“PHAs have long been recognized as a promising alternative to petroleum-based plastics,” famous Neri Oxman, CEO and Founding father of OXMAN. “We have successfully elevated the potential of PHA through the development of O°, a new technology for the design and fabrication of products that seeks to minimize harm in its conception and nourish the environment in its afterlife. We are thrilled to unveil our first product using this new technology: the O° shoe, which is made using 100% PHA, is 100% biodegradable, and has no petrochemicals or microplastics.”

0% petrochemicals, 0% ceaselessly chemical substances, 0% microplastics, and 100% biodegradable
PHAs may also be produced through micro organism which eat atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, and/or meals misuse, decreasing carbon within the atmosphere as they develop. They’re biologically recyclable, and 100% biodegradable in ambient statuses. Because of this, O° textiles and footwear don’t reduce at the back of microplastics once they decompose. O° textiles and footwear are made fully of PHAs, so once they decompose they change into one with the atmosphere, turning back the micro organism from which they originated. Then again, identical to conventional biodegradable supplies old for attire corresponding to fibre, string, and silk, PHA is not going to biodegrade life being impaired, washed, or saved.

A high-efficiency design procedure
O° footwear embrace the flexibility of PHAs through incorporating actual designs knowledgeable through the kinetics of human movement. Whether or not they pull ultimate mode as a strolling or working shoe, or ballet slipper, every shoe has a bottom layer of a knitted higher and outer layers which might be imprinted on the textile to grant explicit capability together with reinforcement, cushioning, energy, and pliability. The flexibility and automation constructed into the O° platform allow speedy iterations and  an speeded up building procedure from design to manufacturing.

A related zero-waste manufacturing procedure
A compact robot formulation is central to the O° platform: the O° robot formulation three-D prints customized PHA blends onto a textile this is three-D knitted on an business flatbed device from a 100% PHA anecdote produced thru a technique of extrusion and soften spinning. By way of the usage of this knitting and printing era to manufacture condition and motion, OXMAN has eradicated the cut-and-sew and adhesion processes related to conventional shoe meeting. The O° era trade in a related zero-waste manufacturing procedure and calls for minimum human involvement and intervention, enabling native, cheap manufacturing, minimizing the shipping price and environmental affect of the free provide chains conventional of the shoe trade.

Bio-engineered colorways, sovereign of petrochemicals
Many business pigments and dyes are sourced from uncooked supplies derived from petro-chemicals which let go environmentally harmful chemical substances all over their manufacturing and utilization. Those dyes and pigments are depending on a resource-intensive and complicated international provide chain for synthesis, processing, and shipping. Against this, micro organism can build pigments from easy and considerable herbal sources. O° makes use of micro organism no longer simply as a supply of materials, but in addition to encode alternative practical homes corresponding to pigment manufacturing to simplify and centralize the producing procedure.

OXMAN’s O° platform builds at the assurance of PHAs through tuning the fabrication procedure and providing an supplementary design and manufacturing procedure that holistically considers a product’s complete lifecycle, from idea to decomposition. 

OXMAN is now beginning discussions with doable companions, buyers, and emblem collaborators to deliver the manufacturing of O° footwear and textiles to scale and to marketplace.  We look ahead to listening to from you. You’ll be able to achieve us here.

About OXMAN
OXMAN is a design lab whose venture is to manufacture and ship nature-centric merchandise and environments to its purchasers and the wildlife. Bringing in combination computational design, robotics, supplies science, inexperienced chemistry, biology, and eco-system engineering, OXMAN’s paintings reinvents the economic programs that dictate how we design and build on a regular basis issues—from the meals we consume and the garments we put on to the constructions we inhabit. https://oxman.com

O° CONTACT
https://oxman.com/contact

MEDIA CONTACT
Alex Klimoski
[email protected]
+1 (212) 671-5184 

BACKGROUND
The Condition: Never-ending Assemblies, Endlessly Chemical substances
The sneakers design and production trade faces important environmental demanding situations that come with hazardous chemical formulations polluting our breeze, aqua and ground, greenhouse gasoline emissions, human exploitation, rarity of provide chain traceability, in addition to rarity of sustainable end-of-life situations for supplies that can not be recycled or biodegraded.

Info & Figures:

• 24+ billion footwear are manufactured international every generation^1,2,3
• 300+ million pairs of trainers are discarded every year, 95% of which finally end up in landfill^2,3
• Sneakers don’t fracture ailing simply or temporarily: shock-absorbent soles can stay in a landfill for 1,000 years⁴
• On reasonable, 40 distinct supplies are old to manufacture a conventional shoe (e.g., foams, materials, rubbers, coatings, adhesives)⁵
• “Forever chemicals” are present in nearly all industrially produced footwear as of late (33-4200 portions according to billion may also be present in a conventional shoe)⁶
• Sneakers constituted of petroleum-derived plastics account for 1.4% of world greenhouse emissions^7,8

The Answer: One Subject material, One Device
O° is a design platform that begins and ends with biology. It embodies an automatic, vertically built-in, bio-digital fabrication formulation for lifecycle design of multi-functional mono-material merchandise. 

Made fully of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), a bacterially-produced thermo-plastic polymer, the mono-material O° permits the design and electronic fabrication of attire pieces, corresponding to footwear and textiles, that showcase a field of bodily homes, purposes, and end-of-life trajectories. By way of cultivating our supplies from micro organism—versus extracting them from sources like oil or sourcing them from farmed supplies corresponding to string and cellulose—we unencumber the possibility of a radically untouched manufacturing paradigm—person who bears extra resemblance to rising than to the traditional production processes. This method envisions centralizing all parts of manufacturing right into a unmarried materials, a unmarried website, and a unmarried procedure. O° targets to take away the complexity concerned within the fabrication of gadgets through staying inside one materials elegance for all technical necessities. Streamlining production lets in us to take away externalities that might incur environmental injury; if we best want one materials to form a shoe, we haven’t any want to import specialised parts from world wide. Lowering microplastics, decreasing atmospheric greenhouse gasses, and selling organic enlargement thru centered biodegra-dation apply as additional vectors of conceivable certain environmental affect. 

Unequalled Versatility: Potency in Design, in Song with Nature
The flexibility and automation constructed into the O° platform allow speedy iterations and an speeded up building procedure from design to manufacturing, enabling a wide selection of mechanical, thermal, chemical, and production homes that meet a vast field of processing wishes and packages. Such tall ranges of versatility, accomplished thru design tunability throughout design levels and media—manufacturing, processability, and programmable decomposition— are on the core of O°’s designs and platform era.

Key Options:

• Origins: PHAs are derived from naturally-occurring “feedstocks” which come with carbon dioxide, methane, sugars, and misuse streams. There’s a broadening medical consensus that PHAs may also be produced in bulk from atmospheric carbon and alternative resources that grant it with an overly little and even unfavourable carbon footprint.
• Processability: Regarded as probably the most flexible bacterially-derived thermo-polymer elegance, PHAs are simply built-in into maximum business production processes, together with soften extrusion, injection molding, soften blowing, fiber spinning, and casting.
• Capability: With over 13 formulations designed to grant a field of mechan-ical homes for explicit makes use of, our PHA anecdote is 6x as versatile as polyester and as comfortable as lyocell. In park of assembling independently produced portions, every with its related materials homes, we harvest organic mono-materials with extremely tunable homes to manufacture gradients of capability.
• Product options (pigmentation, scents, branding): The bacterial manufacturing of PHAs allow genetically and chemically-encoded pigmentation, scents, and labeling. The genetic label of O° is synthesized in DNA. As soon as embedded, this label may also be old to discover and skim the genetic code following polymer biodegradation. It will allow a presen the place actual id of disposal and biodegradation merchandise is an on a regular basis fact.

¹ https://www.worldfootwear.com/news/10-countries-were-responsible-for-88-of-total-footwear-production-/9148.html
² https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/04/01/plant-based-sole-sneaker/
³ Bodoga, A., Nistorac, A., Loghin, M.C. and Isopescu, D.N., 2024. Environmental Affect of Shoes The use of Day Cycle Evaluation—Case Learn about of Skilled Shoes. Sustainability, 16(14), p.6094.
⁴ Lippa, N.M., Krzeminski, D.E., Piland, S.G., Rawlins, J.W. and Gould, T.E., 2017. Biofidelic mechanical growing old of ethylene vinyl acetate working sneakers midsole foam. Court cases of the Establishment of Mechanical Engineers, Section P: Magazine of Sports activities Engineering and Era, 231(4), pp.287-297.
⁵ Cheah, L., Ciceri, N.D., Olivetti, E., Matsumura, S., Forterre, D., Roth, R. and Kirchain, R., 2013. Production-focused emissions discounts in sneakers manufacturing. Magazine of cleaner manufacturing, 44, pp.18-29.
⁶ https://www.ecocenter.org/our-work/healthy-stuff-lab/reports/wolverine-worldwide-shoes-pfas-results/toxic-pfas-chemicals
⁷  https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
⁸ Bodoga, A., Nistorac, A., Loghin, M.C. and Isopescu, D.N., 2024. Environmental Affect of Shoes The use of Day Cycle Evaluation—Case Learn about of Skilled Shoes. Sustainability, 16(14), p.6094.

SOURCE OXMAN