Last Updated on April 30, 2024
Are you on the hunt for the perfect vegan shoes? There are many brands that are starting to create vegan footwear, but not all of them are created equal.
For example, brands that use virgin plastic in their footwear can technically claim it’s “vegan.” The same goes for most faux leather that claims to be vegan – it’s typically just virgin plastic.
Some of the links in this post are affiliate links; for more information please see my disclosure policy.
Virgin plastic may not be derived from animals, per say, but its manufacturing is directly linked to the climate crisis.
To make virgin plastic, crude oil must be extracted from the earth via fracking. Then through an energy intensive process, usually done in a fossil fuel powered factory, it is transformed into virgin plastic. All of this emits carbon (CO2), which is a greenhouse gas that exacerbates climate change.
So, what’s the solution? Looking into vegan shoes that have a low carbon footprint. That can mean they’re made with sustainable and recycled materials, built to last, and/or are designed in a low waste manner.
Thankfully, many brands are starting to embrace ethical and sustainable shoemaking practices that also include vegan options. Here are the best brands making vegan shoes with a small carbon footprint.
what is a vegan shoe?
A vegan shoe is footwear that’s made without any animal-derived materials, like silk, leather, wool or suede. Essentially, no animals were harmed in the making of the shoe.
Instead, vegan shoes can be made from:
- Bio-based materials like corn, bamboo, mushroom, apple or pineapple fibers
- Synthetic materials like recycled plastics, rubber, canvas, microfibers
Just be mindful that many companies will also use vegan leather, which is most often made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or polyurethane. Both materials are made from fossil fuels and take many centuries to break down.
However, there are many companies coming out with innovative vegan leather options made from pineapple, cactus, mushroom and apple skins too. These plant-based leathers are made from juice industry waste or waste from farming. Several of the brands listed below utilize these materials.
You’ll also want to avoid brands trying to greenwash you by using the label “vegan” as a marketing tactic. This label alone does not make it sustainable.
Is the brand being transparent about their materials and production practices? Look into their eco-friendly initiatives and see what they’re pursuing, such as offering a take-back program or planting trees with every purchase.
Here’s a general overview of what to look for in vegan shoes to ensure they’re kind to planet + people:
- Made from sustainable, innovative materials (aka, not virgin plastic)
- Ethical manufacturing: Brands paying fair wages + providing safe working environments
- Thoughtful packaging that’s not excessively wasteful
- Timeless designs that can be paired with any of your wardrobe pieces
- Repairability + durability – can it easily be repaired by a shoe cobbler?
- Thoughtful craftsmanship: Every component of the shoe was carefully considered
are vegan shoes better?
It’s important to remember that “vegan shoes” are not more environmentally friendly by default, simply because they’re vegan. Rather, what matters is looking at the entire shoe as a whole.
There is some debate on the environmental impact of synthetic leathers (like PVCs) versus leather production. Both have an impact on our environment.
For example, the impact of real leather is driven by land use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with animal agriculture. This impacts biodiversity, water usage and climate change.
But the plastic industry also has a heavy carbon footprint. Plastic takes hundreds of years to biodegrade and during that time, they shed microplastics which have been found in human feces, blood and even placentas.
So, which is better? Well, neither is ideal. Because vegan leather made from plants (like apples, cactus, and pineapple) certainly outranks both plastic leather and real leather combined. This kind of leather is made from a waste product, which lowers its impact even further.
However, remember this: The shoe you already have is the most sustainable option, be it vegan or not. The materials and resources needed to make that shoe have already been expended, so you might as well put it to use.
Another great option is to find vegan shoes secondhand at a local thrift store or vintage store. Here are the best online marketplaces for thrifted and vintage finds. You’ll give shoes a second chance at life and avoid sending them to the landfill.
how to tell if a shoe is vegan?
You can tell if a shoe is vegan by looking at their materials, which are usually listed on their website or on the shoebox.
Vegan materials can include, but are not limited to:
- Cotton
- Hemp
- Cactus, apple, pineapple + mushroom leather
- Cork
- Recycled plastic
Just be mindful of labels like “vegan leather” or “pleather”, as this could just mean virgin plastic. Make sure to double check and see what their vegan leather is made of before committing.
Here are some non-vegan materials:
- Leather
- Wool
- Suede
- Fur
- Silk
how long do vegan shoes last?
How long vegan shoes last is variable: This depends on how high quality the shoe is, how often you wear it, and what conditions you wear it in.
For example, if you wear your favorite vegan shoes every day, rain or shine, chances are they will diminish in quality a lot faster than saving them for special occasions.
However, a good high quality pair of vegan shoes can last for several years, even with repeat use. If they are repairable, you may be able to extend their lifespan even further.
gzw approved vegan shoe options
I’ve rounded up a list of brands that create vegan shoes: All of these get the Going Zero Waste seal of approval. Some of these brands are exclusively vegan, whereas others offer a varying array of vegan options.
All the brands on this list utilize different strategies to ensure their materials are sustainable and ethical. There are several brands that also offer take-back programs, which help close the loop and ensure your shoes get recycled at the end of their life.
I’ve gone ahead and highlighted some key features of each brand, but it isn’t an exhaustive list. Be sure to check out their websites for more information.
1. cariuma
- Women + men’s footwear
- 65% of products are 100% vegan
- Sustainable materials like organic cotton, recycled PET and natural rubber
- Support fair working hours + wages
- Focus on biodiverse reforestation: Plant 2 trees for every pair of shoes purchased
2. rothy’s
- Women + men’s footwear
- Vegan + cruelty-free
- Made from recycled water bottles with natural and renewable soles
- Offers a recycling program
3. suavs
- Women + men’s footwear
- Vegan
- Made from sustainable materials like 100% post-consumer recycled plastics
- Compact and reusable shoe boxes that double as shipping boxes
- Excess product is donated to organizations like Soles4Souls
4. alohas
- Women’s footwear
- Multiple vegan shoe options available
- Locally produced in Spain
- Carbon offset option
- On-demand shopping to avoid overproduction
5. kengos
- Women + men’s footwear
- Various vegan options
- Made from innovative materials like mushroom leather + cactus leather
- Created with only 6 components
- No petroleum-based adhesives used
- Recycled cardboard packaging
6. nae shoes
- Women, men + unisex footwear
- Vegan + cruelty-free
- Made from sustainable materials like Pinatex, apple skin, cork, organic cotton, etc.
- Pre-loved program allows you to send back your shoes to be recycled or resold
7. clae
- Women + men’s sneakers
- Vegan options available
- Made with cactus and apple leather, recycled materials, etc.
8. ground cover
- Unisex shoes
- Vegan + cruelty-free
- Made with cactus + pineapple leather
- Non-virgin inputs for both the insole and sole: cork + coffee ground waste
- Packaged in a post-consumer cardboard shoebox
So, which of these sustainable vegan shoes would you try? Let me know in the comments!
The post The Best Vegan Shoes: 8 Brands Making Cruelty-Free Footwear appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
Last winter, we kept our house at 60 degrees and our electric bill was STILL $280. I’ve been interested in solar for a long time, but on the long list of house projects (especially when you’re restoring a 200 year old house on the historic registry) some are more pressing than others.
But with a few of those major projects wrapping up, and a daunting bill before me, I figured now was the time for a quick google search on solar panels, and let me tell you….. It can be very overwhelming.
Figuring out the rules (cough, cough, historic society), incentives or rebates if applicable, how much it would cost, how much we could save, etc. felt a little like a part-time job. But, one website made it really easy to compare things, and I am happy to be partnering with Aurora Solar to share that site with you.
Because I think you should be able to easily run the numbers on your house without a lot of hassle!
This post is sponsored by Aurora Solar, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
If you’ve ever gotten a solar quote, there’s a good chance that Aurora Solar was involved. Aurora was founded in 2013 after its co-founders spent seven months trying to design a solar energy system using a patchwork of different tools.
Afterall, designing a solar system shouldn’t be harder than actually installing one. So they built software specifically for solar professionals. Today, more than 7,000 solar organizations use Aurora, and more than 20 million solar projects have been designed using the platform. They are also the largest solar software provider in the world. Their software is used by roughly 80% of the top 75 residential solar companies in the U.S.
All of this tech has been primarily used by professional installers to map your roof and then create a proposal, but now Aurora is offering this tech to us to help compare quotes.
So instead of having to call a bunch of different installers, I could use the Aurora Solar Marketplace to understand my solar potential, compare estimates, understand my possible savings, look into battery storage and other home electrification incentives, and map out different financing options.
1. know how much electricity the system will actually produce
Before you even get into the price, make sure you understand what you’re actually being quoted.
Two solar systems can have very different prices because they may not be the same size or produce the same amount of electricity. A cheaper system might simply have fewer panels and offset less of your electric bill.
With Aurora, you can compare solar estimates and see the system size, energy production, and how much electricity the system should offset.
You can also upload your utility bill to get a solar estimate based more closely on your actual energy usage, to make the quote accurate for you instead of a ‘generic household’.
2. understand the solar payback period
Aurora calculates things like payback period and lifetime savings, which makes it much easier to understand the long-term finances.
The solar payback period is basically how long it takes for your estimated savings to make up for what you spent on the system, and this is the number that surprised me most!
One estimate had a payback period of around 7 years, and another was closer to 11 years! Over 25 years, two of the estimates I looked at had almost a $13,000 difference in projected savings.
Of course, these are still projections as electricity rates can change (HELLO 2026) but when you’re trying to compare two options for the same house, knowing that one is projected to pay for itself four years sooner is pretty useful information.
3. look beyond the monthly payment
Depending on the installer, you may be looking at a cash purchase, solar loan, lease, or power purchase agreement.
But thankfully with Aurora you can compare the different financing options side-by-side which makes it a lot easier to see the trade-offs. One option may have a lower upfront cost, another may have a lower monthly payment, and another may give you better long-term savings.
4. find out which solar incentives actually apply to you
The minute you start Googling solar, you can find federal incentives, state incentives, utility programs, rebates, net metering, and a whole bunch of information that may or may not even apply to where you live.
And some of the articles ranking at the top of Google are several years old! (RIP to the federal incentives canceled at the end of 2025.) But, Aurora can account for solar incentives when calculating the cost and savings of a system, including state, local, and utility-specific programs.
I would still double check any incentive or tax benefit you’re planning to use before signing a contract, especially because programs and eligibility can change, but having all the relevant information in the same place makes the research process much less overwhelming.
5. research the installer, equipment, and warranties
Aurora lets you compare solar installers based on things like reviews, reputation, pricing, and financing options, which I think is just as important as the actual quote.
I’d also look closely at what equipment is included. What panels are they using? What kind of inverter? How long are the equipment warranties? Is there also a workmanship warranty from the installer? Who handles repairs if something goes wrong five or ten years from now?
And, I know I’ve said it a million times, but it’s nice to see it side-by-side without having to fill out a bunch of forms and be hounded on the phone just to get an idea of what solar may look like.
The post How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: XPRIZE’s David Babson on Why Climate Grand Challenges Need Buyers, Too
Buyers contracted nearly 30 million tons of durable carbon removal in 2025, more than triple the 2024 total, according to CDR.fyi data reported by Heatmap. About 90% of those purchases came from a single company, Microsoft, and suppliers delivered only about 450,000 tons during the year. That is a sliver of the six to 10 billion tons of removal a year that climate scenarios suggest the world will need by 2050. The technology to pull carbon out of the air works, but the customers needed to scale it remain scarce.
Our guest today, David Babson, is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. He calls the slow progress a market failure, because the technology is progressing faster than it is being adopted. Babson previously led MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and was a program director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. His portfolio includes XPRIZE Carbon Removal, which drew 1,334 teams and whose participants have raised more than $3.3 billion. In April 2025, Mati Carbon won its $50 million grand prize for spreading crushed basalt on smallholder farms in India, where the rock locks away carbon dioxide. “If people could make money taking carbon out of the air and putting it underground, as opposed to only being able to make money taking it from underground and putting it in the air, we would be in a better place,” Babson says. Mati is weathering the slump in part because its rock dust also improves soil health and crop yields, giving farmers a reason to participate that doesn’t depend on carbon credit prices.
XPRIZE’s answer is to change what winners receive. Babson describes “mixed purses” that pair a cash award with a guaranteed buyer through an advance market commitment, a power purchase agreement, or an offtake contract. In one thought experiment, a carbon removal prize would come with a separate $1 billion fund raised from credit buyers, which qualified teams could draw on as they deliver verified tons. XPRIZE is applying the same thinking to a planned series of fusion energy prizes, pairing technical milestones with market mechanisms to build the supply chain that commercial fusion will require. The same gap between invention and adoption shows up in other XPRIZE competitions. On September 23, XPRIZE Wildfire awarded about $4.55 million from its $11 million purse, with defense contractor Anduril Industries taking first place in autonomous fire response along with a $1 million Lockheed Martin bonus. Babson expects costs to fall as fire agencies adopt the tools and as startups license individual components into cheaper platforms, though underfunded agencies will need a way to buy the first systems. He also notes that the competition left fuel management and ground-based autonomy for future prizes. Earlier this year, program director Andrea Santy told us that field testing had moved ahead of drone regulations. In biodiversity, Limelight Rainforest won $5 million for surveying 100 hectares of tropical forest in under 24 hours and identifying more than 250 species. Biodiversity still lacks a price, but Babson argues that once ecosystems can be measured, slow-walking policy becomes “a dereliction of what they should be doing.”
We also discuss the tension inside XPRIZE’s vision of “equitable abundance,” including a $101 million Healthspan prize that could add years of consumption to longer lives. Babson argues that abundant, cheap clean energy would let society move beyond efficiency as its organizing principle, powering uses such as indoor vertical farms that could return millions of acres of farmland to nature. You can follow XPRIZE’s new competitions and get involved in its prize ideation workshops at xprize.org.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 00:36
Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s talk about the power and the uses of grand challenge programs to kickstart low-carbon industries and respond to the changing environment. Over the past several years, we’ve talked on the show with leaders of grand challenge programs designed to accelerate progress on humanity’s most difficult challenges, from pulling carbon out of the atmosphere to fighting rapidly growing wildfire threats in cities and rural communities. Many of these competitions have been launched by XPRIZE, whose leaders have shared on the show the stories of these competitions as they launched and unfolded.
Today is a chance to take stock, to look back and think about how climate markets, technology, and politics are changing fast, and how that makes this a good moment to ask the question: Are these programs designed to accelerate progress actually delivering that progress?
Our guest today designs XPRIZE’s climate bets. David Babson is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. Before XPRIZE, he was the executive director of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and a program director at the U.S. Energy Department’s ARPA-E energy technology research agency.
His portfolio includes the largest incentive in prize history. In 2025, Mati Carbon received a $50 million grand prize for their enhanced rock weathering solution for capturing and drawing down carbon, and XPRIZE now reports that companies participating in its programs have raised $3.3 billion. That carbon removal win arrived just as the removal market hit serious turbulence, and as XPRIZE’s wildfire competition wrapped up with its top prize still unclaimed.
So we’re going to discuss what grand challenges can really accomplish, which winners continue to build and which stall, and what the reasons are, as well as the tensions inside a portfolio that funds both climate solutions and longer human lifespans. We’ll get to the conversation right after this brief commercial break. Stay tuned.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear, and welcome, David Babson, to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?
David Babson 03:10
I’m doing well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 03:11
I’m glad to have you here. You’ve run research portfolios at ARPA-E and MIT. What can a prize purse accomplish that a well-funded grant program can’t, or are they complementary?
David Babson 03:22
They’re absolutely complementary. The way that I think about it is that the value of these different mechanisms for promoting innovation is at different parts of the innovation supply chain, if you will. A prize is not a substitute for the very necessary investments that places like governments make into basic, applied, and advanced research. In fact, those types of investments are really valuable for establishing the innovation ecosystems and the technical capacities to eventually win prizes.
Where the prize is very valuable is somewhat downstream: translating technologies, ideas, and innovations that are coming out of academia and labs to market for scale. It challenges the innovators to imagine those technical capacities as solutions to global challenges, and then the visibility that the prize brings to those translations of technologies de-risks funding to flow to those