Dec2009
Shoes
I have a pair of Eco-Sneaks. They are made from recycled materials, with the sole being fashioned from an old car tyre, and the laces crafted from recycled plastic bottles. In practice this means the soles have the grip of bald tyres and the laces don’t stay tied, but let’s not nitpick, they’re ethical after all. Really, I’m under no allusions that they might well be a cynical attempt by an American company to cash in on the green bandwagon, neatly packaging up an ethical purchase for the kind of consumer that would splash out on a conspicuously green recycled eco-phone.
But maybe, just maybe, I am that kind of consumer. Providing, that is, that those conspicuously ethical products happen to be cheap. And yes, I found these Eco-Sneaks in a sale.
Anyway, the shoes have been pretty good to me, but, in addition to the issues mentioned above, there is one more thing that makes them a little bit unsuitable for life in the rainforest. To limit their environmental impact, they’re held together with water-based glue. Now, this is bad enough in England, where they were largely limited to summer use, but here, where torrential downpours are at least a weekly occurence, it’s something of an issue. Therefore, after a couple of somewhat waterlogged football matches, I wasn’t that surprised to see the soles peeling away from the base of the shoe.
Farewell Eco-Sneaks, you might think. To which I say, cobblers.
In Iquitos, the trade of shoe repair is alive and well. Therefore, rather than pitch my ethical shoes in a rather less ethical bin, I was able to take them to a rather random-seeming old man sitting on a street corner, who could give them a new, super-ethical, second life. An hour later I returned to find that for the princely sum of five nuevo soles (oh the irony, but yes, that is the name of the currency) he’d completely restitched them. This meant not only that they were wearable once more, but that I’d never have to worry about them coming unglued again. And so I strolled away, glowing with ethical pride, knowing that I was probably ticking all three of the golden ethical boxes – reduce, reuse, recycle – with a single pair of shoes.
It’s a shame that the service of shoe-repair (and clothing-repair for that matter) has become uneconomical in much of the Western world, as I imagine it could do a hell of a lot to reduce overconsumption / landfill etc. But I don’t want this to descend into yet another blog about how the simple ways of a foreign land are infinitely superior to those of the ‘developed’ world.
No, all I really want to say is “Hey, look at me in my repaired, recycled trainers. You can’t test my ethics, suckaz!”*
* This is a joke. I appreciate that you probably can test my ethics, and all things considered I’d probably rather you didn’t. Don’t go calling me a hippy in the comments either.
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment
© 2009 Tom Schrieber. Website by (Mark Ross). Valid XHTML Strict
You hippy!
Comment by helen todd — December 1, 2009 @ 5:51 pm
Damn – beat me to it.
Comment by Mark — December 1, 2009 @ 6:32 pm
People in recycled glass houses, Helen, shouldn’t throw mystic runes.
Comment by tom — December 2, 2009 @ 5:52 pm