Canadian start-up Evoco: ‘closing the loop on unsustainabilty’

Evoco, a  young Canadian company specialised in providing sustainable materials and components for the footwear industry, is on a mission.

“We are here to make sustainable change happen. It’s the reason we’re so passionate about what we do,” is how Jason Robinson, founder and CEO of Evoco, explains it. What the company has done is to develop a new type of bio-foam that is currently being used in the midsoles and insoles of a host of major sports, leisure and outdoor shoe brands. Called Fates, it offers an alternative to traditional polyurethane that delivers both environmental and performance benefits.

The fashion industry is a major polluter. In fact, the fashion industry is estimated to be responsible for 20 percent of global wastewater and10 percent of global carbon emissions – more than international flights and maritime shipping combined. Moreover, it consumes one-tenth of all of the water used industrially to run factories and clean products. In other words, fast fashion - shoes and apparel - comes at an enormous environmental cost.

Convinced it didn’t need to be this way, Robinson sought to create a new, sustainably sourced material which, by replacing the polyurethane foams used to produce shoe insoles, could reduce the amount of footwear waste produced. However, it took another four years to develop a biofoam that met the requirements for this application in full.

According to Evoco, its Fates biofoam can not only replace standard PU foam, it shows a significant improvement in strength and elongation, and with less than 5% compression set. This translates to less waste as increased resiliency and durability mean Fates products last longer and do not need to be replaced as often. At the end of life, they can be organically recycled back to the earth through composting, rather than ending up as landfill. The biofoam produces 6-10 times less CO₂ emissions than standard polyurethane foam.

Fates has been certified up as containing up to 72% renewable material by GreenCircle, a third-party certification body with a rigorous evaluation process that ensures the validity of a company’s environmental claims. The company is aiming to increase the bio-based content up to 95% by 2025.

Fates has also earned the USDA Certified Biobased Product label issued by the USDA under its Biopreferred Program.