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Eco trainers to minimise your carbon footprint

- Nick Compton

Training shoes, sneakers or even kicks if you prefer, have become a key territory in the sustainable fashion turf war. The fashion industry’s environmental impact – it produces more carbon emissions than international flights and shipping combined– is increasingly under scrutiny. And trainers leave a particularly large and unpleasant footprint, as they use a lot of different and ‘problematic’ materials – leather, nylon, synthetic rubber, plastic and viscose – and involve a number of different manufacturing processes – injection moulding, foaming, heating, cutting and sewing. That means a lot of resource-munching making and logistical toing and froing up and down the supply chain. Where they are made also matters.

Over three-quarters of the world’s trainers are produced in China, where manufacturing is still – despite some positive moves – vastly reliant on fossil fuels. (If you want to get to grips with the complex sustainability issues around sneaker production, check out the excellent Better Shoes Foundation website.)

For sustainably-minded entrepreneurs then, sneaker-making leaves a lot of room for footprint-reducing manoeuvres. Perhaps the most visible of these niche players (and getting less niche by the day) is Paris-based Veja. The brand was launched by childhood friends Sébastien Kopp and François-Ghislain Morillion in 2005. With backgrounds in banking, neither was, by their own admission, a ‘sneaker head’. But intent on a sustainable business, they understood that sneakers was a market where they could make a big impact.