It’s not the end of the line for your well-loved Native Shoes. The Native Shoes Remix™ Project is our commitment to recycling your worn out footwear into something new.
Source: Native Shoes Remix™ Project | Native Shoes™
A week ago CBS Mornings showed a video that shook me to my core. While the video dealt primarily with apparel and fast fashion, my immediate reference is always sneakers. The U.S. is a consumer based economy. We don’t really make things anymore, so trade in the U.S. relies on buying clothes and consumable goods. Manufacturing is limited and for many the price of products made in the U.S. is prohibitive because the entire country has grown to expect inexpensive brand names.
The 5 minute video above is heartbreaking and including it in this post somewhat antithetical. But Native is a brand that recognizes the complex issues with growth in a business and eco-responsibility. When a brand is already in existence and has fans what should that brand do to make things better when the brand is going to continue to produce products?
Many of the SKUs from Native are EVA. This means that in most instances the product isn’t going to break down quickly. To offset this issue, the company has partnered with Bloom Foam:
The Sustainability Report Ep. 14 | Part 7: The Wet Lab at Bloom Foam – Part 1
Bloom is a company dedicated to cleaning up harmful algae blooms in waterways around the U.S. They take the algae and turn it into a bioplastic. While utilizing Bloom is a bonus, it’s a small step. Even the process of creating the Foam generates carbon as it has to ship to China and be combined with recycled materials. It’s definitely an upgrade and that’s where I want to take this dialogue as it relates to Native.
Native Shoes is taking the next step beyond using Bloom, and they will attempt to be life cycled managed completely. This doesn’t mean every product will be sustainable. They aren’t making that claim and I respect the brand for clarifying what this means for Native.
The Remix Project was born out of our purpose – encouraging everyone to ask more what ifs. We asked the question: what if we could recycle our shoes to give them a second life?
From there, we investigated ways in which we could grind and repurpose the bouncy, lightweight materials for which our shoes are known and loved.
The unique composition of Native Shoes can be reground into versatile material that is useful in the creation of seating, playground flooring, insulation and more. Other shoes are sorted and donated to good causes, or recycled via our partners across the globe. From that point – there’s no telling where your soles could turn up!
I am very realistic about the problems with fashion and I understand the issues with changing supply chains and improving the options created. Think of fashion as a zombie bite. If you’re bitten it’s pretty much a wrap. That’s where we are in the world as it relates to the forest fires, and hurricanes becoming more prominent each season. We’re bitten. To stop the virus from spreading there are two options, amputate immediately or kill the virus. Brands would have to amputate or die. If this happens, jobs are loss the economy suffers because we are consumer based. The only other solution is to become better communities. Join together and reduce where we can. Be thoughtful and create options for those products to be repurposed, until every brand can amputate the products creating these issues. Shout out to Native for taking on this responsibility.