León Guanajuato. — A company out of the state of Guanajuato has produced tennis shoes from Quintana Roo seaweed and PET plastic bottles.
León, Guanajuato — A company out of the state of Guanajuato has produced tennis shoes using seaweed collected in Quintana Roo and PET plastic bottles.
Founder of the company Renovare, Jorge Castro Ramos, presided over the launch of the “organic and ecological” footwear line, whose sole is made of sargasso and the upper part or cut, with recycled plastic bottles.
The model of the shoe is called OVA and is made by the company Renovare Ocean established in the city of León Guanajuato using Quintana Roo seaweed.
Castro Ramos says that they were five years of testing, reusing parts of plastic bottles and sargasso before launching the shoes. He explained that eight months ago, they designed and manufactured the first tennis shoe that contains an average of 100 grams of seaweed in the sole and five recycled plastic bottles in the upper part, which gives the shoe water resistance.
“We, as a new generation of shoe manufacturers, are convinced we can work with recycled materials, so five years ago we started working with plastic bottles,” he explained adding that last year, they began adding seaweed to the soles of the shoes.
He pointed out that the footwear is not yet available for sale but in the promotion stage to create demand which, once met, will see up to 20,000 pairs produced per month. They estimate that approximately 2.5 tons of organic material will be required each month to produce the 20,000 pair of shoes.
The shoes will continue to be produced in León with Quintana Roo sargasso being cleaned and dried in Cancun before shipping.
Adrián López, president of Coparmex Cancún said “It is also expected that a percentage of the sales of shoes will be used to clean beaches as well as to continue investigating new alternatives for the use of sargassum.”
As part of the creative process, the shoe makers also obtained the certification of the Centro de Innovación Aplicada en Tecnologías Competitivas.
Shoe production has been added to the alternatives list of sargasso use that has been arriving along the Quintana Roo coast for several years.
Last year, Blue Green México company founder Omar Sánchez Vázquez, began constructing homes out of the state’s unwanted sargasso.
