These shoes don't look like the future of mass fashion. The pale, porous SMS Gateway Taiwan shoes resemble a cross between beige Crocs and a bizarre forest mushroom. But the creators of the project hope that they will become a real breakthrough: they are the world's first foldable shoes printed to individual measurements on a 3D printer.
Fashion is one of the most polluting industries, accounting for about 10% of the world's carbon emissions and requiring vast amounts of water and land for production. Experts say that due to their complexity, modern footwear is one of the most difficult objects to recycle. However, there are few reliable statistics on the number of shoes produced, and there is virtually no data on their impact on the environment.
Shoes are mostly made up of synthetic fabric, rubber, plastic and metal, often held together with superglue, and are very difficult to recycle. After use, most shoes end up in landfills, where they can take hundreds of years to decompose.
The $70 billion industry is already seeing some attempts to promote recyclable sneakers, with so
