Last week, to great fanfare, Adidas launched a shoe that was made almost entirely from plastic collected and recycled from the ocean. The launch included an announcement from Adidas Group Executive Board Member of Global Brands, Eric Liedtke, who informed an expectant media how “The upper shoe is made entirely of yarns and filaments reclaimed from illegal deep-sea gillnets and other ocean waste, while the base is made from sustainable cushioning material.”
Unfortunately, Adidas has no plans at present to sell the shoe, and it remains a ‘concept shoe’, constructed after a 110 day voyage by the environmental sailors on the vessel Sea Shepherd.
This news came as a surprise for two main reasons. Firstly, that such a thing as a ‘concept shoe’ exists, and secondly that a trainer/sneaker created never to go on sale should become such a newsworthy event.
Any company’s attempt to solve a problem such as ocean waste or increased recycling of plastics is to be applauded, but if the plastic being reused is from a single collection and the sneaker is never to be sold, then isn’t the story more publicity stunt than planet saving action?
Perhaps the media should focus more on a company such as Ecover, a business founded in 1979 based on a product that was a phosphate free washing powder. Today, it produces a whole range of household cleaning products with a view to having less impact on the environment. For example it’s toilet cleaner contains only the following ingredients; water, citric acid, lauryl polyglucose, sodium citrate, xanthan gum, parfum, sodium benzoate, linalook and limonene.
Better still, on the plastics front it is selling a washing up liquid bottle made entirely from recycled plastic, 10% of which is plastic collected from the ocean.
A worthy achievement, but one that still fails to entirely solve the problem of waste plastic in the ocean, as the bottle is just a ‘limited edition’ and the company admits that, “This year, we will be using one tonne of Ocean Plastic and we aim to increase to three tonnes next year.”
One company that does manage to achieve an all year round collection and recycling of raw material from ocean debris is Method. They also make soap, and sell it in bottles that are made from plastics sourced from the ocean.
To do this, as Forbes magazine reports, “The company has partnered with Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii and the Kōkua Hawaii Foundation to hand-pick more than a ton of plastic from local beaches.” The business model for this, as CEO and co-founder Adam Lowry explains is that they have “created a crowd source model for collecting plastic”.
This volunteer support needs training, as only some of the debris on the beach can be reclaimed, and even then the search for waste is focused on beaches where there is a high level of the polypropylene and high density polyethylene needed.
Even with this volunteer support, Lowry explains, Method still faces numerous problems to make its recycled plastics sourcing viable. “The material is not only difficult to collect, it’s also degraded, brittle, and hard to recycle.” This means that in the end, to create a quality plastic, it has to be mixed with other recycled plastic sources.
Given that as the Wall Street Journal reports, as much as “8.8 million metric tons of plastic waste are dumped in the world’s oceans each year.” then the efforts of Adidas, Method and Ecover begin to seem rather insignificant.
So given that recycling plastic from the ocean is so difficult, shouldn’t we be focusing on a different approach?
Lego, the Denmark-based makers of plastic toy bricks for the last 66 years, has decided to clean up its use of raw materials by promising to introduce “sustainable raw materials” to replace the petrochemical-based polymers it currently uses. This it hopes to achieve by the year 2030 at a cost of $150 million.
At present, according to Lego chemical engineers, ”the key raw material for the blocks is acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS), a copolymer of styrene and acrylonitrile synthesized in the presence of polybutadiene rubber”
This product is supplied by a firm called Styrolution, a spokesman from which explained to the American Chemical Society the problems Lego is facing, and why the change will take so long, and so much money.
“The building-block raw material has to be made to an exact specification so that the blocks lock together and then come apart with just the right amount of force. It is not your run-of-the-mill ABS.”
When, and if, Lego find their solution, it is certain not to be a perfect answer, as even oil free plastics have their problems. Bioplastics began to be developed and commercially tested in the 1950’s and are now used in countless products. But as world population soars and food prices rise, setting aside thousands of acres of land to grow plant to make into plastics is becoming less and less viable.
Maybe, that problem has now also been solved as a group of researchers at the Institute of Chemical and Bioengineering at the university ETH Zurich, have found a new way to make the PLA (polylactic acid) used in many bioplastics.
This new method uses glycerol, a waste product of biofuel production, and so saves energy and produces 20% less carbon dioxide than traditional production methods.
The method is explained further in the Smithsonian Magazine, which explains that, “Rather than using fermentation to create PLA, as is commonly done, the researchers teamed up with scientists from the university’s Advanced Catalysis Engineering group to create a custom catalyst. Made from a microporous mineral, the catalyst’s structure specifically promotes the desired chemical process.”
The end product still has its disadvantages, as it does not perform well when hot, so cannot replace plastics used in the microwave or in coffee cups, and it is of course, years away from being commercially produced.
But with developments like this, one can begin to wonder if we are on the cusp of new wave of sustainable plastics. For now it seems that there is no single solution to the amount of plastic-based waste that we produce, instead, it seems a combination of recycling and recreating may be the answer. With the initial, albeit small steps into reclaiming ocean plastic, mixed with investment from big businesses into sustainable plastics, and further developments and research into bioplastics, we may be on our way to maintaining a healthy industry and more importantly, a healthy planet.