Green Footing Part 1: Much Ado about the Shoe
Editor’s note: We all know shoes leave a footprint, but probably haven’t given much thought to the environmental footprint created by shoe manufacturing. Travis Brown, a student in Professor Simran Sethi’s Media and the Environment course at the University of Kansas, takes a look at the impact of what we put on our feet. This post was originally published to the course blog on Monday, March 10, 2008, and on Triplepundit on Thursday, March 13, 2008.
America has a shoe problem.
2,286,472,000 shoes were purchased in the U.S. in 2005 according to the American Apparel & Footwear Association. There were 297,821,175 Americans alive at the end of 2005. That’s 7.67 shoes per person. Now I realize that I am a man and therefore do not understand the true glory of shoes, but this seems a little absurd. Think of all the different materials that go into making shoes and their packaging. Think of all the different places that those materials come from. Then think of where the shoes are made and how far they travel. In 2005, only 1.4% of consumed shoes were manufactured in America. 84.2% of American bought shoes that were made in China.
Just take a gander at this trend throughout the past few decades.
