Sustainable Skateboard Shoes and The Problem With Liking Things
I've recently been quite taken with skateboarding, which, as I'm not much of a skateboarder, has mostly consisted of playing through the recent (excellent) "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2" remake collection and plugging in the Xbox so that I can relive 2010's "Skate 3" (side note: 2010 was a very different time). I've also binged several hours of content from the Braille Skateboarding channel on YouTube, though I was actually steered to them in a roundabout way via an unlikely collab with The Lockpicking Lawyer.
That, in turn, lead me to this video in particular:
So, without burying the lede any further: what do skate shoes mean for the future of the planet?
Is destroying the disposable really a challenge? #
For those who don't give a fig about skateboarding or shoes, let me summarize the video: Aaron Kyro, founder of Braille Skateboarding, opens a new box containing a basic pair of Vans skate shoes. He and his group then take turns performing kickflips in these new shoes, with the express goal of wearing a hole in them. This is a common phenomenon in skating: a skater's shoes spend a lot of time scraping against the sandpaper-like grip tape of their skateboard, and doing enough tricks or riding aggressively enough will eventually wear down the rubber. So, what does this mean for the skater? It means that shoes are a wear item. Ultimately, many things in skateboarding are wear items: wheels wear down, decks break or splinter, grip tape loses its grip--and so it goes on. This is, frankly, pretty common for hobbies: at least some elements will require maintenance or occasional replacement. This is normal! Heck, there's nothing even terribly wrong with the concept of the video: consider it good consumer information to know how much you can expect from a pair of bog standard Vans. So why was it the shoes that set me off, of all things?
Making the boots that will oppress you #
The garment industry, and the shoe industry as a subset thereof, has a long history of relying on sweatshop labor. Nike, one of the world's largest manufacturers of athletics wear (and the subject of a different Braille video on stress-testing skate shoes), has a long history of exploiting international labor and, even when it seems like they're making strides, they manage to find a way to slip back with aplomb like some kind of nightmarish "Groundhog's Day" loop where every day starts with slavery. Nike is not the only guilty party, however; this is true of plenty of other garment makers are guilty, and it seems as though COVID-19 has only exacerbated these issues. The fact that VF Corp., the parent company of Vans, has a "Modern Slavery Statement" on their website speaks to the fact that avoiding slavery requires constant vigilence, lest the siren song of profits lure yet another company into the seductive maw of sweatshop labor.
And then there's the environmental cost: some companies, like Emerica and Etnies advertise vegan collections. Etnies goes so far as to promise to plant a tree with each purchase. Which is good, because being vegan does not absolve us of guilt in this case: rubber has to come from somewhere, and rubber farming leads to deforestation, damaging biodiversity. Sustainable rubber can exist, but as with avoiding slave labor, we have to trust that the supply chain is properly incentivized to prioritize sustainable growth. We can commend companies like Intel and Apple for trying to remove conflict minerals from their products, for example, we but must also appreciate that doing so is hard, because supply chains are complicated and capitalism is built to maximize growth and profits, not human or environmental wellbeing.
So what's the point? #
The point is that these big problems have a way of filtering down to everything that we do. I think that, on average, the American consumer would like to know that their shoes, or the maple in their skateboard deck, or their paintbrushes, or whatever tools and accessories their hobby demands are available to them without the baggage or exploited labor or environmental distruction. But how can we be confident of that? How can we be informed consumers when the very shoes on our feet are so entangled in global labor markets and supply chains? Skateboarding shoes are a niche product, available at a wide array of prices from many companies to consumers with a wide array of disposable income or personal tastes, and the variety of products on the market reflect that. And, indeed, some of them do proudly proclaim how sustainable they are. These products, however, are a niche within a niche, serving a community that rapidly dwindles as you realize that sustainable shoes might, in fact, be more expensive for little material benefit.
If nothing else, this tale simply accentuates that ethics in capitalism are the unfortunate realm of the privileged who can afford to care that their shoes are made from sustainable rubber and fair-trade cotton. Through that lense, there will never be enough information in the world to convince well-informed consumers to choose the better option when the Sameul Vines "Boots" Theory of Socieoeconomic Unfairness tells us that the average consumer may very well know that their purchases (literally shoes in this case, as in Pratchett's example) may not be the optimal choice, but when the choice is bad shoes or no shoes, bad shoes will always win. Imagine the world we must live in that some consumers could be priced out of making good choices, or that companies can profit on their image as ethical!
Skate and destroy (capitalism) #
I'm no economist, and plenty of air has been spent theorizing about how the market tends to be inefficient at solving for negative externalities (shocking /s). The unfortunate truth seems to be that this is a hard problem to solve: it's hard for consumers to be informed, it's hard for companies to remain vigilent when profit incentives say otherwise, and it's hard for producers and laborers to walk away from exploitative practices when their financial future may be at stake. Ethics and capitalism are like oil and water: they mix only when shaken vigorously, and tend to separate rapidly when left alone.
I'm no nihilist, either, though, and so I won't advocate that everyone abandon their hobbies and sacrifice their joy for the greater good. There are effectively two routes that I think the individual should take: the first is to make good decisions, as much as their budget allows (while recognizing that being priced out of concious consumerism doesn't make someone a bad person). This is imperfect and I know it, but pragmatism dicates that we not stop down that course simply because it is not a total solution now. There's still plenty of good out there, and avoiding it for the sake of it is just despair for despair's sake.
The other route is political, to take these challenges to the world stage. Perhaps if capitalism can't resolve these issues, what we should be thinking about is the post-Imperial world we live in and why exploiting cheap labor oversees is so easy and comes with so little oversight. We struggle every day to deal with the reality of classism at home, but we need to consider what classism looks like on a world scale. Always remember the person on the other end, and hold others to that same expectation.