Skip to main content

Cotton and corn! Reebok’s newest sneaker is ‘made from things that grow’

Reebok | Cotton + Corn | Made From Things That Grow

We already have shoes made out of trash from Adidas, so why not footwear made out of corn from Reebok?

The global footwear and apparel firm this week launched its first shoe that’s “made from things that grow.” The stylish-looking sustainable sneaker features a woven upper made entirely from organic cotton, a base originating from industrial-grown corn, and an insole made using castor bean oil. No dyes have been used to color the shoes, either, and the packaging is 100-percent recyclable.

The Reebok Future team, which created the shoe, is tasked with finding ways to use plants rather than oil-based materials to make the company’s footwear “so that you can feel good about what you’re wearing and where it came from.”

To make the corn-based material, the company teamed up with DuPont Tate & Lyle Bio Products, a leading manufacturer of high-performance bio-based solutions. For Reebok’s shoe it developed Susterra propanediol, described as “a pure, petroleum-free, non-toxic, 100-percent USDA-certified bio-based product, derived from field corn.”

“We like to say we are ‘growing shoes’ here at Reebok,” Bill McInnis, head of Reebok Future, said last year when the company announced its plan for the unique footwear, adding, “This is really just the first step for us.”

Reebok

McInnis said that with Reebok’s new sustainable shoe, his team was focused on all three phases of the product lifecycle.

“First, with product development we’re using materials that grow and can be replenished, rather than the petroleum-based materials commonly used today.  Second, when the product hits the market we know our consumers don’t want to sacrifice on how sneakers look and perform. Finally, we care about what happens to the shoes when people are done with them. So we’ve focused on plant-based materials such as corn and cotton at the beginning, and compostability in the end.”

For its own sustainable sportswear effort, Adidas teamed up with conservation group Parley for the Oceans to create shoes made from recycled plastic pulled from the sea. A typical pair of Parley running shoes reuses around 11 plastic bottles to create the laces, heel webbing, heel lining, and sock liner covers. Footwear firm Allbirds has also been making a name for itself with a range of shoes made from a specially crafted wool fabric.

As for Reebok, McInnes says the goal is to create a wide selection of bio-based footwear that can be composted after use. “We’ll then use that compost as part of the soil to grow the materials for the next range of shoes. We want to take the entire cycle into account; to go from dust to dust.”

Reebok’s cotton and corn shoes are available online and come with a $95 price tag.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more