When I first heard about the line of Adidas shoes that were said to be made using recycled “ocean plastic” (i.e. plastic polluting the ocean), I was sceptical about its legitimacy. On one hand, Adidas is a very big company and likely has the means to spend on resources to clean the ocean of its plastic debris and use them to make shoes. Given the increasing awareness and shifts toward eco-friendly products, it could be true that Adidas is taking the step to become more sustainable. On the other hand, corporations as big as Adidas always seem to be lying about something or other, aren’t they? Or not telling the full truth, or cherry-picking information to advertise…
I came across this video by Deutsche Welle (DW) Planet A entitled ‘Why recycled ocean plastic is (often) a lie’. Juicy title, sounded interesting, and it certainly did not disappoint.
What the author and video creator, Kai Steinecke, reveals is that ocean plastic is incredibly expensive to recycle. It is nowhere near economically feasible for businesses to use mass produce their products. For example, a popularly advertised recycled ocean plastic is fishing nets. This video shows how it involves detangling the masses of fishing nets, sorting them by colour, cutting and cleaning them (they can only contain 5% impurities to be acceptable for recycling). The entire process is very labour intensive and unlikely to be done at the industrial scale.
Resultantly, the video emphasises that there is no mass-produced product that is really made from ‘recycled ocean plastic’. That said, businesses promoting recycled ocean plastic products do use recycle plastic, just not exactly plastic found in the ocean. They largely comprise ocean-bound plastic—plastic waste found within 50 km of the coast (near-shore locations, on beaches etc.) which is likely to end up in the ocean given its proximity. Products may still contain plastic found in the ocean but in minute amounts. This is unlike the image of a product made from marine debris which advertisements often promote. For example, my immediate thought from seeing this image of the shoes surrounded by fishnet is that discarded fishnet polluting the ocean is directly used to make the shoe.
For the Adidas x Parley collection, I found that the shoes are marketed quite inconsistently. Broadly, these shoes are marketed as Ocean Plastic® shoes, made from upcycled marine waste. This gives the impression that the plastic was all collected up from the ocean. Parley’s website makes no mention of using ocean-bound plastic, only of “reclaimed” and “upcycled” marine plastic waste. Some product descriptions on the Adidas website also only vaguely talk about recycled plastic (Screenshot 1). However, some have more detailed descriptions do say that they used “intercepted” plastic waste (Screenshot 2). In any case, there is an omission of the truth—that most of the recycled plastic is ocean-bound plastic collected from land, not plastic in the ocean.
Of course, Adidas is ultimately contributing a movement to address the ocean plastic waste issue, albeit by collecting waste from shore/near-shore areas rather than in the ocean. A pertinent quote from the DW video is this: “There is no need for brands to overreach their marketing for what can be such a powerful story of cleaning up our coastlines and supporting coastal communities. Why do we have to pretend that it’s coming out of the ocean instead of saying what it is and delivering to customers on that promise?”.
In conclusion, these shoes are not really too good to be true. They do deliver on their advertised objective of using recycled ocean plastic to address ocean pollution. But the shoes are marketed in a way that is misleading if one does not properly research them. And how many shoppers would actually do that?
References:
The DW Planet A video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o9-FkSHGWA
Adidas shoes-related information:
https://www.parley.tv/updates/adidasxparley
https://www.adidas.com.sg/ultraboost-21-x-parley-shoes/FZ1927.html
https://www.adidas.com.sg/ultraboost-21-x-parley-shoes/G55649.html
