The Futurecraft Loop performance running shoes can be returned to Adidas, where they will be ground up to make more shoes, again and again.
So, recycling is a mess. Manufacturers have sold us on the idea that it’s the consumer’s responsibility to recycle the manufacturer’s product, ostensibly relieving the manufacturer of responsibility for all the trash their products generate. Meanwhile, despite many of us trying our best to uphold our end of the deal, recycling is complicated – and in the end, 91 percent of plastic, for example, is not recycled.
Given plastic’s nearly eternal durability, it’s little wonder that we’re finding it literally everywhere on the planet. And we keep making new plastic at a prodigious rate – National Geographic notes that “If present trends continue, by 2050, there will be 12 billion metric tons of plastic in landfills.”