(chill music)
- [Narrator] You can tell a lot about a person
based on their shoes.
And today, there's a ton of options.
In 2018, footwear was a $250 billion industry.
With over 24 million shoes produced globally.
Just look at Kanye.
His shoe and apparel line is valued at $1 billion.
The problem is, lots of shoes,
especially sneakers, aren't made to last.
They're made of plastic and we can't recycle them.
So a lot of 'em end up as trash.
So the question, can sneakers become sustainable?
(birds calling)
The average American, in 2018, bought seven pairs of shoes.
But let's focus on the sneaker,
which wasn't always so popular.
Here's where it started.
It's the late 1870s. (peppy music)
Lawn tennis becomes popular,
which allows men and women to compete against each other.
Or tennis and chill.
That game also created a new must-have item, these.
(upbeat music)
Sports became really popular.
Basketball, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, golf.
And by 1919, almost 20 million pairs of tennis shoes
were being produced in the US.
Brands like Keds, Converse, and PF Flyers
launched the very beginning of the sneaker market.
(engine rumbling)
This is Pensole Footwear Design Academy.
And this is D'Wayne Edwards, its founder.
- Shoes are very complicated.
- [Narrator] Also one of the first black footwear designers.
His resume includes LA Gear, Sketchers, Nike, and Jordan.
(choir singing)
- So plastics made their way
onto sneakers in a few key areas.
- [Narrator] First, in the outsole for support.
And then in the heel counter for structure.
In the 1970s jogging becomes super popular.
Companies introduce polyurethane foam into the midsole.
Which makes jogging more...
- Uh, comfortable.
- [Narrator] But they don't stop there.
They start to focus on the athletes.
- The goal was, if you can make their footwear lighter,
then you can make the athlete faster.
- [Narrator] Molded EVA replaces
polyurethane in the midsole, which...
- Immediately cut the weight down in half almost.
(peppy music)
- [Narrator] And almost simultaneously synthetic leather
is introduced into the upper, which impacts
the fit, weight, and maybe more importantly, the design.
(upbeat music)
- My name is Nicoline van Enter.
I am the founder and creative director of the Footwearists.
- [Narrator] Nicoline is a footwear forecaster
and shoe designer.
Her job is to see trends before they even happen.
- Everybody could imagine classic sneakers, for instance,
that you collect from the late 80s or early 90s,
often now when you open the box the sole just crumbles away.
- [Man] Hey what's up everyone?
Check it out.
Midsole.
You can see is just flaking off there.
- That's essentially what happens to plastics.
And that's also why it's difficult to
have a plastic shoe, recycle it into another plastic shoe.
- [Narrator] So right now shoes are essentially
a hodgepodge of materials, which means when you
wanna recycle an old shoe your options are
donating it, grinding it, or throwing it away.
And that's a pretty short lifecycle.
But, the future, it's actually really exciting.
As consumers, there are more
sustainable options than ever before.
The World Footwear 2030 report predicts that sustainability
will drive innovation in the footwear industry.
And it's already happening.
Big brands are experimenting with things like
biofabrication, like using mushrooms
to grow the materials for their shoes.
And 3D printing, which significantly reduces waste
during the manufacturing process.
One example of this is the Adidas Futurecraft.Loop.
Here's how it works.
- If you have a shoe of only one material
you can grind that up, take it back to pellets,
melt that again, and turn it back into
the same TPU that the shoe was made of.
- [Narrator] But companies still don't know
how many times that process can be repeated.
Another consideration, can a sustainable shoe
still appeal to sneaker culture?
- Sustainability, right now,
does not have a design language.
You can hold up a sustainable material
and a non-sustainable material in the form of a synthetic,
a textile, a leather, a plastic, a foam,
and not be able to tell a difference.
That's a problem.
If you want consumers to truly embrace sustainability
you have to win the aesthetic game.
And the aesthetic game is allowing sustainability
to have its own natural aesthetic.
- [Narrator] So back to the question,
can sneakers become sustainable?
It's going to come down to how much companies
are willing to invest, what consumers want.
And if technology can drive the change
that will give us a material that's,
well, better than plastic.
(chill music)