Get the latest gossip

Pale, porous and 3D-printed: inside the weird and wonderful quest to make compostable shoes


Shoes are notoriously hard to recycle and the vast majority are sent to landfill. Can a new design help reduce the environmental impact of our footwear?

Modern shoes are among the hardest items to produce sustainably because of their complexity, say industry experts, and there are few reliable statistics about the number manufactured every year for the world’s 8 billion humans. Photograph: PR“We are a trying to build a regenerative footwear business in an industry that is pretty famous for exploration, extraction and short-termism,” says Asher Clark, a co-founder of Vivobarefoot. Polly Lythall, a business development manager for the non-profit British Footwear Association, says shifting manufacturing bases to China and India has increased the cost of more sustainable options.

Get the Android app

Or read this on The Guardian