Crocs, Inc is a major US footwear company selling casual clogs, sandals and sneakers — as well as accessories called ‘Jibbitz’ — in more than 80 countries. In 2025, Crocs’ net revenue was $4.04 billion USD.
The majority of Crocs’ footwear (81.6%) is made from Croslite™, a foam based material made with fossil fuel-sourced polymers like polyethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), polyolefin elastomers and other proprietary materials.
May 2026
We launched our report From offsets to insets: new developments in corporate climate greenwashing, examining how mass balance accounting and insetting are being used across supply chains to market products as low-carbon and to claim emissions reductions. The analysis includes Crocs and finds that its bio-circular materials claims for Croslite™ do not reflect the physical composition of the material, raising questions about the integrity and credibility of the company’s climate targets.
Most of Crocs’ shoes are made from fossil-based inputs, meaning the majority of the brand’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the production of raw materials used in its footwear. In fact, 80% of Crocs’ Scope 3 emissions come from Scope 3, Category 1: Purchased Goods and Services — the category that includes raw materials.
To address the company’s emissions, Crocs has committed to increasing the share of bio-circular content — derived from plant-based sources like used cooking oil — in the Croslite™ compounds used in its flagship Classic Clog to 50% by 2030. In 2026, Crocs narrowed this commitment from 50% circular materials in its overall Croslite materials, to just its Classic Clog line, and reported that it had achieved 25% bio-circular material in the Classic Clog.
But here is the problem: this claim does not necessarily represent the physical content of the shoes. The actual bio-circular content in any given pair of shoes could be much lower — or even zero. This is because Crocs uses a methodology called free allocation mass balance accounting, which allows companies to assign low-carbon content to a product through credits rather than its actual material composition.
Crocs mainly purchases “bio-circular” elastomers from major chemical producer Dow Chemical. Dow produces these elastomers by mixing fossil-based and plant-based feedstocks in the same production process. Using mass balance accounting, a small amount of bio-based input can then be converted into transferable credits and allocated to selected products for customers willing to pay a premium.
Crocs can then use those credits to claim lower Scope 3 emissions and market lower-carbon shoes, even if the emissions reduction happened elsewhere in the value chain and the bio-circular material is not physically present in the product itself.
This credit-based mechanism is similar to offsetting — except it happens inside Crocs’ own supply chain, where it is often rebranded as “insetting.” Mass balance insetting makes it extremely difficult for consumers, regulators, and researchers to verify what Crocs’ products are actually made from, how materials were sourced, or whether emissions reductions have genuinely occurred.
A customer who purchases a pair of Crocs marketed as 25% bio-circular might reasonably assume that 25% of the material in their shoes comes from recycled sources, when the reality could be that the ‘recycled’ content is far lower, it could even be zero.
By using mass balance accounting, Crocs is profiting from marketing climate-friendly shoes with a lower carbon footprint, even if those shoes are made mostly — or entirely — from fossil fuels.
Materials disclosure and transparency are the bare minimum for corporate climate action. If a product claims to contain bio-based materials, those materials should actually be in the product. Crocs is currently committed to reducing the carbon footprint of its flagship product, the Classic Clog, by 50% by 2030 and increasing their bio-circular content to 50% by 2030. However, their progress towards these targets will remain questionable until they prioritise transparent, credible and high-integrity reporting.
There are clear alternatives to Crocs’ approach. Other chain-of-custody systems, like controlled blending, prioritise tracing the physical low-carbon materials in a given product in proportion to the low-carbon inputs used in that same process. These systems ensure that product claims match what is actually in the product and help scale low-carbon materials — leading to real emissions cuts, not accounting tricks.
We are calling on Crocs to increase its materials and emissions transparency by committing to meet its targets using physically traceable materials — not mass balance.
Crocs is not an isolated case. The use of mass balance accounting is growing across multiple industries. At the same time, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol — the global standard that determines how companies measure and report emissions — is being reviewed for the first time in a decade. Corporate pressure from massive polluters like Exxonmobil and Dow Chemical is mounting to embed loopholes like mass balance insetting into these rules.
If those loopholes are adopted, a significant share of emissions from some of the world’s biggest companies could be hidden from accountability. Emissions that do not get counted do not get reduced. That is why scrutiny matters now. If a major consumer brand like Crocs moves away from mass balance accounting, it would send a powerful signal to other brands — and to the corporations lobbying for these loopholes — that the future of climate action must be built on real reductions, not paper claims.
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