The world is evolving, or at least a portion of it is. There does exist pockets and groups of innovators, thinkers, designers and missionaries out there who are purposefully generating new ideas and products, not for consumerism or consumption, but for life. As individual people, and as a planet – we need a giant cleansing. We need to detox our lives, our minds, our eating habits, our shopping, our screen obsessions, our lifestyle, our work imbalance, our air and we also need to detox our oceans.
Last week, ADIDAS, Parley for the Oceans and British shoe designer Alexandre Taylor, unveiled the prototype of a shoe with an upper made entirely from yarns and filaments produced using plastic salvaged from the ocean.
Parley for the Oceans is an organization that assembles creators, thinkers and leaders to raise awareness for the beauty and the fragility of our oceans and collaborate on projects that can end their destruction. Parley addresses major threats towards the planet’s oceans, the most important ecosystem of our planet.
“This way there is no reason why materials with similar characteristics to those that we use every day with conventional production processes cannot be simply replaced by ocean plastic materials, it is really much more a case of working with specialist ‘green’ chemists and companies such as Bionic textile to build new materials by re-constituting and re-engineering the nets and plastics.” Says Taylor.
ADIDAS plans to launch this shoe next year as apart of a wider collection of sportswear using recycled ocean waste fabric and is continually working on perfecting the technology of creating these very new products. Their goal is to globally raise awareness for ocean preservation through the ADIDAS stores in collaboration with Parley.
The nets that were used for the upper part of the Ultra-Boost-style shoe were retrieved by Parley for the Oceans partner organisation Sea Shepherd, during a 110-day expedition tracking an illegal poaching vessel off the coast of West Africa.
Adidas revealed the designs during a talk titled “Oceans. Climate. Life”, hosted at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The announcement follows Adidas’ sustainability plan, which includes their recent decision to phase out plastic bags in all retail stores.
There is currently no fixed release date for the shoes, but Adidas has scheduled the launch for spring 2016. We are definitely looking forward to seeing what is next for this collaboration and other brands making the leap into sustainability in fashion – this is the future.
More information on Parley for the Oceans parley.tv/#unxparley
Written by Ashley Allwood
Holistic Editor, KA MAGAZINE
