San Francisco-based startup Rothy’s are making shoes from plastic water bottles. The company uses a proprietary process to 3D-knit the fibre into a seamless, essentially waste-free shoe that takes six minutes to produce.
As Rothy’s started developing shoes that were better than other shoes on the market they realised they also wanted to make the shoe more sustainable and found that they could dramatically reduce the materials that are normally thrown out in construction.
“A tremendous amount of scrap goes into landfills,” said Roth Martin, cofounder and chief creative officer of the startup. “Our process allows us to knit three-dimensional parts that use the exact amount of material that they need in order to create the part. So like an inkjet printer, it draws just the amount of ink that it needs to complete that task, and then it repeats the task as needed.”
