It’s taken the company nearly 10 years, but Adidas has officially released a statement: they are on the way to figuring out how to craft a shoe that can be recycled and made into a different shoe.
The new shoe, Futurecraft.Loop, is created from a single reusable material called thermoplastic polyurethane. The main challenges Adidas faced were making a shoe from a single material and not using glue to construct the shoe.
It’s hard for recyclers to process mixed materials because their consistencies are different when pulverized. However, by using one material, Adidas can wash the shoes and grind them up into little pellets. From there, the pellets are melted into a material that can be used to make more Futurecraft.Loop sneakers.
Eric Liedtke, who is in charge of global brands at adidas, called the shoe an indicator “of our intent to take responsibility for the entire life of our product.