reported in 2022, but the company has explained that the “corporate assessment” work that Nicole Sala refers to has recently flagged up “data anomalies” with cotton. These include variances in units of measurement and reporting periods. It says this has caused it to question the numbers for 2022 and 2023. It says it will revise its cotton calculations and the processes related to them. It remains to be seen if this will lead to a change in the target for this fibre. It is not giving up on cotton; quite the reverse. It has identified that some of its “highest-volume blended materials” are good targets for its wider sustainability efforts and it has pledged to reduce drastically the amount of polyester in these blends, or convert products to 100% cotton, of the preferred types, naturally.
Fast-paced change
It will continue to use synthetic fibres as well, principally polyester, which New Balance says is its most used material of all. But not just any polyester. By 2030, it will use only preferred polyester. A 2023 target was to make 50% of its polyester recycled by 2025. The result for 2023 was a figure that was higher than that target, reaching 56%. “This achievement demonstrates that meaningful, fast-paced change is possible,” the company states. Based on this, the 2024 changes state that 25% of recycled polyester must, by 2030, derive from textile waste feedstock, or from biological sources (although not from human food sources).
Synthetic materials (with bio-based content) also go into the soles of the shoes, but it should be no surprise to learn that New Balance has preferred compounds for these components. By 2030, it aims to use 80% preferred midsole materials and 90% preferred outsole components. A proportion of bio-based ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) from sugarcane or recycled midsole foam are a small but important part of its preferred midsole materials, a minimum of 3% of the former and 5% of the latter. For outsoles, the 5% recycled content applies, too, in this case recycled rubber or bio-based compounds.
It acknowledges that this will mean that most of the midsoles and outsoles will continue to have a synthetic composition, but argues that, even with these small percentages, the “impact at scale across the business” will be large.
Lowest-carbon-footprint shoe
LCA projects that New Balance has worked on with specialist Milan-based consultancy Spin360 have helped inform the changes the company is now making to its environmental targets. It has already put into effect some of the lessons it has learned from LCA and it has begun to see concrete evidence of the benefits. “We know our lowest-carbon-footprint shoe,” Nicole Sala explains. “It’s a performance running shoe called the Hierro v8.”
This version of the Hierro shoe incorporates design changes that LCA analysis of its immediate predecessor, Hierro v7, inspired. The study focused on a pair of Hierro v7 in US size 9.5. It took into account raw materials, raw material production, assembly of the shoes, distribution, use equivalent to 100 wears, and end of life.
Under these circumstances, the outcome of the analysis is that this pair of Hierro v7 would have a carbon impact of 7.93 kilos of CO2-equivalent. As Ms Sala says, raw materials have come out as the biggest contributors to this figure, with the midsole, outsole and upper mesh the components contributing the highest impact. This is mainly because of the compounds used to construct them, energy and the dyeing of the mesh upper.
Changes for the Hierro v8 include some use of bio-based materials, recycled content and what New Balance calls “low-waste design elements”, but, it insists, without any compromise on performance. The result is a carbon impact for the redesigned shoe of 6.49 kilos of CO2-equivalent, a reduction of 18%. What the brand has taken away from this is that using data to drive design changes can produce encouraging results. It is setting its environmental goals accordingly.
The Hierro v7. LCA analysis of this shoe informed the design changes for a new version.
All Credits: New Balance
