![Picture](/uploads/1/2/3/6/12365113/published/shoes.jpg?1498051466)
Yesterday I wore the white shoes, shown in the photo here, to work. At 10am I had physical therapy down the hall and upon leaving (after stretching more ways that I knew I had in me), I noticed something thin, white and curled on the floor, but didn’t really think much of it. When I got back to my desk, I noticed other white debris on the floor beneath my desk. Suspicious now, I inspected my shoes. Lo and behold, they were shedding the white ‘vinyl’ layer from inside my slides. My shoes were disintegrating as the day wore on, I was leaving a trail that I hoped no-one noticed. I don’t recall how old they were, but obviously, old enough! When I got home, they went right in the garbage. Sadly. They were comfortable.
This isn’t the first time this happened to me. On another occasion, I was doing a plant tour of an ultra-clean pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. It required steel-toe shoes. Women’s steel-toe shoes have improved over the years since I first started wearing them in 1981, but they are still heavy and mostly ugly. The shoes that died were only a few years old, lightly used because I’m not routinely in manufacturing settings anymore. So imagine my surprise when I tried to figure out why they felt ‘weird’ and more uncomfortable to walk on than normal – and discovered that the black “rubber” sole was disintegrating and leaving black chunks everywhere! That sort of thing would not have surprised me in my chemical plant days (I worked in an acid plant and no telling what you step in there). Needless to say, it was pretty embarrassing and I chose to sit out the remainder of the tour rather than leave my trail of debris. No great loss to see them die.
Turns out crumbing soles are not uncommon. I don’t think my steel toe shoe soles were actually rubber – more likely polyurethane foam. PU foam dries out as it ages – though sometimes there might be bad manufacturing chemistry. And this is weird – the disintegration is accelerated if shoes sit in a box, nicely protected and looking like you just bought them! “Use them or lose them” seems to apply here. On the bright side, soles that crumble in a shoebox will crumble in a landfill, which is where they went too.
This isn’t the first time this happened to me. On another occasion, I was doing a plant tour of an ultra-clean pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. It required steel-toe shoes. Women’s steel-toe shoes have improved over the years since I first started wearing them in 1981, but they are still heavy and mostly ugly. The shoes that died were only a few years old, lightly used because I’m not routinely in manufacturing settings anymore. So imagine my surprise when I tried to figure out why they felt ‘weird’ and more uncomfortable to walk on than normal – and discovered that the black “rubber” sole was disintegrating and leaving black chunks everywhere! That sort of thing would not have surprised me in my chemical plant days (I worked in an acid plant and no telling what you step in there). Needless to say, it was pretty embarrassing and I chose to sit out the remainder of the tour rather than leave my trail of debris. No great loss to see them die.
Turns out crumbing soles are not uncommon. I don’t think my steel toe shoe soles were actually rubber – more likely polyurethane foam. PU foam dries out as it ages – though sometimes there might be bad manufacturing chemistry. And this is weird – the disintegration is accelerated if shoes sit in a box, nicely protected and looking like you just bought them! “Use them or lose them” seems to apply here. On the bright side, soles that crumble in a shoebox will crumble in a landfill, which is where they went too.