People have learned to segregate their trash accordingly, and this is because there’s a need to recycle. In this day and age, it’s all about saving the world and making sure the landfills don’t get overflowed with garbage that just sit there for decades.
But what if there’s more to it than just recycling? This is exactly what one couple thought about when they designed their sustainable baby shoes. They have come up with the perfect method of going green while saving space on landfills.
A husband and wife team hailing from Oregon have come up with a perfect design for baby shoes. That’s because these melt away into water. This works best because infants outgrow their shoes very quickly and parents oftentimes resort to throwing them out even when they’ve been barely used.
The silky fabric is made from a kind of water-soluble plastic that covers compounds such as detergent pods, cosmetic products, and pill coatings. While it is soluble, it has also been designed be sturdy. In fact, it can last through the use of two infants so that it can be handed down from one sibling to the next.
These shoes are known as “Woolybubs,” and starting price for these is $34, which is for crawlers, and $40 for walkers. Power couple Jesse Milliken and Wife Meghan took time and energy to make sure that they are able to dissolve in water while staying sturdy all throughout use. They’ve also been baby tested, and baby approved. Even when the infants chew on them, they will remain intact. As the couple said, “This wasn’t easy. We experienced some trial and error and a few unsatisfied babies in the process. But the babies pushed us to go farther, do better, innovate more, fear less. And, in the end, we ended up with sustainable baby shoes that support the most high-performing, style-conscious babies on the planet.”
Landfill waste in the textile and fashion industries can be too much. This is more seen in children’s clothing, particularly for infant-through-Kindergarten clothing. Children outgrow their clothes very quickly. In fact, it only takes a couple of months for many.
The founders have done their research and said that around 300 million pairs of shoes get thrown in landfills per year, and many of them take around 40 years to decompose. The Millikens are parents of three, and they feel the impact on the environment. They’ve been feeling guilty about the unnecessary landfill waste that came from just them, much more from the rest. That’s why Jesse opted to leave his job at Nike. He still stayed in the same industry, but this time, he brought his experience on footwear development to a specific niche – that of baby-booties. This was when Woolybubs was born.
“It took us almost a year to develop this fabric that was durable enough,” Jesse Milliken told Fast Company. “It’s kind of ironic to use the word durable for babies, but durable enough to last and stand up to baby wear and tear, and then ultimately still break down and degrade in the right conditions.”
The silk-like material for the shoes makes use of polyvinyl alcohol, or (PVA), a biodegradable and water-soluble plastic in every component. Because of this, every part of the shoe dissolves in boiling water.
The Millikens are still trying to put together a study. They wanted to investigate whether the PVA that comes from the shoes turns into nothing. However, some researchers also believe that this requires a solution that needs special bacteria for it to completely break apart. This has been a debate until now, and if it has been found to be true, they can assume that the dissolved plastic would stay in the water supply even long after it has been dissolved. That’s because wastewater plants don’t come with a specialized design that is able to take care of the PVA solution.
Other researchers have also looked into this and they discovered that it does both dissolve and biodegrade. This means that it leaves nothing harmful to the environment.
As for the toddlers who are still learning how to walk, they’ve designed something that’s made from a hundred percent recycled plastic. This can also be shipped back to the company so that they can take care of the recycling process in case the family has no need for them. The Woolybubs have also requested for a separate study to see if the shoes will biodegrade in landfills or compost piles.
“We are always looking for innovative solutions to improve the environmental impact to the planet,” Milliken shared.
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