Companies like New Era and Reebok are leading the charge in manufacturing products like hats and shoes from renewable materials.
Athletic shoes made out of corn? A Portland Trail Blazers hat fashioned from water bottles? These renewable materials have made a serious foray into the realms of fan apparel and athletic gear thanks to recent partnerships between developers and retailers.
According to a press release, hat manufacturing giant New Era has collaborated with a company called Unifi, Inc. and the Portland Trail Blazers to produce the new Rip City REPREVE hat. REPREVE fibers are manufactured by Unifi using plastic bottles, and Unifi says that each of the new hats will be produced from four of them. The hats were available for purchase during the Trail Blazers’ last two home games (April 6 and 8) at the Rip City Clothing Company at the Moda Center in Portland. They retailed for $30.
In concert with this new use for plastic bottles, Reebok has engineered a new use for corn and organic cotton.
Reebok announced that it will release a shoe composed of those two materials later this year. Mark J. Burns of SportTechie reports that the shoe’s base will be composed out of corn fibers, and the upper part of the shoe will be made out of organic cotton.
In both cases, these new products set the retailers apart as leaders in the spaces of athletic gear/fan apparel made with renewable materials. In turn, the increased market for products made from the materials will help the manufactures of the raw materials used to not only stay in business but continue to develop new materials.
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The ultimate winner in these developments could be the environment, however. Using renewable materials not only cuts down on the amount of waste generated, but the renewable materials in the Reebok shoes are biodegradable. If these products and others like them sell well, expect to see a surge of such products in stores and online in the near future.