GREAT FALLS — Our shoes may be wearing out the environment.
The plastics from our footwear live forever in landfills and studies have shown they even have chemicals that contribute to the downfall of certain wildlife.
But a Colorado native, turned shoe industry insider, now living in Bozeman, is charting a path for change.
Thomas Bogle is the founder and Chief Executive Officer for Solum, a Bozeman-based company that is utilizing agricultural waste to redesign the shoes people wear.
“Solum is a biomaterials company that is engineering plastic alternatives using plant nutrients,” said Bogle.
Bogle has been involved in the footwear industry in one way or another for the past 12 years.
“I find myself working through a lot of specialty footwear stores, retail stores and then just completely picking apart the product and dissecting it and just kind of nerding out over these shoe products, particularly running shoes,” said Bogle, an avid runner himself. “So, my career evolved after college. I got into manufacturing with footwear, which brought me all over the world.”
His journey led him to working in development facilities and research and development centers in Asia.
“We would specialize in taking their materials, their products, development, and bringing them out to brands. And one of the big gaps within that that we saw was sustainability,” said Bogle.
It was a path that eventually paved the way for Solum Tread. Bogle says the company has been in operation for about four years now, with three years of research and development and one year of commercialization. But the Solum story goes back even further.
Bogle says the idea initially came to him while living and running in Steamboat, Colorado, where two major waterways, the Green River and Colorado River meet.
Bogle says it was there where he ran more miles on rougher terrain putting more stress and wear on the bottom of his shoes. He says he was going through up to seven pairs of shoes a year. With the cost of running shoes, it was a pricey hobby to keep up with at times.
Bogle says it was always the outsole that went down first, and he wondered where all the outsole material was going.
“I was fortunate enough to have the perspective of being in the shoe industry and having that peek behind the curtain to see what these materials were made of,” said Bogle. “Not just what we refer to as plastics, but the chemicals that are going into them.”
Bogle says he thought running in a wilderness area at the top of the world, he was leaving no trace.
“In reality, I'm leaving quite a bit of trace when you start to look at this,” said Bogle. “Not only that, but how these particles can flow, how they can transport, get picked up in soils and eventually waterways, they can make their way down.”
Bogle says around that time, Washington State University was studying rubber abrasion coming off tires and cars and how it affects Coho salmon in Washington.
He says the study showed about a 90% mortality rate in spawning fish that were ingesting tiny rubber particles.
Bogle says the big part comes down to a chemical that tires and rubber use called 6PPD, an antioxidant that has extremely acute toxicity.
He says there were almost instant death rates and mortality within these fish that were coming in contact with the particles.
One way to take that out of the equation was to use leftover straw parts from various crops to make high-quality footwear.
“These are all the leftover parts of that crop, the husks and the stocks and the leaves and the stems of the plant that traditionally don't get used for food systems but are very, very rich in nutrient content,” said Bogle.
By reusing ag waste, Solum is bringing new meaning to the rubber hitting the road.
“What Solum's producing is a bio additive that goes into these outsoles and replaces roughly 30 to 40-percent of that outsole content,” said Bogle. “In other words, the petrochemical part is, are all the toxic parts of that of that outsole and with that additive we make it from is agricultural residue.”
New shoes have a nice full tread on the bottom. But after only about two years, they lose about 30-percent of that tread. What isn’t seen is the environmental damage that's left behind on the trail.
With help from Ag Processing Solutions in Great Falls, Solum Tread is turning the straw from Missouri rice and Nebraska soybeans into powder that can be converted to pellets which Solum uses to act alongside natural rubber.
“In doing so, we can remove all the synthetic out of that product,” said Bogle.
“It was an idea that him (Bogle) and I worked on and turned into reality here where we're milling his rice straw and hopefully going to be wheat straw someday and turning that into a value-added product that he can then sell on the market,” said Andrew Bishop, the owner of Ag Processing Solutions, Inc. In Great Falls.
The result is durable and environmentally friendly footwear, not destined to linger in a landfill.
“We can cut out on the end of life and have shoes, biodegrade quicker, be reabsorbed even in just anaerobic type of landfill environments quicker, but still meet the core need of the consumer and how long they want to use this,” said Bogle.
Bogle plans to open a production facility in Belgrade next year, with hopes of expanding across the Treasure State, creating jobs for workers and ultimately more opportunities for Montana producers.
“Once that facility is in there, we're going to have 100% of our products and ingredients sourced from Montana,” said Bogle. "We can do summer wheat as well as winter wheat and start to phase that into our product right now.”
Bishop believes the idea is an excellent way to capitalize on value-added agriculture.
“If you pencil your ground on Winter wheat, you're not making much money anymore,” said Bishop. “You need to have a lot of acres to make any money. So, when we take those farmers and get them looking in the right direction of different products they can make in different markets, that’s really where I see I see the future of Montana agriculture.”
Currently, Solum Tread is available on work boots made by British Company Rockfall, but they’re in talks for development trials with bigger companies.
Wear testing samples for new compounds has been favorable, especially when it comes to grip.
“They're out there on the river fishing, walking over slick rock and stones and always the first thing we always get back is ‘I felt locked into the ground and what was underneath me more than I ever have,’” said Bogle.
Bishop thinks Solum Tread is just one example of how value-added agriculture might convince young Montanans to lace up their sneakers and come back home.
“There's a lot of different things we can do with those commodities, with different technologies,” said Bishop. “Whether it be an application for Solum Tread where they're making shoes out of them. I love to just meet young Farmers and say, ‘What direction do you want to head?’”
While Solum is relatively new to the show market, Bogle believes there may be marketing opportunities for the company.
“There's some 50,000 products and goods made from rubber in our world today,” said Bogle. “Just outside of shoes, you're looking at stands, pads, cribs, mats. Think about the handle of your fishing pole and the handle of your bike grip, all made from rubber, all made from plastics, which don't have such a high bar and standard for certain performance things.”
Bogle says someday, Solum might even literally hit the road.
“We would absolutely love to move into the tire market’” said Bogle. “Tire markets represent the pinnacle of rubber engineering for obvious reasons. Tires are one of the few rubber products that has governance over it in terms of those safety standards and have to meet certain requirements. So, there's a lot of smaller stage gates for us that we will need to check off before we can start building all the way into a fully finished tire additive side.”
Bogle knows reaching that milestone will be difficult, especially when competing against products that are so dependent on plastics.
“It's sometimes really difficult to wrap your head around just the sheer size of the plastics industry and what the uphill battle and fight that we have in front of us, as well as a number of a number of other suppliers,” said Bogle. “But plastic being petroleum-based, it's all wrapped up in that fossil fuel industry that comes with that.”
Bogle is hopeful that Solum Tread shoes and eventually other products catch on. Bishop hopes more people see the potential of this type of value added agriculture.
“My generation is by and large, very interested in the environment and how we right some wrongs,” said Bishop. “I'm excited to be part of the solution and not the problem. I think a lot of young farmers across Montana are looking at if they do come back, what are they going to do? There are so many different opportunities with ag waste material.”
