Real Madrid score a win for recycled plastic

Real Madrid are the world’s most successful football club and one of its most popular too. It’s now one of its more environmentally friendly teams too. In a preseason game that took place in the US against Italian powerhouse AS Roma, the Spanish giants unveiled their latest third kit: a orange-red strip. Nothing really newsworthy about that, you might say.

Here’s the thing, though: the new Adidas kit has been produced in collaboration with the environmental organization Parley for the Oceans and contains only material made of plastic waste recovered from the planet’s oceans and other bodies of water.

Nor will Real Madrid be the only team supporting the initiative. Several other European clubs, including Manchester United, Juventus, and Bayern Munich, will soon likewise be sporting new kits made from the same recycled material.

The trailblazing move by the Spanish team has been hailed by Parley’s founder Cyrill Gutsch, an award-winning designer and product developer. “Real Madrid has the power to amplify our message, to share it with their massive global following and to bring it to life with their own decisions and actions,” he said.

Parley’s mission is to reduce marine plastic pollution by encouraging people around the world to use less plastic and waste less still. The company works on turning plastic waste into high-performance apparel and footwear with the aim of making a case for reusing recycled materials in high-end products.

Recently, for instance, Parley and Adidas created running shoes made entirely from plastic waste. The upper part of each shoe boasted 95% content of plastic waste taken from the ocean near the Maldives. The rest of each shoe was also mostly made from recycled waste materials. Its midsole, for instance, was 3D-printed using recycled polyamide and content gained from recycling gill nets.