Last week sportswear giant, Adidas, unveiled the “Futurecraft 3D,” a 3D-printed, customized running-shoe midsole designed to meet the cushioning needs of an individual’s foot. Hailing it a “production breakthrough,” Adidas says the concept piece will take the running-shoe standard to the “next level” by offering a flexible carbon copy of the athlete’s foot, down to his or her exact contours and pressure points.
Adidas has teamed up with Parley for the Oceans, a multidisciplinary band of “creators, thinkers and leaders” who want to make ocean debris a valuable material for the fashion industry, to create the world’s first shoe upper made entirely from reclaimed ocean plastic and illegal deep-sea gillnets.
Shoes and sneakers don’t really seem like products that would have a large impact on the environment, but they do. The footwear industry – along with the rest of the textile industry – is one of the worst polluting in the world.