More Sustainable Materials and Circular Services

Recycled polyester

Polyester is the most common single-used material in adidas products and, by 2024, we aim to replace all virgin polyester with recycled polyester in all products where a solution exists. We set clear internal milestones for product creation teams and have seen great progress throughout the last few seasons. 91% of all polyester used in 2021 was recycled. With that, we are on track to use only recycled polyester from 2024 onwards. 

All of the recycled polyester, polyamide, elastane and recycled cotton yarns used in our products are either certified according to Recycled Claim Standard (RCS) or Global Recycled Standard (GRS). These are international, voluntary standards that set requirements for third-party certification of recycled input and chain of custody. This means that we have a transaction certificate for every yarn with recycled content that is used in our products. A Transaction Certificate (TC) assures that a specific shipment of products received is certified to a Textile Exchange standard. They are issued by a certification body and lists the actual certified products and shipment details including the buyer’s name and address and declares the certification status of the shipped goods. In addition, all Tier 3 (raw material), Tier 2 (material) and Tier 1 (finished goods) suppliers that handle these yarns, materials or products with recycled content, hold a scope certificate (SC) that verifies that a company is qualified to produce goods to a given standard. This means that a supplier has the capability to separate certified materials from non-certified materials. These certificates are managed by Textile Exchange (TE), a global non-profit organization focused on accelerating the use of preferred fibers across the global textile industry, with brands, retailers, and suppliers as members. adidas is a member of Textile Exchange. 

Parley Ocean Plastic

Parley for the Oceans is an environmental organization and global collaboration network. Founded in 2012, Parley aims to raise awareness for the beauty and fragility of the oceans, and to inspire and empower diverse groups such as pacesetting companies, brands, organizations, governments, artists, designers, scientists, innovators and environmentalists in the exploration of new ways of creating, thinking and living on our finite, blue planet. Parley Ocean Plastic is a material created from upcycled plastic waste that has been intercepted from beaches and coastal communities before reaching the ocean. Parley for the Oceans works with its partners to collect, sort and transport the recovered raw material (mainly PET bottles) to our supplier who produces the yarn, which is legally trademarked. It is used as a replacement for virgin plastic in the making of adidas x Parley products.  In 2015, adidas presented the first adidas x Parley running shoe made with recycled plastic waste intercepted from beaches and coastal communities at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Since then, adidas has aggressively tackled the use of plastic and introduced recycled polyester across its entire product range. In 2021, we produced close to 18 million pairs of shoes containing Parley Ocean Plastic. 

MORE SUSTAINABLE COTTON

Since 2018, 100% of the cotton we source globally has been more sustainable cotton, that means Better Cotton or organic cotton. Our success is the result of clear target setting – both with suppliers and with internal teams who supported the sourcing of Better Cotton for our products.

Better Cotton’s mission is to help cotton communities survive and thrive, while protecting and restoring the environment. Better Cotton is sourced via a chain of custody model called mass balance. This means that Better Cotton is not physically traceable to end products, however, Better Cotton Farmers benefit from the demand for Better Cotton in equivalent volumes to those we ‘source.’ Click here to learn more.

RESPONSIBLY SOURCED LEATHER

adidas uses a tiny fraction of animal-derived materials, primarily leather, for their high quality and unique properties. These currently make up approximately 3% of adidas' total materials volume. For our standards for animal-derived guidelines, please see here.

adidas prohibits the use of leathers, hides or skins from animals that have been inhumanely treated, whether these animals are wild or farmed. Furthermore, adidas does not source or process raw materials from any endangered or threatened species, as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) in its red list.  

Since 2006, adidas has been an active member of the Leather Working Group (LWG), which is a multi-stakeholder group that promotes sustainable business practices within the leather industry. The LWG has developed stringent standards and audit protocols benchmarked against industry best practices, and checks compliance through independent monitoring. Our participation in the LWG supports the goal to improve the leather manufacturing industry by creating alignment on environmental priorities, bringing greater visibility to best practices and providing guidelines for continual improvement. Hides used for our products are sourced from tanneries audited by the LWG with a Gold, Silver or Bronze rating, and therefore fulfill the highest standards in the industry. The LWG protocol covers 99% of adidas’ leather volume, sourced from tanneries across the globe, including those in Asia, who source hides mainly from South and North America. All of the tanneries we source leather from have achieved at least a Silver rating, and more than 80% of tanneries achieved Gold rating. 

Leather traceability is key to avoid deforestation. The LWG has been working to improve leather traceability for many years (see LWG website on Traceability, LWG website on Deforestation), and ensures that tanneries have visibility on their raw material through the supply chain. To guarantee that suppliers are not involved in any form of deforestation practices, the LWG has defined clear criteria for traceability in the LWG Audit Protocol (Sections 6&7), for instance in Brazil, where suppliers sourcing raw material need to demonstrate traceability to the slaughterhouse, including the date of slaughter. Furthermore, suppliers must ensure that meat packers, where the material originates, meet all listed criteria. A signed declaration is required from the slaughterhouse clearly demonstrating compliance. Following the LWG’s introduction of hide traceability into the LWG audit protocol, a traceability score is awarded to the leather manufacturer and can be publicly reviewed. 

Traceability is being championed by our partners throughout the leather supply chain. For instance, one of our largest full-grain leather suppliers has verified that all of their hides are traceable back to the slaughterhouse, and their traceability procedure is audited by the LWG. Furthermore, they only buy hides from slaughterhouses that have permission to operate in each of the countries from which they source, and they comply with the local regulations related to environmental requirements and animal welfare policies. Over ten years ago, another of our largest full-grain leather suppliers implemented an internal policy that requires all of their Brazilian raw material suppliers to confirm in writing that they have traceability systems in place. This is to ensure that all raw material supplied originates from slaughterhouses and farms located outside of the ‘Amazon Legal’. The systems that they operate in conjunction with their Brazilian raw material suppliers allow them to not only identify the tannery where the leather was processed, but also to trace the slaughter date and place. Each year, they request that their raw material suppliers update their commitment to the policy to make sure that none of the hides delivered are sourced from the Amazon Legal. The LWG has verified their ability to trace the raw material from their Brazilian suppliers holding a Grade A traceability rating from the LWG. Another of our largest split leather suppliers confirmed that tanneries can only source their raw material from LWG Gold rated members, and they further require their suppliers to add their slaughterhouses’ certificate to ensure all the wet blue splits from Brazil are not coming from the Amazon region. As such they ensure that their operation is not involved with deforestation. 

Packaging protects our products during shipping, handling and storage, and ensures that our consumers receive them in sound condition. When it comes to packaging, we are working towards the following sustainable design principles: 

• Avoid or reduce packaging wherever possible 

• Use recycled and recyclable materials 

• Use materials that have established recycling waste streams 

• Avoid gluing and laminations 

• Design the packaging from a single material where possible to improve recyclability 

• Design packaging for assembly at the point of manufacture to decrease transportation impacts 

• Design for disassembly 

• Design for distribution 

• Clearly mark the materials on the packaging components to facilitate recycling 

• Avoid materials which contain restricted substances 

We have already made considerable progress, e.g., by reducing the weight of our standard shoe boxes, changing our transport boxes from double-wall to single-wall, eliminating the use of shoe stuffing and shifting to the use of recycled or certified materials. 

Where the use of plastics is still unavoidable, such as in transport packaging, adidas is working to find sustainable alternatives. For example, together with the global innovation platform ‘Fashion for Good’, the company explored the development of a recycling infrastructure and innovative recycling processes for used polybags, testing the technical feasibility of plastic bag circularity. A summary of the pilot’s success is available here.  

In addition, we have succeeded in changing practically all of the plastic bags used to protect finished products during transport from our manufacturing facilities, from virgin material to 100% recycled low-density polyethylene (LDPE) by the end of 2021. Most of the few remaining virgin plastic bags cannot currently be replaced, as no alternative is available in the production country and import restrictions are in place. As part of our transition to 100% recycled LDPE bags, we re-engineered them to reduce their weight by 20%. This directly translates into a related footprint reduction. 

In addition, we are exploring plastic-free alternatives.