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Woolybubs presents a pair of biodegradable baby shoes that dissolve in boiling water
Woolybubs is designed to be the world’s first disappearing baby shoe
Image: Kaitlin Green, Courtesy of Woolybubs
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Woolybubs presents a pair of biodegradable baby shoes that dissolve in boiling water

Responding to the amount of kids’ waste that ends up in landfills, a Portland-based couple transformed learnings of their own parenthood journey into making ‘the world’s first disappearing baby shoe’.

by Zohra Khan
Published on : Sep 05, 2022

When parents of three, Portland-based Megan and Jesse Milliken lived the quarantine days of the 2020 COVID pandemic, being at home all day—surrounded and overwhelmed by piles of kids' items—sparked an idea for them. With Megan's background in environmental sustainability, and Jesse's experience in product development - having worked in footwear design for Nike, the two set out to build the world's first disappearing baby shoe.

Woolybubs, the American company co-founded by the two which creates these shoes, is pivoted on the fact that babies grow out of things pretty quickly and parents worldwide struggle to declutter their homes from stuff their kids don’t need anymore. The shoes are also the duo’s little contribution to creating a biodegradable design that doesn’t end up in waste landfills.

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Woolybubs’ shoes address the fact that kids outgrow things quite quickly which often end up in waste landfills Image: Kaitlin Green, Courtesy of Woolybubs

But how does this work, you would ask? Woolybubs’ baby kicks, when dipped in boiling water, disappear, ‘leaving a non-toxic safe liquid right before your eyes’. Made of what the founders describes as ‘100 per cent biodegradable materials’, the shoes even if avoided immersion in boiling water, will breakdown over time in an industrial composting facility.

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Baby shoes from Woolybubs get dissolved when immersed in boiling water Image: Courtesy of Woolybubs

Speaking with STIR over a Zoom call, Megan discusses the genesis of Woolybubs and what it aims to achieve. She says, “For Jesse and I, similar to a lot of people during the COVID days, we thought about the growing climate change that was impacting everyone’s lives and what we could do as individuals. We thought of doing something that could somehow not send stuff to landfills, not clutter our lives, and the earth ecology more than it already is. And that’s how Jesse and I came up with a shoe design that is biodegradable. We started with shoes because that's what Jesse knows in the product design and development world while I tend to take care of its marketing, but we're hopeful that we can expand into other things that babies grow out of quickly or that parents don't need which have a short lifespan.”

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Woolybubs’ shoes, as per Megan and Jesse, is their little contribution to reducing the inevitable amount of waste that come with parenthood Image: Kaitlin Green, Courtesy of Woolybubs

As per Megan and Jesse’s industry research, each person in the United States discards about four pounds of trash every day, and about 18 pounds a day for a family. Parenthood, well, witnesses an exponential increase in waste when things are no longer needed and only 15 per cent of it gets handed down. The two strongly feel that though Woolybubs’ sustainable baby shoes might not fix the world’s waste problem they hope their kids products give parents an affordable and practical option toward significantly reducing the amount of waste in their home.

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The Woolybubs Newbie come in a combination of soft pastel colours Image: Courtesy of Woolybubs

“The Newbie is our first step,” Megan adds, pointing towards the company’s range of baby’s first pair of shoes. Available in a combination of soft pastel colours, each pair of shoes are made of water-soluble inks and polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) – a colourless, odourless and water-soluble synthetic polymer commonly used in manufacturing of beauty products, in healthcare, and pharmaceutics. When asked about the product’s materiality, Megan continues, “We source it from Japan, China, and Austria, and the shoes are currently made in China. It's also OEKO-TEX certified which is one of the safest designations that you can have for any type of material.”

When you put the shoes in boiling water, the PVOH in the shoe seamlessly dissolves in the liquid where, according to Megan, “it doesn't break down into microplastics but instead gets reduced to single polymer chains.” The polymers, though not visible with naked eyes, remain in the liquid; their decomposition happen at the waste water treatment plant where microorganisms reduce the polymers into carbon dioxide and water.

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The shoes could either be dissolved in boiling water or decomposted in a local industrial composting facility Image: Kaitlin Green, Courtesy of Woolybubs

If the consumer opts for composting of the shoes, the process could only be possible at an industrial composter site under pre-set temperature and environment conditions. Or one could simply send the shoes back to the company where they get the shoes decomposed through their composting partner.

A project that began from the couple’s journey of parenthood, STIR asks Megan what’s NEXT for her and Woolybubs. Optimistic to expand the company’s horizon, she says “We're hoping to kind of grow with the baby and what is it that parents want to have go away once they're done with it. For the most part, I think the answer is almost everything. But ideally things that have a short lifespan would be wonderful if they could be biodegradable.”

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