What really happens to a plastic bottle that is tossed into the recycling bin? Does it actually get recycled or carted off to the dump? Shoe company New Balance along with Dasani water, owned by Coca-Cola, have now teamed up to show what is possible through reducing, reusing and recycling some of the materials that we use in our everyday lives. This partnership was launched to highlight the sustainability of reusing the plastic from one product and turning it in another product. In this case it was turning the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic that is commonly used in drink bottles into a fabric that can be used in a pair of shoes under the name newSKY.
The New Balance newSKY shoes use the PET plastic from eight water bottles to create 95-percent of the upper material used in one pair of newSKY shoes. This includes the fabric, laces, stitching and even the labels. The process is pretty straight forward in creating the fabric. The bottles enter the recycling stream, they are chopped up, the plastic is melted, the molten plastic is pulled into thin strands and those strands are processed into a non-woven material. The design of the newSKY shoes also uses 73-percent less material than a similar shoe using traditional manufacturing methods.