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Advocating the Avoided Impact of On’s World-First Manufacturing Technology
On’s LightSpray™ Technology Reduces Shoe Upper Manufacturing by About 75%
On has dedicated the past five years to developing LightSpray™, a new manufacturing technique created to revolutionize the footwear industry and the production of athletic footwear. This first-of-its-kind technology fabricates an ultralight, single-piece shoe upper through a streamlined singular process. It eliminates the need for the stitching and bonding typically required in traditional shoe production.
Quantifying the Saved Impact of a Brand New Manufacturing Technology
LightSpray™ was developed to revolutionize On’s production technique, reducing environmental impact while enhancing athletic performance. The technology simplifies the supply chain, streamlines manufacturing, eliminates assembly processes, reduces waste and ultimately optimizes high-performance running shoes. Each of these improvements helps reduce the carbon footprint of On’s footwear, and the On team wanted to quantify and verify the potential emissions savings.
Quantifying the environmental impact of On’s pioneering LightSpray™ technology presented a formidable challenge, given the technology’s groundbreaking nature and its early stage of deployment. The complexity of life cycle assessment (LCA) was magnified without the benefit of large-scale application data, prompting On to enlist Vaayu’s expertise in rigorously verifying the impact savings of this innovative manufacturing process.
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Using Prospective LCA to Calculate LightSpray’s Potential Impact
On worked with Vaayu to verify its internal LCA findings by focusing on the potential of LightSpray™ upper technology to reduce the carbon footprint of On athletic shoes. Vaayu quantified the potential reduction in carbon footprint (in CO₂e), delving deeper into the environmental benefits of adopting this technology in the footwear industry.
Leveraging our internal specialist LCA team, Vaayu calculated a prospective attributional LCA for LightSpray™ technology applied to a specific shoe model, a conventional attributional LCA for the existing (non-LightSpray™) technology used in the same shoe model, and a comparative analysis between LightSpray™ and the existing approach, considering eight different scenarios.
The findings shared focus on two scenarios. The first compared LightSpray™ technology with On’s existing technology used for athletic footwear while not using renewable energy. The second scenario compared LightSpray™ with On’s existing technology used for athletic footwear while using 100% renewable energy.
Assumptions for the first scenario included that the location-based emission factor for the upper manufacturing (and consequently, shoe assembly) is in Switzerland. It also accounted for the transportation of the shoe bottom in the LightSpray™ system and the boxed shoe pair in the conventional system from the manufacturing facility in Vietnam to the warehouse in Switzerland, occurring with a 12% probability of the shoe being transported by air and an 88% probability of being transported by sea from Vietnam to the Netherlands. The final assumption was that the transportation from the Netherlands to Switzerland is through HGV.
The assumptions for the second scenario included that all assumptions from the first scenario remain true, while also using renewable energy for the LightSpray™ scenario, reflecting On’s ambition to use 100% renewable energy in later commercialisation. See Vaayu’s ‘LightSpray™ technology: Prospective LCA’ technical report for a complete breakdown of Vaayu’s methodology and the eight scenarios calculated.
Advocating the Lower Impact of LightSpray™ to Reduce Manufacturing Emissions Industry-Wide
Compared to a pair of athletic shoes made using standard production methods, Vaayu calculated that LightSprayTM technology could reduce up to 78% of production emissions.
Vaayu also found that the most significant carbon emissions reduction potential comes from using raw materials more efficiently, cutting energy use, and reducing transportation emissions. LightSpray™ technology also considerably lowers material and energy consumption and most significantly minimizes waste during production.
LightSpray™ technology could reduce 4.6 kg CO₂e compared to conventional production
The technology reduces up to 78% of production emissions if renewable energy is used, which On is dedicated to fully adopting as it scales its use of LightSpray™
To be conservative, and considering all scenarios calculated, On is communicating a carbon emissions reduction of 75%
Through this project, On is experimenting with a brand new way of looking at manufacturing in the footwear industry and will use the learnings to work towards making reductions in its environmental impact. The Vaayu team is grateful to be a part of On’s important journey and the scaling of LightSpray™ to reduce the footwear industry’s global impact.