14 DAY TRIAL // Three Brits by the names Charles Duffy, William Gubbins and Billy Turvey have a soft spot for trash. In fact, they are so fascinated by it that they have recently set the basis for an art project dubbed Everything Is Rubbish.
As part of this project, the Brits ended up creating the colorful shoes pictured above. As surprising as this may sound given how cool the shoes look, it appears that recycled trash was Charles Duffy's, William Gubbins', and Billy Turvey's material of choice.
The creation process is detailed in the video below. For those who don't have time to watch the footage, here is what it boils down to: collecting plastic trash, cleaning it, heating it up and turning it into sheets, and using these sheets to make shoes.
According to Grist, Charles Duffy, William Gubbins and Billy Turvey got into the business of making shoes from garbage in an attempt to raise awareness about plastic pollution and its impact on beaches and marine ecosystems.
The three greenheads settled on creating shoes due to the fact that, quite often, these items of clothing are thrown away sooner than pants, shirts and the like, the same source details.
“The first of our clothing to show signs of damage is footwear. In the eyes of the consumer, a superficial blemish or a shift in the latest trend is all that’s needed to warrant a new purchase,” Charles Duffy, William Gubbins and Billy Turvey explain.
“Contemporary footwear spends barely a fraction of its life hugging a foot. For the majority of its life it is rubbish,” the three Brits go on to argue.