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Talent

COMPOUND

A project by
Alex Witty

Alex Witty

Wikifactory Website
LinkedIn

Profession
Designer
Project
Compound
Based in
Brighton
Platform Member
Other Today
Works at

About the project

Compound takes industry waste from across motorsport and converts it into unique, recycled, fashionable footwear. As over 1.5 billion used tyres are discarded every year, 25% of material is wasted in motorsport clothing manufacturing and 23 billion trainers are made with virgin materials each year, we aim to utilise these precious, wasted resources to create fashionable, recycled footwear, whilst also reducing the global sneaker industry’s impact on the planet.

 

We use the waste stream of the 1.5 billion tyres that struggle to find a home each year to create our rubber soles. We create our shoe uppers out of the pre and post-consumer waste that the motorsport clothing industry generates. We aim to move some of the 350,000 tonnes of garments from the dump onto our workshop benches so we can create our unique range of footwear from these valuable, unwanted waste streams. We sort our off-cuts and waste fabric by material type and colour as well as material quality. Material that is ripped or distressed can be re-shredded and converted back into its raw form for future use. Our tyres are mixed with a polymer and converted using TreeD technology into 3D printable filament and loaded into machines ready for printing.

 

We aim to create sports leisure footwear for all ages. We create our shoe uppers out of the pre and post-consumer waste that the motorsport clothing industry generates as well as creating our 3D printed soles made out of 20% recycled tyres and springy thermoplastic elastomer!