I just got back from a two week trip to New Zealand. What an incredible country. The best way for me to describe it is: "Lake Tahoe meets Hawaii". It’s that amazing of a place. We toured the South Island and drew a TON of inspiration from the Kiwi culture as well as spoke with dozens of folks who live in flops year round.
During that same time Rao has been focusing efforts on the south-west market of the US. Specifically Texas. We will have a lot more on that effort shortly.
EVA, (Ethylene-vinyl acetate) is some incredibly versatile stuff. It’s the elasticized polymer foam material used in most footwear to add support, structure, and cushioning. It’s incredibly versatile as it can be molded, dyed, cut, and shaped into just about any configuration. It’s incredibly inexpensive compared to the other materials used in footwear such as leather or rubber, and it’s darn easy to get good at working with it!
But it’s not all roses for this wonder material. EVA doesn’t break-down naturally and so it’s filling landfills across the globe with a product that doesn’t jive with nature. The manufacturing of EVA is a toxic process, and even though EVA scraps and used EVA can be recycled into new EVA – it’s not at all a green process.
So as many of you know, Rao is in India right now working on new product. He’s come up with some really cool ideas and found some interesting new materials for us to work with. (Not bad for a recovering IT manager!!) I covered some of the new eco-friendly materials we are looking to use in previous posts, but wanted to share this latest item with you.
Rao and I are literally scouring the earth seeking eco-friendly and sustainable materials to use in constructing Common Soles footwear. We’ve come across all sorts of incredible product as well as some down-right scary stuff. We’re finding materials both here in Massachusetts as well as across the ocean. Building on our Oct 22nd blog post on Making Eco-Friendly Flip-Flops here is an update on some of the materials and construction techniques we hope to be working into our line moving forward. This post is also essentially Part 3 of a series I am writing on sustainable footwear here on our blog. Enjoy!
Rice Rubber Outsole: This stuff is amazing. The outsole is the very bottom of footwear, the part that connects with the ground. Most traditional outsoles are made from rubber or PU (polyurethane). Rice Rubber is a blend of several happier ingredients. It’s a base of natural latex rubber mixed with SBR or Styrene Butadiene Rubber. SBR has been used for over 60 years in all sorts of applications such as tires, shoes, and gaskets. The blend is necessary for durability and longevity (Remember – durable footwear has a longer useful life = fewer pairs need to be manufactured). Rice husks which are a byproduct of the food industry and typically discarded after harvesting are then mixed in with the rubber. The rice husks displace a good portion of the rubber needed as well as add strength to the mixture. Similar to how gravel is added to cement to form concrete. The resulting product is not only a more eco-friendly alternative to traditional rubber soles, but it looks darn cool!
We’re working hard on designing and manufacturing our footwear to be as sustainable as possible. What is sustainable in footwear though?? Sustainable footwear considers: raw materials, product design, manufacturing processes, end-of-useful-life policy, and a whole slew of other components. So many in fact that the only way a company can truly produce a pair of sustainably made footwear is to tackle one element of the process of achieving total sustainability at a time. We at Common Soles are currently focusing our efforts on materials and manufacturing processes right now. That is not to say we aren’t doing all we can elsewhere in the sustainability value chain – this is just our area of focus at the moment.
I wrote a bit about materials on October 22nd of this year. This post is on process. The big one we can influence as a band in the US making footwear overseas is how our factory sources materials. Sourcing is a blend of art and science and is a constant battle of quality versus cost. Being who we are (a social venture) we lean toward quality whenever we have a choice. The difficulty we run into often times is that we are quite small in the world of footwear manufacturing and thus often have little say. Not an excuse though…
Meet the Maestri. He is the guru that figures out how to assemble the wacky product ideas we come up with. Maestri does it with a cool head, steady hand, and incredible patience. It's amazing how he is able to take our garbled direction and actually produce a product that not only looks good, but fits!
Check out my amateur attempt at making a video on what goes into making a flip-flop!
-Dave