Making shoes sustainable through AR digital skins and 3D printed biodegradable self-healing technology for the year 2040.
23 billion shoes are purchased annually, with 80% ending up in landfill and 20% incinerated. This project aims to address this and develop the most sustainable shoe for 2040.
This will be achieved by reducing the number of shoes consumed, making footwear fully biodegradable and simplifying manufacture.
The technologies to enable this are AR, biomaterials and 3D printing. We developed a 3D printed biodegradable nanocellulose footwear with self-healing capabilities to extend its usable lifetime. The self-healing structures are created through generative design specific to the user, and the shoe can regenerate up to 50% of its total surface area. To tackle overconsumption due to fast fashion, the style is visualised through multi-user AR enabled by a biodegradable embedded RFID chip. Finally, the shoes are designed to be locally manufactured to bring resources back to communities and deconstruct complex global supply chains contributing to carbon emissions and inhumane working conditions.
