If I hadn't yet been properly blown away by how complicated it is to make a running shoe, I am now positively awed. There are more than 50 pieces to the Trance 8, and each one has to be put together by hand. There are dozens of assembly lines, with 80 or 90 people on a line. The shoes on your feet were probably touched by as many as 200 hands.
Here is a small sampling of what happens: printing, high-frequency embossing, water-washing, brushing, cementing thermoplastic polyurethane, applying heat, attaching rubber, water-pressing, up- and down-pressing, priming, dipping and cementing stuffing, sole-pressing, cleaning, inspecting, packing, shipping. There are processes involving vacuums, metal detectors, hammers, sewing machines, and ultraviolet light.
Next door, Nike uses water-based adhesives, but Campbell says that glue didn't meet the company's performance standards. Instead, Brooks has replaced some glue with a solvent-free "hot-melt" polyvinylalcohol. When they do use a more traditional adhesive, it comes out of a special dispenser that limits the exposure of the workers and minimizes the amount of glue. Still, I remember what Patagonia's Throne had told me: "The job I least want in a factory is gluing the outsole to the midsole." Sure enough, here's the smell of nail-polish remover again. Huge fans are blowing it out of the buildings. Brooks has 35 employees in China overseeing this and every other detail of production, something smaller companies can't afford to do.
As we walk past the endless rows of blue-clad workers bending over their work, a few members of the Brooks team attempt to explain more things above the din. They tell me how they nest together the shiny thermoplastic polyurethane flourishes before they cut them to save materials, and how they no longer use toluene as a solvent, and how an infrared machine requires less energy than the ovens of old.
And when it's all done, the shoes get trucked to a ginormous port and packed on a container, 6,500 boxes to a container times several hundred containers.
I'm completely overwhelmed.
We walk outside for some (relatively) fresh air. I ask to see the waste piles, and that's when we head to the half-filled stalls out back where Campbell helps me ponder the meaning of it all.
A factory executive must think I look deflated because he comes over to tell me that Nike's waste piles next door get sorted for recyclable scraps.
"Why don't your piles get sorted?" I ask Campbell. He looks tired, too. He's about to head home to jaw with someone about developing sustainable cellulosic materials and to jaw with other scientists he won't tell me about. Having pulled off BioMoGo, the future concepts team is working on a next-generation running shoe–greener, more responsible, more technically advanced.
"We're too small to do that," he sighs.
"Why don't you just truck your waste over to Nike and have them deal with it?" thinking I've solved everybody's problems.
"That would be nice, but they'd probably laugh in our face," he says.
I look back at the waste, and even though it's smaller and smells better than just a few years ago, I can't help but think that it would be nice if we didn't need to buy quite so many complicated shoes that have to change every season. For a few long moments, I feel like I never want to buy anything ever again.
I say as much, and Campbell nods.
"It's all about what customers want," he says. And while I'm glad Campbell shows this pile to his designers, I also wish that every American customer, the people who buy some 58 million pairs of running shoes each year, can see what I've seen. Maybe then they'd accept fewer colors, maybe some duller whites or more uniform outsoles. But they can't all see it, and not everyone wants to give up flash. Still, a greener future lies in both consumer behavior and technology. Which is why we need Derek Campbell, Lorrie Vogel, and Andrew Estey to keep at it.
Here at the end of the line, we're actually in the middle of the line. The shoes still have to get boxed, shipped, bought, run in, and replaced all over again.