Puma reveals results of Re:Suede experiment to make biodegradable shoe
CategoriesSustainable News

Puma reveals results of Re:Suede experiment to make biodegradable shoe

Sportswear brand Puma has said it is a step closer to launching a truly biodegradable shoe, following a trial in which a specially made version of its Suede sneakers decomposed under strict conditions.

In the Re:Suede experiment, 500 shoes were sent out to testers for six months of wear. Of those shoes, 412 were returned to Puma and sent to an industrial composting facility in The Netherlands, where they were mixed with other green waste and left to biodegrade.

After around three and a half months, a large proportion of the leather trainer had broken down sufficiently to be sold in The Netherlands as Grade A compost – a high-quality compost typically used on gardens and landscapes.

Slowing things down was the sole, which in the Re:Suedes was made of thermoplastic elastomer (TPE-E), a type of rubber. It took longer than the other components to break down into small enough pieces to be classified as compost, around six months.

Close-up of the tongue of Puma's Re:Suede sneaker showing a fuzzy cream-coloured suede leather upper with an embossed Puma logo and off-white hemp laces
The Re:Suede shoe was designed with biodegradable materials

Puma is calling the Re:Suede experiment “successful” – with caveats. The longer timeframe required for the soles to break down is a deviation from standard operating procedures for industrial composting, so the shoes could not just be thrown into a household food waste collection.

However, Puma is hoping to launch a commercial version of the sneaker next year, incorporating a takeback scheme that would see it compost the shoe using its tailor-made process.

“While the Re:Suede could not be processed under the standard operating procedures for industrial composting, the shoes did eventually turn into compost,” said Puma chief sourcing officer Anne-Laure Descours.

“We will continue to innovate with our partners to determine the infrastructure and technologies needed to make the process viable for a commercial version of the Re:Suede, including a takeback scheme, in 2024.”

Photo of Puma's Re:Suede biodegradable sneaker showing a cream-coloured version of the common Suede sneaker
Its leather upper was found to decompose under industrial composting conditions

In a report of the experiment’s findings, Puma said it would pursue a “new business model in composting” that could support the decomposition of the shoe.

“The soles slow the process down, resulting in more composting cycles required to turn the shoe into Grade A compost, meaning they can’t be processed using today’s standard industrial composting operating procedures,” said the report.

“But with a new business model in composting and a higher volume of input into it, those standard operating procedures can change,” the report concluded. “There is a future for Re:Suede. To get there, we need more scale.”

Puma’s Re:Suede shoe is made of Zeology suede, which is tanned using a process based on zeolite minerals and free of chrome, aldehyde and heavy metals. Padding and laces are made of hemp, while the lining is made of a hemp-cotton blend.

For the composting process, Puma partnered with Dutch waste company Ortessa. The procedure involved shredding the shoe and placing the pieces into a composting tunnel – a unit where the temperature, humidity and oxygen levels are kept at optimal levels for bacteria to break down organic matter.

For the decomposing shoe granules to be considered small enough for compost, they had to be under 10 millimetres in size.

Those granules were periodically filtered out and sold as compost in The Netherlands.

The leftover pieces, 10 to 40 millimetres in size, became part of the “compost starter mix” and were combined with more green waste to continue decomposing. Ortessa estimated that the full shoe was turned into compost within approximately six months.

Close-up photo of the beige-coloured rubber outsole of Puma's Re-Suede biodegradable sneakers, showing tread and a Puma logo
The rubber outsole took longer to break down into compost

Re:Suede is Puma’s second attempt at launching a compostable shoe, with the first coming over a decade ago in the form of 2012’s InCycle collection.

Its Basket sneaker, which Puma said was fully compostable through industrial composting, was made of organic cotton and linen with a sole composed of a biodegradable plastic called APINATbio. The range was discontinued in 2014 and its failure blamed on poor consumer demand.

While several shoe designs have been marketed as biodegradable in recent years, the strict conditions required for them to actually break down are often not specified or the infrastructure not available. This can be seen as a kind of greenwashing.

Brands that have launched footwear described as biodegradable include Bottega Veneta with its sugarcane and coffee boots and Adidas with the uppers of its Futurecraft trainers.

A more experimental composition came from German designer Emilie Burfeind, whose compostable sneakers are made with a mushroom mycelium sole and a canine hair upper.

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Allbirds releases “world’s first net-zero carbon shoe”
CategoriesSustainable News

Allbirds releases “world’s first net-zero carbon shoe”

At the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen, Allbirds has unveiled a woolly sock-style trainer with a bioplastic sole that effectively adds zero emissions to the atmosphere over the course of its life, the shoe brand claims.

The minimal all-grey Moonshot sneaker features an upper made using wool from a regenerative farm in New Zealand, which uses sustainable land management practices to capture more carbon than it emits.

This on-farm carbon storage offset any other emissions generated over the product’s lifecycle, Allbirds claims, making it the “world’s first net-zero carbon shoe”.

“Regenerative wool was a critical pillar of helping us reimagine how products are designed and made through the lens of carbon reduction,” co-founder Tim Brown told Dezeen.

“To me, the currently untapped opportunity for naturally derived, net-zero products is the future of fashion.”

Allbirds races to reduce trainers’ footprint

Set to launch commercially next spring, the product follows in the footsteps of the Futurecraft.Footprint trainer, which at 2.94 kilograms CO2e was reportedly the lowest-carbon trainer ever made when Allbirds and Adidas launched it in 2021.

Back then, the team focused mainly on simplifying the construction of trainers, which have an average footprint of 13.6 kilograms CO2e, and reducing the number of separate components from 65 to just seven.

This same principle was also applied to the Moonshot, which features no laces or eyelets and integrates its insole directly into the knitted upper.

Close-up of knitted upper on Allbirds shoe
Moonshot was unveiled at the Global Fashion Summit

But this time, the key advance came in the form of materials – primarily the merino wool upper sourced from Lake Hawea Station, a certified net-zero farm in New Zealand.

Through regenerative practices such as replanting native trees and vegetation, as well as maintaining soil carbon through rotational grazing, the farm says it sequesters almost twice as much carbon as it emits.

However, these carbon benefits of sustainable land management are generally not considered in a material’s lifecycle assessment (LCA).

“Frequently, the way that the carbon intensity of wool is looked at is just acknowledging the emissions, so completely disregarding any of the removals happening on farm,” said Allbirds sustainability manager Aileen Lerch. “And we think that that is a huge missing opportunity.”

That’s because it prevents brands, designers and architects, who are increasingly making use of biomaterials to reduce the footprint of their projects, from reliably calculating and certifying any emissions savings.

With the Moonshot project, Allbirds hopes to offer a template for how these carbon benefits could be considered within LCAs, using Lake Hawea Station’s overall carbon footprint as a basis.

From this, the Allbirds extrapolated a product-level footprint for the wool, which the company has so far failed to disclose, using its own carbon calculator.

Carbon calculation chart for M0.0NSHOT trainer
Carbon sequestered on the wool farm offsets emissions elsewhere in the lifecycle, Allbirds claims

As a result, there is a degree of uncertainty around the actual footprint of the trainer because it cannot currently be verified by a third party according to official international standards.

But Allbirds head of sustainability Hana Kajimura argues that this is a risk worth taking to help push the discussion forward and incentivise a shift towards regenerative agriculture.

“It’s about progress, not perfection,” she said. “We could spend decades debating the finer points of carbon sequestration, or we can innovate today with a common sense approach.”

Plastics still play a role for performance

Regenerative wool also cannot yet fully contend with the performance of synthetic fibres, meaning that to create the Moonshot upper, it had to be blended with some recycled nylon and polyester for durability and stretch.

For the midsole, Allbirds managed to amp up the bioplastic content from 18 per cent in 2021’s Futurecraft.Footprint trainer to 70 per cent in the Moonshot, using a process called supercritical foaming.

This involves injecting gas into the midsole, making it more durable and lightweight while reducing the need for emissions-intensive synthetic additives.

“In the industry right now, most midsoles have no bio content or quite a minimal one,” Lerch explained. “So it’s really a large step change in what’s possible because of this supercritical foaming process.”

Stuck to the front of the sneaker is a bioplastic smiley face badge by California company Mango Materials, which is made using captured methane emissions from a wastewater treatment facility that is then digested by bacteria and turned into a biopolyester called PHA.

The shoe itself will be vacuum-packed in bioplastic polyethylene to save space and weight during transport, which Allbirds plans to conduct via electric trucks and biofuel-powered container ships.

There is no “perfect solution” for end of life

Another area that will need further development is the end of life, meaning how the shoe’s packaging and its various plastic and bioplastic composite components can be responsibly disposed of given that they are notoriously hard – if not impossible – to recycle.

“We don’t yet have a perfect solution of what will happen at its end of life,” Lerch said. “We don’t want to make a promise of: send it back, don’t worry, buy your next shoe and move on.”

“We acknowledge though, that the answer isn’t just to keep making more products that end up in landfill or incinerated. So we’re continuously looking at what those solutions can be.”

M0.0NSHOT net-zero trainers by Allbirds
The sock trainers feature a minimal wool-heavy design

In a bid to overcome challenges like this and encourage collaboration across the industry, Allbirds is open-sourcing the toolkit it used to create Moonshot and encouraging other companies to adapt, expand and improve on it.

“It is also about ushering in a new age of ‘hyper-collaboration’ across brands and industries to share best practice, build scale for all parts of the supply chain, to reward growers and lower costs,” Brown said.

Allbirds became the first fashion brand to provide carbon labelling for all of its products in 2020.

Since then, the company has committed itself to reducing the carbon footprint of its products to below one kilogram and its overall footprint to “near zero” by 2030.

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Vegan athletic shoe brand champions social change
CategoriesSustainable News

Vegan athletic shoe brand champions social change

Spotted: Reducing reliance on petroleum is a driving force in many industries, and solutions are varied. In the UK, athletic shoe brand Hylo produces a vegan sneaker that looks as good as it feels. Even better, every sale contributes to the social campaign Common Goal. Common Goal uses the power of football to help shape positive social changes. Members of the Common Goal group contribute one per cent of their salary or income to the fund.

Hylo’s sneakers are made in China, with the majority of materials sourced from within 60 kilometres of the factory and all delivered by road, not air. No animal products go into the making of the shoes, and the company makes supply chain and production transparency a priority. Each pair of shoes is numbered, allowing for full traceability of every product. The company also offers a take-back service for shoes that need recycling, and gives every customer that returns a used pair a £10 credit.

In July 2021, Hylo joined the Sustainable Apparel Coalition in order to ensure compliance with the leading means of sustainable, caring production. The company’s investment in biogas digesters near its manufacturing hub further offsets its carbon emissions. Having secured nearly €3 million in a recent funding round, the company plans to expand its marketing and product development.

Coffee grounds, carbon emissions, and algae are only three of the other sustainable ingredients Springwise has spotted being used to improve the environmental footprint of the footwear industry.  

Written by: Keely Khoury

Email: hello@hyloathletics.com

Website: hyloathletics.com

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