A large number of runners feel concerned by this waste. Because shoes, yes, they consume them in droves! The Swiss brand On Running has clearly perceived this uneasiness in the community. With the CloudNeo, it offers the first pair of shoes “made from bio-sourced, circular and infinitely recyclable materials”.
In just a few years, the Zurich start-up has become a major player in the ultra-competitive sports shoe sector. On Running is now defending its place with giants like Adidas and Nike.
The art of telling stories
His strong point? Communication! At On Running, we know how to tell great stories like that of the CloudNeo that we never really own. “She doesn't belong to you.”actually explains an advertisement for the brand. “After use, we must collect it to recycle it. Indefinitely.”
On Running has invented a leasing system for running shoes like it exists for cars. Clearly, the brand offers to take out a subscription for 29.95 euros/month in exchange for which you receive a new pair of CloudNeo every three months while the used pair is collected by the manufacturer for recycling. This ensures that you always have a pair of almost new shoes on your feet for an investment of 360 euros per year. It's expensive! But what wouldn't we do to protect the environment?
Marketing arguments regarding the survey
Corinne Portier and Jean-Marc Chevillard, two journalists from the Swiss television channel RTS, still decided to carry out an investigation. Is the CloudNeo really as virtuous as the brand claims?
Each of the selling points has been subjected to criticism. Starting with the use of castor oil, a plant from which the oil is extracted which then makes it possible to manufacture flexible or rigid materials which are used in the composition of these shoes. Note that On Running is not the only one to use this material. This manufacturing process is even quite widespread in this industrial sector and most often has a reputation “verte”. At On running, we prefer the adjective “bio-sourced” which suggests that a product based on 100% natural ingredients cannot produce chemical waste. From this point of view, castor oil is quite a magical plant that grows easily in countries with warm climates such as India. With or without rain, the tree produces its fruits which are then pressed to extract the oil which is used in the manufacture of shoes. So far, so good. “The oil is transformed into a monomer which is polymerized., explains the manufacturer. In summary, we use the atoms of castor oil to produce a “polymer”that is to say an association of macromolecules which constitute fibers.
These fibers can be natural as in the case of proteins, DNA, collagen, keratin, cellulose. Or synthetic as in glues, paints, resins, composite materials. In this second case, it is simply plastic.
Of course, one then wonders which category castor oil materials fall into. Natural or synthetic? We would like to respond with the first proposition. Unfortunately, it is the latter that prevails. The polymerization of castor oil is carried out in the factories of the French petrochemical giant Arkéma, the only one to master the procedure, the secret of which it jealously guards. This takes place in its factory in Marseille, in the heart of the 11th arrondissement. All we know is that this factory is classified “Seveso high threshold”i.e. the maximum risk in industrial matters. There is also an evacuation plan for local residents in the event of an accident. Reassuring! What do we fear the most? A leak of heavy gases: bromine, ammonia, chlorine. Obviously, these (very) dangerous and (very) polluting chemicals are necessary to transform castor oil into plastic.
We imagined a biological and infinitely recyclable material. “The cycle of life meets the circular economy”says one of the many CloudNeo advertisements. The cycle of nature, where nothing is lost, and that of shoes are put in parallel. We are far from the mark.
gull“This dream shoe is not realistic at all!”
Nathalie Gontard, specialist in polymers, studies the degradation of plastics at the National Institute for Research in Agronomy in Montpellier. Faced with CloudNeo and its advertisements, she literally fell out of her chair.
“This dream shoe is not realistic at all!”she confided to RTS journalists. “There we say to ourselves that we are making shoes from castor oil and therefore that nature will be able to degrade them. But no! That's without taking into account the intervention of man in the middle. Castor oil is completely destroyed and through chemical processes, a polymer is reconstituted which is called polyamide or polyester or polyethylene which is identical to the petrochemical polymer. It is true that from the moment we hear the prefix. ‘bio’we tell ourselves that it is benign. Well no, because organic can be chemically manipulated and we obtain materials like polyamide, which can no longer be reintegrated and are no longer biodegradable.”
A life after death
Next to the asset “ricin”On Running also highlights the recycling of its CloudNeo. “After recovery, the shoe is crushed and melted before becoming a new raw material. promise us the brand's champions.
But recycling a running shoe is no easy task! These sneakers are made up of more than a hundred components made of various materials (polyester, PVC, polypropylene, rubber, etc.) which must be separated, sorted and then sent to the various recycling channels… where they exist! This explains why a large number of pairs of shoes end up in open landfills, buried, burned or lost in nature in the most remote corners of the planet.
To avoid this sad fate, the CloudNeo combines only two materials from Arkéma factories: Pebax and the famous Rilsan based on castor oil. We can therefore more easily dissect them at the end of their life. Officially, this work takes place at Agiplast, a recycling factory located in Casalbuttano, in Lombardy, in northern Italy. This is where used shoes from all over the world must land. At the end of April 2024, almost two years after the model was put on the market, journalists set out to find out how many CloudNeo shoes had been recycled. This number stood at…zero! Yes, zero!
A few weeks after the publication of the RTS report, a new question appeared in the FAQ of their website: “have your Cyclon products been recycled?”. To which the brand responds: “we invest a lot of energy in the circularity of our production, but for an efficient recycling process we depend on the number of used shoes collected from our members. Good news, the threshold having been reached, we hope that the first recycling cycle will begin in August 2024.”
Still nothing very concrete, then. Nathalie Gontard, our polymer specialist, is once again surprised that, on such complex issues, the brand demonstrates such confidence. “We would all like our plastics to be circular. Recyclable. But that's not the case. We don't know how to recycle them at reasonable environmental and economic costs.”
The only exception: PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles that can be recycled and transformed once (only once!) into another product such as clothing.polar” or a garden table. “This recycling process is not intended for polyamide, the plastic that makes up this shoe. In any case, not for the moment. And there is little chance that this will be the case in the decades to come.explains Nathalie Gontard.
A building ready to collapse
A supposedly ecological material which is not, a recycling which, at this stage, remains a promise: this already did a lot for a society supposedly concerned about the environment. There remains one last point to be clarified: the working conditions of the workers who manufacture these pumps.
On its site, On Running claims that it pays particular attention to this last point. The factories it subcontracts are located in Vietnam, like those of its competitors: Nike, Adidas, Puma, Decathlon, Patagonia, Salomon, The North Face, etc. But when we look for more precise information, it's a big blur.
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