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Karin Kloosterman
Sustainable news for Israel and the Middle east

Sustainable fashion icon Stella McCartney works with Israel’s Balena to make fashion green

Balena slides, a prototype to demonstrate the material of circularity, fully degrades back to the soil. HANDOUT.
Balena slides, a prototype to demonstrate the material of circularity, fully degrades back to the soil. HANDOUT.

Balena Stella McCartney

When Crocs first came into being, I had already owned a prototype pair of foam-injected slides from Italy that I bought at a fashionable shop in Tel Aviv on Dizengoff Street. I thought they were the best invention since sliced cheese, until the soles wore thin and I had to throw them out.  Crocs were much clunkier and never really my look, but they caught on in Israel 20 years ago, and like in the rest of the world, almost everyone owned a pair of Crocs, except me.

Yet I love the idea of injectable foamy plastic that is biodegradable. Consider that some islands in the Seychelles are completely swamped by discarded flipflops. And reports over the last few years from the US show that most materials sent to recycling just end up in landfill.

Enter Balena.

The Israeli-made company develops bioplastics that can fully compost and be 3D printed and have have worked with a number of fashion brands such as the UK-based Vivo Barefoot –– and now Stella McCartney.

Their compostable, recyclable, and biobased material embodies the shared vision between Balena and Stella McCartney: a future where innovation meets circularity to create sustainable design.

This collaboration is a milestone for Balena and for the future of materials.

Kitty Shukman

Kitty Shukman

“It’s proof of how far we’ve come and how much further we can go together,” says Balena founder David Roubach.

“When I started Balena, one of my dreams was to collaborate with Stella McCartney—a true pioneer in sustainable fashion. Today, I’m proud to share that this dream has become a reality. Our groundbreaking material, BioCir Flex, is now featured in Stella McCartney’s S-Wave Sport trainers, part of her Autumn 2025 collection,” says Roubach.

 

About the Author
Karin Kloosterman is a long-time journalist, and eco-entrepreneur, championing her energy for the earth and the good people and animal friends who live on it. She is a tech patent owner, brand designer, a published scientist, and an award-winning journalist. She's consulted governments, educational institutions and corporates such as Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, TEVA, and Tel Aviv University. She founded the first international cannabis technology conference in Israel, CannaTech, to promote medical cannabis as medicine and science. And she developed a robot to grow cannabis on earth and on Mars. Find her sustainability ideas at the world's first and leading eco news site for the Middle East, Green Prophet www.greenprophet.com Contact her: karin@greenprophet.com
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