The sneaker designed to be recycled

Futurecraft.Loop by Adidas is the running shoe designed from scratch to be recycled.

The main challenge of recycling sneakers is that they’re usually made from a variety of different materials which are complicated to separate, sort, and repurpose – but Adidas has found a solution. As part of the footwear label’s bid to mitigate the plastic crisis, they’ve launched a groundbreaking, high-performance running shoe that can actually be broken up and remade again.

Rather than creating shoes that need to be taken apart and eventually recycled in 12 to 15 different ways (as is often the case), Adidas has begun using virgin thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), a single raw material that won’t end up on a landfill after it’s run its course.

‘As consumers we all enjoy buying stuff, yet some of the consequences of consumption on the planet are devastating,’ says footwear developer Amanda Verbeck. ‘This one-material shoe is designed so that it remains a valuable resource to create another shoe.’

Typical running shoes nowadays are built with a mix of rubbers, knits, foams, and other light synthetic shells, but the Futurecraft.Loop is made entirely from TPU components which are fused together with heat.

This also means that no glue is used for any of the manufacture and the used shoes can eventually be washed and ground into pellets to make future editions. As a result, Adidas is claiming that there will be zero waste whatsoever. Pretty sick aye.