Adidas manufactures about 400 million shoes every single year, and manufacturing this number of shoes requires a good amount of resources. But creating new materials, again and again, isn’t that great for our environment. So, to deal with the issue, Adidas is turning in a different direction.

According to the experts, by 2030, there will be more plastics in the oceans than fishes themselves. And one more study tells that about 90% of the seabirds have consumed at least some form of plastic waste. All this pollution in the oceans and on the beaches is dangerous to both humans and marine life.

Adidas is attempting to stop some of these plastics before reaching the ocean. Adidas partnered with the environmental organization Parley for the Oceans in 2015 intending to turn marine pollution into sportswear. According to the company, the partnership has prevented tons of plastics from reaching the oceans. In 2019 alone, Adidas manufactured about 11 million shoes with recycled ocean plastic.

The process starts at the beach. Parley, along with its partners collects waste from coastal areas like the Maldives. The waste then gets sorted and the plastic from the material is sent to the Adidas processing plant. Plastic bottles used by Adidas are the ones containing polyethylene terephthalate or PET. And things that cant be used, like rings or caps, are sent to normal recycling facilities.

The waste gets crushed, washed, and dehydrated at the processing plant, and what’s left behind are small plastic flakes. These flakes get heated, dried, and cooled, and then chopped into small resin pellets. Normally, polyester is made out of petroleum. But what Adidas does is melt these pellets into creating a filament, which is spun into what we call Ocean Plastic, which is a form of polyester yarn.

This ocean plastic is used in forming the upper parts of shoes, and clothing like jerseys. Items in the Parley collection consist of at least 75% of intercepted marine waste. And they are still nowhere left behind in standards in comparison with Adidas’s other shoes.

Recycled polyester uses lesser chemicals and water and helps in preventing plastic pollution. The company aims at replacing all virgin polyester with recycled polyester by 2024. Currently, a big chunk of Adidas’s apparel uses recycled polyester. You might have come across Adidas’s recycled sportswear, without even noticing it. With a little helping hand from Parley of the Oceans, Adidas is able to efficiently make use of the already available materials, and manufacture into something new.

Tazeen Fatma