Thanks a lot to those of you, who gave me feedback on my critical article in our previous issue about the plastics-eating wax moths, and about the way a good part of the press dealt with it. Just recently, another case came to my attention… . Adidas announced at a conference in New York that it had developed a prototype shoe, with uppers made of protein-based fibres that replicate spider silk. It didn’t take long for the “press” to turn this into “Adidas to launch biodegradable shoes that dissolve in 36 hours”, extolling the material’s “sustainable” properties… “material that can go back into the Earth”… and so on. No mention at all about whether the whole shoe was made of biodegradable materials, or about the end-of life options of the shoe. Waste disposal contractors will certainly be sceptical about having shoes end up in the biowaste collection system. And of course nobody wants to find ‘biodegradable’ shoes in parks, forests or the ocean. The whole project leaves a lot more questions open than it answers. See a short note on p.19.