DESIGN | SUSTAINABILITY


Right: Caspar Coppetti, Co-Founder of On, with the Cyclon shoe


foam, which is a PEBA foam developed with Arkema. For the Cyclon shoe’s bottom unit, On innovated


Below: TPU material recycled from used Index.01 running shoes will be used by Salomon in an injection moulded


component of new ski boots


further with a physical foaming technique using supercritical fluid. In tests, the Cyclon shoe foam had a rebound rate of more than 65%, which the company says is higher than regular Helion foam. Other advanced manufacturing features include the use of ultrasonic welding to replace glue in bonding the shoe components together. “To engineer a recyclable shoe of this standard, you cannot use common production processes,” says Nils Altrogge, Innovation Technology Lead. “The beauty of the super critical foaming technol- ogy is that we replace harmful chemicals with a gas that controls the expansion of the foam. If you want to have high performance and a high rebound, it’s only possible with the highest quality materials.” Sustainability, materials and processes were the major topics at AMI’s Polymers in Footwear virtual summit in January and February. The online conference, bringing together designers from brands with plastics materials and technology firms, included a panel discussion on challenges in the footwear industry’s sustainability efforts. Olivier Mouzin, Footwear Sustainability Manager at Salomon, the ski boot manufacturer, said the industry has made a start in sustainability but needs to move beyond established approaches, such as downcycling waste shoes into low-value products. Sports shoe brands continue to focus on perfor- mance, he said: “We need to keep the perfor- mance in mind but add sustainability to it.” Salomon is branching out into running shoes and is planning to launch the recyclable Index.01 shoe this spring. Recyclable polyester is used for the upper, while the bottom unit is made complete- ly from TPU, which the company says will be recycled, combined with virgin TPU and used in an injection moulded component to make Salomon alpine ski boots in Europe for the 2022 winter range. The bottom unit of the Index.01 is an


injection moulded TPU-based foam that Salomon calls Infiniride. The sole’s design is a reverse camber, which it says helps propel the runner forward with a quick transition. In the discussion, Nico van Enter, Founder of


The Footwearists consultancy, agreed with the point made by Mouzin that the industry does not generally have systems in place yet for closed loop recycling. She added that it is the big brands that make the news with their recycling initiatives. “The largest numbers in the footwear industry are not in branded footwear but in non-branded footwear… When we look at the 42bn shoes produced every year, on that scale, I don’t think we are that far [ahead in sustainability].” Beto Bina, Head of Sourcing & Innovation at


Veja, said: “The way we measure sustainability right now, we’re a little bit obsessed with carbon – which is important, but it’s just one of the metrics. We are starting to learn how to measure sustainability.” Galahad Clark, Founder of Vivobarefoot,


agreed and added that companies across the footwear industry are using their own methods to measure their sustainability which makes compari- sons difficult. “It’s crazy that as an industry we haven’t come together and agreed the rules of the game,” he said. In his presentation, Clark said VivoBarefoot has a


2023 target to make 50% of its shoes from biode- gradable materials or “3rd


to 4th generation”


feedstocks – meaning materials that do not compete with food crop production, which could include polymers based on CO2 or other sources such as algae. Vivobarefoot is also planning to start mass bespoke shoe production with 3D printing later this year, in which the shoe design is adapted to individuals’ feet from 3D data captured by a scanner app on their smartphone. The influence of shoe production processes on sustainability was illustrated in a presentation on


14 INJECTION WORLD | March 2021 www.injectionworld.com


IMAGE: SALOMON


IMAGE: ON


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