Turning magazines into shoes

Don’t feel bad if you didn’t get a pair of these for Christmas, they’ve only been on sale since January 1. Whether you would have wanted Nike’s latest release – a pair of shoes made out of recycled magazines – is a whole different ball game.

The premium print pack line features different women’s styles and features strips of pages from old magazines instead of leather and plastic, although the paper is (obviously) treated so that they don’t turn to mush when it rains.

It isn’t the first time that Nike experiments with recycled materials – since the 1990s a program called Reuse-a-Shoe ww.nikereuseashoe.com has transformed 24 million pairs of old shoes into playgrounds and shoe parts – but this is the first time that anyone has made shoes out of paper.

 The idea is undoubtedly catchy but are these shoes really a good buy? Lorrie Vogel, who manages the company’s green practices, explains that Nike is working hard to improve its environmental record but has opted to keep its eco-friendliness quiet so as not to put off its hip customers. In fact, the sole of the new Air Jordan is made of materials recycled from its Reuse-a-Shoe program. But

US-based anti-sweatshop NGO USAS has a different opinion of Nike: making its supply chain more sustainable doesn’t make its human rights record any better.