Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Personal Sustainability, Old Running Shoes, and Green Olympic Gear
It's all about sustainability: for our earth, our communities, and our own bodies. This GSpotting TV segment delves into donating shoes to be ground up into a running track through Nike's Reuse a Shoe program, Olympic commemorative tshirts from Coca Cola made from recycled Coke bottles, and revisits a previous post about Canadian Olympians wearing sustainable uniforms.
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2 comments:
good for coke and nike for shiz. they should be paying the g-spotter for positive press.
Question... is it organic cotton coke uses to blend with the recycled polymer fiber? The idea that a running shoe only will last a couple hundred miles before the spring in the rubber mushes, always felt nuts to me. I used to run ten miles a day, that meant that I would have needed a new pair of running shoes every month, or so... the first thing that wore out were the heels, so I would rebuild them with Shoe-Goo, would last me another hundred miles or so. I have cowboy boots I've worn for thirty years... the soles wear out, I take them to a shoe repair shop. Most of them are all out of business now because people throw away their shoes instead of repairing them. Running shoes are a marketing scheme to get you to keep buying a new pair as often as possible. So I designed a running shoe with a replacable snap-in, snap-out heel, showed it around to all the running shoe makers. Nobody is interested, because they sell one pair of sneakers every other month to most runners, which like my cowboy boots, could be good for as long as the leather holds up, which can be forever in some cases. And that would cut deeply into their profit margin. If you want to see the sketch, click here:
www.remyc.com/snaponheel.html
Any claim by running shoe companies that they are concerned about sustainability is greenwash. Pure and simple. Running shoes are made to wear out. Period.
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