World-First Biodegradable Shoe the Orba Released

New Zealand’s first street sneaker specifically designed to biodegrade, the Orba Ghost, which has just been launched, is made almost entirely of natural materials, Kāpiti News reporter Rosalie Willis write. The shoe formula is a global first combining aesthetics, technical excellence, and ethics, but is also designed to eliminate the number of disposed shoes entering landfills.

The revolutionary product was the brainchild of Kāpiti man Greg Howard who started the company in lockdown last year after years of planning and research into creating a footwear company that would fight to reduce the amount of pollution caused by 20 billion shoes that go into landfill each year, Willis writes.

Orba’s first fulltime employee, sustainability manager Gillian Boucher, said the ethos of the company was about closing the loop in product production.

“The basic principle of the shoe is that we wanted to design a biodegradable shoe right down to the finest of details,” Boucher said.

Like embroidering the eyelets.

Original article by Rosalie Willis, Kāpiti News, The New Zealand Herald, September 23, 2021.