Adidas X Parley: Sustainability Meets Sport on a Miami Football Field

By 2024, we will end the use of all virgin polyester in our shoes and apparel. To celebrate this commitment, we partnered with Miami Edison High School to unveil a new football field composed of approximately 1.8 million plastic bottles, or 40,000 pounds of plastic waste.

END PLASTIC WASTE

Wearing cleats constructed from intercepted ocean plastic, combining interactive gaming and athlete education, running routes on discarded water bottles-turned-turf—if it sounds like the future of football, that’s because it is.

It’s no secret that the health of our oceans—and planet at large—is at risk. Experts project roughly 55% of plastic resides in landfills or natural areas, damaging ecosystems and threatening animal life. We’re doing our part to turn the tide and create change by eliminating all virgin polyester by 2024, making our commitment known with the 2020 adidas x Parley collection, a capsule collection of cleats and running shoes constructed with sustainable fabric and technology to help reduce sportswear’s negative environmental impact.

To mark the shift to more responsible production and creative repurposing of plastics, we unveiled a brand new, sustainable turf field at South Florida’s Miami Edison High School composed of approximately 1.8 million plastic bottles, or 40,000 pounds of plastic waste, followed by a 7-on-7 tournament featuring local male and female athletes. The custom multi-sport scoreboard highlights key facts about the field’s composition and offers practical tips on how community members can further their impact.

Players at the 7-on-7 took a pledge to avoid single-use plastic bottles, learning the impact of plastic waste on the environment through an interactive video game created specifically for the tournament. Upon completion of the game, athletes were given a code to access event swag in the Players’ Lounge—including limited-edition Adizero cleats constructed with Parley Ocean Plastic™.

To round out the long-term sustainability effort at Miami Edison, recycling bins were placed across campus to help students maintain their commitment to ending plastic waste. The donation of the field highlights our belief that a serious effort to improve ocean health is a must for us and future generations, because #ChangeIsATeamSport.

Source: adidas.com