Say no to fast fashion with these shoes made from coffee grounds

Imagine joining your father’s company and proceeding to make yourself “a headache for everybody”. 

That’s what Wilson Hsu did when he left his banking job to work at his father’s shoe manufacturing company in 2010, but he had good reason – tackling the staggering amount of pollution created by the fashion industry, which generates an estimated 2 to 8 percent of global emissions each year to produce millions of apparel and footwear items.

The “headache” Wilson created is CCILU, an award-winning brand of shoes made from agricultural waste like coffee grounds, ocean plastic and silicone waste. The brand operates on a closed-loop business model, which means it aims to not generate any waste. Instead, it recovers waste to use as raw material for its shoes. They’ve also started a programme where used shoes can be sent back to CCILU to be processed into diesel for electricity via pyrolysis. 
 
Wilson concedes that the brand does not make much money and is manufactured separately from his father’s other operations, which still produces shoes the conventional, more carbon-intensive way. 

But the “small wins” achieved so far are crucial to changing minds in the long run, says Wilson, a 2022 DBS Foundation Grant Awardee. “In recent years we have started to feel that we are not alone and there are many people standing by us,” he says. “All this gives us encouragement.”

Slowing down the pace of fast fashion 

Wilson recalls that when he joined his father’s company, its factories could run two shifts a day and had the capacity to produce 50 million pairs of shoes a year. To him, this was an unsustainable pace that would drain the resources of the planet. 

“Brands tell people, ‘you guys have to buy more every season’,” he says. “In the short term, we are happy because we are making more. But this is crazy. I'm not sure how long we can be on this same journey.”

According to UNEP partner Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a rubbish truck full of clothes is burned or added to the landfill every second. Landfill waste is expected to increase about 70 percent by 2050 as the global population continues to climb, according to the World Bank.

In 2017, Wilson and the company began looking at how they could do things differently: “We started thinking – if everything comes from petrol and oil, can we have something different? Can we have the waste from other industries and create technology to transform them into valuable material?”

CCILU started with used coffee grounds, which emit large quantities of methane and carbon dioxide when sent to landfills, but ventured into other materials like ocean plastic in response to feedback. 

“Unfortunately [coffee] is something that most consumers didn’t get. People know about plastic, so they ask us to do more about plastic,” recalls Wilson. “This is the reason we started working with ocean plastic. And that brought quite a lot of impact to the market and to consumers.”

Soon, other industries came knocking. A semiconductor company called CCILU, asking if they could make shoes with silicon waste, followed by other streams of agricultural waste – corn, oyster shells, tea leaves, bamboo, pineapples, and coconuts. “Sometimes we are also pushed by other people who we are trying to help,” reflects Wilson. 


Image via CCILU’s website

Uplifting the the low-wage workers picking up the plastic

CCILU’s quest to recycle waste material also led them to the human side of the supply chain – while sourcing plastic bottles, the brand realised that used plastic bottles were often collected by people from disadvantaged backgrounds who were paid a pittance for their labour.   

Through surveys conducted on the ground, CCILU learnt that every 600 or so plastic bottles collected only earned the workers USD 1. “Every day their income is around USD 3–4, [from] collecting thousands of plastic bottles a day,” shares Wilson. 

The brand decided to work with collectors and pay them three times the market rate, increasing their daily income to about USD 12–15. It currently works with around 20 collectors. “This is also good for the company because we know where the bottle comes from,” says Wilson. “We have 100 percent transparency and traceability.”

Winning over naysayers 

CCILU’s shoes may have won awards for their innovative designs, but not everyone is a fan. “My father recently came to me again and said that it wasn't worth doing, making shoes this way,” shares Wilson. “He said, ‘We have 50 people, we have to come up with 2,000 pairs a day. While Wilson has the same 50 people trialling and making only a few pairs a day.’”

His father, he notes, grew up in a different time. “This was after World War II, when people wanted to survive and make money. And growing the company to a bigger number is the definition of success,” he says. “In my time, we choose to have a very different way, and my father just doesn’t understand why I’m doing this.”

Despite their differences, Wilson’s father has continued to support his venture and the pair have managed to work together by setting down firm boundaries and communication strategies. “He is my wonderful father and he gave me a lot of foundation and a lot of knowledge, and a lot of skills,” he adds.

The price to pay for sustainability is a high one in economic terms – it has taken CCILU years and teams of people to develop a reliable supply pipeline of waste material from different sources. “And that is just on the waste! Then you spend the other few years studying how to transfer all this waste into high performance material for footwear,” explains Wilson. 

This is followed by spending time and money to educate and persuade consumers to buy the product, but Wilson remains firmly committed to his vision: “This might not be cheap, but this is good for everybody.” 

Asked how he measures CCILU’s success, Wilson cites the importance of developing high-quality, high performance materials, but adds that changing mindsets is just as important. 

“This is something we feel really happy about, [when] we see more and more consumers who are willing to spend more time listening to our stories, trying to learn our technology and buying a pair from us,” he says. “By my definition, this is a very important success.”