Growing up in early-aughts San Francisco (before the drought came to California), I basically lived in my Converse sneakers paired with soggy-bottomed flare pants. Now, I’m no stranger to the wet shoe life. A shoe company called Vessi set out to design completely waterproof shoes to solve this problem. If you live in a rainy climate, you’re probably familiar with the struggle of having damp feet. They don’t offer half sizes, so finding the perfect fit might be more challenging for some.They’re fairly comfortable and lightweight.They take forever to dry once they’re wet.But this also means that Vessi’s aren’t very breathable, which causes uncomfortable, sweaty feet.These are the key takeaways from my Vessi shoes review: The final piece of the puzzle – and one of the most challenging – is collection.TL DR: After testing the Everyday Classic Sneakers over the past year, I don’t recommend Vessi shoes. It has only been on the market since June 2022, so there aren’t enough old shoes available to replace virgin inputs, but Heitz is confident this will change over time. The plastic is versatile enough to be turned into most of the shoe’s components, from laces to soles. “The Cloudneo is the first product where we do this successfully.”Īccording to Heitz, the beauty of the material is that it is thermoplastic, which means it can be recycled over and over again. “There are so many pieces we had to look at,” says Ilmarin Heitz, the company’s head of innovation. The result is the Cloudneo, a bright, white runner made entirely from bio-based castor-bean plastic. Swiss running brand On decided to eliminate the need for separation by making shoes out of a single material. In Australia, customers fill out a form in order to return their spent sneakers, which are shipped to a local partner facility for processing. The European Union has passed legislation to ensure companies are responsible for collecting, sorting and recycling their own products at the end of their life, but this is not the case in other markets. “Things are not moving at the same speed,” Mouzin says. But recycling infrastructure and regulations differ from country to country. Mouzin says it’s a priority to localise the recycling processes in each region where the shoes are sold. The shoe also has a third material that lines the inside, which is recycled into floor mats. For now it is being stored in their warehouse. While the TPU sole can be recycled into a ski boot component, Olivier Mouzin, head of Salomon’s footwear sustainability program, says they have not found a solution for the polyester upper. When the shoes are returned to Salomon, they are split using scissors. In May 2021, they released a sneaker called the Index.01 made of two main materials, a polyester upper and a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) sole. Finally, the bioplastics are sent to an industrial compost.įrench outdoor-wear brand Salomon approached the puzzle slightly differently by simplifying the number of materials in their recyclable shoes. The polyester and rubber components are recycled back into materials that can be used again in shoes the ether foams are open-loop recycled, meaning they can be used in other products. They settled on a shoe made from rubber, bioplastics derived from coconut husks and sugar cane, polyester and other plastics including ether foam. Step two was to ensure every component could be separately recycled. Thousand Fell women’s zero-waste running shoes He says the first thing they had to figure out was how to make a sneaker that could be taken apart without contaminating adhesives so that each material could be processed correctly. Stuart Ahlum, the co-founder of US-based sneaker brand Thousand Fell, started investigating recyclable sneakers in 2018 and launched to the US and Canadian markets one year later. From there they have to contend with retrieving the shoes once the wearer is done using them, a process that differs country to country. Designing a shoe that can be recycled is only the first step. International brands, from Nike to Salomon, are on board with the idea of circular sneakers, albeit with varying degrees of success. In other words, designing sneakers that can be recycled back into sneakers. While some groups, including the Australian Sporting Goods Association, have begun collecting old sneakers, shredding them and turning them into basketball courts, children’s play mats and other types of flooring, the holy grail of circularity is keeping materials at their highest value.
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