Salomon wants to make outdoor gear more circular, but its sustainability boss admits there’s one very big problem

Outdoor brands have become remarkably good at telling us about recycled fabrics, lower-impact materials, and products designed to last longer, but an awkward question still sits beneath much of that progress: what happens when those same brands keep selling more and more stuff?

Salomon thinks it knows the answer. The French outdoor giant has some ambitious targets for 2030, including making all of its key products eco-designed or circular, alongside a commitment to cut its absolute carbon emissions by 25% against a 2022 baseline.

The problem is that Salomon is also growing quickly. “We are growing a lot,” Marie-Laure Piednoir, Salomon’s Global Director of Sustainability and Impact, tells me. “So our growth [compared to the brand's] absolute reduction is a challenge.”

It is a refreshingly straightforward admission, and one that exposes the problem facing almost every major outdoor brand trying to become more sustainable without becoming a smaller business.

Making a greener shoe is only half the battle

Few Salomon products illustrate that difficulty better than the Index. First revealed as a concept in 2019 and launched commercially in 2021, the Index was designed as a recyclable running shoe that consumers could return at the end of its life, allowing its materials to be recovered and reused.

On paper, it sounded like the sort of closed-loop system the footwear industry had spent years talking about, but reality was more complicated.

Salomon expected its customers, particularly environmentally conscious outdoor enthusiasts, to embrace the return system enthusiastically – that did not happen to the extent the company expected.

“We had high expectations on the consumer because these are outdoor consumers, and we felt that they were engaged,” Piednoir explains. “But we didn’t get all the returns we were expecting.”

That might sound like a disappointing ending for an ambitious sustainability experiment, but Piednoir says some of the technology developed for Index has subsequently filtered into far more mainstream Salomon footwear.

The shoe’s TPU-based sole construction helped inform technologies now being used across a much larger range of products, meaning the project ultimately had a wider impact than simply creating one recyclable trainer.

Salomon had originally assumed the entire Index concept would gradually scale into its mainstream range, but, as Piednoir explained, individual innovations from the project proved easier to transfer than the complete closed-loop system itself.

A recyclable product isn’t necessarily a circular product

The word “circular” gets used increasingly freely in outdoor clothing and footwear. A jacket might contain recycled fibres, or a shoe might technically be recyclable. A company might even offer repairs.

But none of those things automatically makes a product genuinely circular. Piednoir is careful about that: “Any company that is claiming that it’s fully circular needs to have very strict criteria to evaluate that,” she says.

For Salomon, circularity has increasingly meant looking at several different stages of a product’s life. Sure, durability matters, and so do repairability and recycling. However, crucially, different products require different solutions.

A pair of skis might remain usable for 15 years, while a heavily used running shoe can wear out comparatively quickly. Trying to apply exactly the same circularity model to both makes little sense.

“There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution for circularity,” Piednoir says. That is why Salomon has recently put more emphasis on repair, including working with United Repair Centre to expand repair services across Europe.

Keeping an existing jacket or pair of trousers working for a few more years may ultimately be far simpler – and potentially greener and less resource-intensive – than breaking the entire product down into raw materials and manufacturing another one.

The outdoor industry is still bending the line into a circle

There is no shortage of impressive sustainability projects across outdoor gear right now. Brands are experimenting with mono-material garments, chemical recycling, resale schemes and increasingly sophisticated repair programmes.

But Piednoir stops short of suggesting that outdoor gear has suddenly become circular. Instead, she describes circularity almost as a direction of travel. “Circularity is a promise,” she says.

Her analogy is that the industry is effectively trying to take a straight, linear system – make something, sell it, use it, throw it away – and gradually bend that line until it starts resembling a loop.

That might begin with repairing something rather than replacing it, recovering materials from worn-out footwear, or simply designing products that last much longer. That said, the perfect circle remains much further away, and scaling those ideas is arguably the difficult part.

Making one technically impressive recyclable jacket or running shoe is achievable. Building collection systems, recycling infrastructure, and enough consumer participation to handle millions of products is something else entirely.

Sometimes competitors have to work together

Salomon also believes outdoor brands will struggle to solve some of those problems individually.

Piednoir points to the Winter Sports Sustainability Network, which brought competing brands together to share knowledge and develop better environmental measurements for products such as skis.

The winter-sports industry had historically been particularly fragmented, she says, with companies and suppliers operating independently and comparatively little shared environmental data available.

That presented a practical problem, because without reliable information on the environmental impact of different materials and manufacturing processes, it becomes much harder to determine where improvements should be made.

Salomon has consequently shared some of its lifecycle-assessment work with the wider industry. For Piednoir, cooperation on environmental issues is becoming increasingly necessary, even among companies competing for exactly the same customers.

The hardest target may still be carbon

Salomon appears reasonably confident about making progress on eco-design by 2030.

The company has developed product scorecards covering things such as materials, manufacturing, durability and circularity, allowing product teams to assess where each model sits against its sustainability criteria.

Piednoir says the brand is currently on the right trajectory towards getting its key product ranges into its top eco-design categories.

Sadly, reducing total carbon emissions for a growing company is a lot harder. Salomon's emissions per product can fall while total emissions continue to rise as sales and production increase.

That creates perhaps the biggest contradiction in modern sustainable consumerism. Brands can make individual products better, but if dramatically more products are manufactured, transported and sold, absolute environmental impact does not necessarily fall.

Piednoir readily acknowledges that Salomon's 2030 carbon target will therefore be challenging. And perhaps that is the most important takeaway from our conversation.

Sustainability in outdoor gear is no longer simply about putting recycled polyester into a jacket or creating one clever recyclable shoe.

It increasingly means tackling the far less glamorous questions surrounding manufacturing volumes, repair networks, consumer behaviour and what actually happens to products once we're finished with them.

Salomon does not pretend it has completed that transition. In fact, Piednoir's description of circularity as something the industry is gradually bending into shape might be one of the more realistic explanations I've heard.

The circle isn't complete yet, but at least brands are finally beginning to work out how difficult it is to draw one.

Read more about Salomon's sustainability commitments on the brand's website.