Some parts return quickly, some take years, and the honest answer is more complicated than most sustainability labels suggest. That is exactly why we stopped printing the word "biodegradable" and started asking a better question: what happens when a shoe reaches the end of its life?
The 30-second version
In a hurry? Here is the short answer.
A Nooch is made from eight plants. No plastic, no leather, just natural fibres and natural rubber, built for the biological cycle rather than the landfill.
What we do not claim is that a finished shoe meets every scientific definition stamped onto the word "biodegradable." What we do claim is simpler: a Nooch comes from nature and is built to return to it. The rest of this page is why that distinction matters, and what we can and cannot prove about it.
Why most shoes were never designed for nature
Most shoes are a mix of plastic, synthetic rubber, petroleum-based foam and chemical glue. They are engineered to resist water, resist bacteria, resist fungi, resist rot. Which is another way of saying they are engineered to resist nature itself.
That is exactly what makes modern footwear such a stubborn waste problem. The same qualities that keep a shoe intact on your feet make it almost impossible for the earth to deal with once you are done with it.
A Nooch starts from the opposite question. Not "how do we make a shoe last forever?" but "what happens when it is finally worn out?" Everything on this page follows from that one switch.
What "returns to nature" actually means
"Returns to nature" is not a yes or no with a number attached. It is a spectrum, and three different words get mixed up on it.
Biodegradable is a lab term, not something you can see happen. There is no single legal definition of it. Instead it is pinned down by test standards: a material counts as biodegradable when micro-organisms turn it into water, CO2 and biomass, and the tests fix how much, how fast and under what conditions. Those standards are written by bodies like ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) and the OECD, and regulators add their own bar on top. In the US, the FTC's Green Guides say an unqualified "degradable" claim means the thing fully breaks down within about a year of normal disposal. So the word always hides three questions: how much, how long, and under what conditions.
Compostable is stricter. The European standard EN 13432 asks, roughly, that a material falls apart within about twelve weeks and breaks down by about ninety percent within six months, in an industrial composter running near sixty degrees, not your garden. The US equivalent is ASTM D6400. So "compostable" almost always means a factory facility, not a back yard.
Returns to nature is the plain-language version: the material ends up as part of the soil again, the way a fallen leaf does. True for some materials, slow for others, and never instant. There is no official definition of this phrase, and that is precisely the gap we sit in. When no existing standard fits a whole shoe, an honest maker has two options: use plain language and explain it openly, or help build a standard that does fit. We use the plain language, we explain the spectrum here, and we think the standard still needs writing.
A shoe is not one material. So the honest question is not "does it biodegrade?" but "which parts, how completely, and how long?"
Why we are careful with the word "biodegradable"
There is a reason we no longer reach for the word. Not the process, we are more committed to that than ever, but the word. Regulators across Europe have spent years cracking down on exactly this one.
A 2020 study by the European Commission found that more than half of environmental claims on the EU market were vague, misleading or unfounded, and that four in ten were entirely unproven. Newer EU consumer rules now treat words like "biodegradable" as claims you have to substantiate, not decorate a label with. In the UK, Trading Standards found that more than sixty percent of the products it audited as "biodegradable" could not back the claim up.
The failure is almost always the same: a "biodegradable" label with no timeframe, no conditions and no test behind it.
Honest disclosure: we said it too
This page would be a little much if we did not admit something first. We used to say biodegradable. We started in 2017. We asked our suppliers for materials that broke down, and they showed us certificates. These were credible companies and genuine people trying to do something good, so there was no reason to doubt them.
What we learned later is subtler than a broken promise: a certificate for a single material is not the same thing as proving that a whole shoe returns to real, uncontrolled soil. The materials were sound. The claim was just bigger than the paperwork underneath it. Set it against an industry where most shoes are plastic glued to leather, and we were still making a giant leap in the right direction.
When we said biodegradable, we meant the plain human thing: nature will take care of it. That is true to the spirit of what we make. But officially the word is not a feeling, it is a test, with a fixed rate, fixed conditions and fixed proof for each material. We meant the honest version of the word and could not prove the official one, not for a whole shoe.
So we stopped using it. Not because we stopped believing nature takes care of it, but because we would rather get on with making shoes that come home than spend a decade proving a word before we are allowed to start.
The real question: fragments or food?
Here is the part the word "biodegradable" hides. There is plastic that is sold as biodegradable, and it technically passes a test. The catch is how. A lot of it simply breaks into pieces so small they fall below what anyone can detect, and then we call it gone. It is not gone. It is microplastic, scattered through soil and water, just too small to see. And not only out there. In 2022, researchers in Amsterdam went looking for these particles in human blood and found them, the first time anyone had shown that plastic this small ends up circulating inside us. "Too small to see" turns out to be a long way from gone.
The EU saw through this. In 2021 it banned oxo-degradable plastic across the bloc, exactly because it does not return to anything. It only fragments into microplastics that stay in the environment. The EU's own definition of real biodegradation is the opposite: micro-organisms turn the material into water, carbon dioxide and biomass, with nothing left behind. That is a good line to draw, and worth applauding.
So two very different endings hide under one word. One breaks into bits too small to find. The other becomes food. Plant materials are the second kind, and that is the whole reason to build a shoe out of them.
It doesn't only happen at the end
Here is something the word "biodegradable" never covers, because it only asks what happens at the very end. A shoe is also returning to nature the whole time you wear it, whether you mean it to or not.
Every step grinds a little off the sole. On an ordinary shoe that sole is synthetic, so what rubs off is microplastic, left on the pavement, washed into drains, lifted into the air. Shoe soles are now counted among the everyday sources of microplastic pollution, shed not at the end of a shoe's life but across all of it, one step at a time.
A plant shoe wears down too. Nothing escapes friction. But what it leaves on the path behind you is plant matter, not plastic. That is the same difference that runs through this whole page, fragments or food, and it does not wait for the end. It is happening on every walk.
What actually happens to a Nooch in soil
Put plant materials in real soil and they behave very differently from one another.
Natural fibres like cotton, flax and hemp break down relatively quickly, weeks to months, depending on warmth and moisture.
Natural rubber is the slow one. It comes from a tree, so micro-organisms can break it down, but it has a heavy molecular structure and needs the right conditions. The sole is almost always the part that takes longest. One real datapoint from the research: a thin disk of natural rubber lost about a sixth of its weight in eight months of soil burial. A whole sole is thicker and denser than a test sample, so if we project that honestly it points to a matter of years, not months, and not the centuries a synthetic sole takes. We have not run a twelve-year soil test on a finished sole and we are not going to pretend we have. But on the evidence we do have, a sole that comes home within a few years is the far more likely reading.
And something does eat it. Soil is full of bacteria and fungi that break natural rubber down and use it as food, as a source of carbon and energy. They turn up exactly where you would guess, in the ground around rubber trees, and scientists have been documenting them since 1928. The catch is the type of rubber. A car tyre is vulcanised, locked shut with sulphur and fillers, which is part of why a tyre can sit in a landfill for generations. A natural, unvulcanised sole is the version those microbes can actually work on. It is the food kind of rubber, not the tyre kind.
Here is the thing, though: slow is not the problem, and fast is not the point. The question that matters is not how fast something vanishes. It is whether it feeds life on the way down, or just fragments into bits that never leave. So a single "this shoe is biodegradable" stamp would still be the wrong tool, because the soft parts and the sole are nowhere near the same clock. How completely, and how long the slow parts take, is the work we keep doing.
A fallen tree doesn't fail because it takes years
Picture a fallen log on a forest floor. It can take years to disappear, sometimes decades. Nobody calls that a failure, because the whole time it lies there it is food: for fungi, for insects, for the soil itself. It is taking part in nature long before it vanishes.
No one gives that log a "biodegradable" certificate from a sterile lab. It takes real time, and the forest floor is an uncontrolled place. But nobody doubts that it belongs there, and that it will return to the soil it grew from.
The biologist Merlin Sheldrake puts it nicely: composers make, decomposers unmake, and nothing in a forest could happen without both. A shoe that can be unmade is not a design failure. It is the design. We do not have a decade to prove the exact timeline first, and we do not think we need one to act. Every day we are making shoes that come home instead of lingering is a day that counts, even if the dent is small.
The oldest shoe ever found is 5,500 years old
In a cave in Armenia, archaeologists once dug up a shoe. One piece of cowhide, laced front and back, shaped to a right foot, still stuffed with the grass someone packed into it. It was 5,500 years old, older than the pyramids, and barely worn out.
It lasted partly because the cave stayed cool and dry and the shoe sat sealed under layers of sheep dung. But it lasted at all because of what it was. Leather, tanned to resist the exact thing this whole page is about: rot, microbes, going back to the soil. Tanning is, in a way, the craft of stopping a hide from returning to nature.
So there is a quiet split at the heart of footwear. One kind of shoe is built to outlast you by thousands of years. The other is built to come home. We are trying, on purpose, to make the second kind.
Is returning to nature always the right goal?
Not necessarily, and we take the counter-argument seriously. Breaking down into soil is not automatically the best ending for every material. A metal bicycle should not be buried. Neither should a smartphone. A thing that just turns back into CO2 is not fully circular, and for some materials reuse or recycling keeps more value. The honest rule is this: returning to nature only earns its place when the material genuinely belongs in the biological cycle rather than the technical one, where the goal is to keep it in use, not bury it.
A Nooch sits firmly in the biological cycle. Plant fibres and natural rubber are not things you want to keep forever in a loop of factories. They came from the ground and are meant to go back to it. That is why returning to nature is the right goal for this shoe, and not for every shoe.
What we're doing next
We are shoemakers, entrepreneurs and innovators, not scientists. So rather than mark our own homework, we commissioned independent research with Wageningen University into how our materials behave in soil and which end-of-life genuinely makes sense. What we will not do is wait a decade of soil tests before we start, because being in the game is how anything in this industry actually changes.
We are also not standing still. The gap between a plant shoe and a perfect ending is exactly where the interesting work is, so we keep poking at it. None of what follows is a promise on a label yet, it is the work, and we would rather show you the workbench than a finished slogan. We are looking at whether adding PHA, a material some of our partners work with, could speed up how the slow parts break down. We are experimenting with bokashi, the Japanese way of fermenting organic matter down into the soil. And in the least scientific and most honest experiment of all, one of us has a worn-out pair buried in the garden right now, just to watch what really happens.
What we know today
We do not know exactly how long every part of a Nooch takes to return to nature. Anyone who claims that kind of certainty is pretending. What we can tell you is exactly what it is made of: eight plants and nothing else. Natural rubber for the sole, a plant-based leather from eucalyptus and mushroom for the upper, hemp, organic cotton, flax and coconut through the rest, and soy-based ink on top. No plastic, no animal leather, nothing engineered to fight nature. It was built to belong to it. In a world filling up with things that leave fragments behind, that feels like a future worth making shoes for.
FAQ — Frequently asked questions about plant-based shoes and biodegradability
Do plant-based shoes return to nature?
Some of their materials can, given time and the right conditions. Natural fibres break down relatively quickly in soil, while natural rubber is far slower. The catch is that most shoes sold as "plant-based" still hide a synthetic sole, thread or glue that never returns at all. Ours is built the other way, with no synthetic part hiding in it, which is the whole point.
Is a Nooch shoe biodegradable?
We do not use that word for our shoes. It is a regulated lab term, and we would rather not borrow it than borrow it badly. What we will say plainly is that a Nooch is made of materials that came from the earth and are built to return to it safely. We used to use the word in our early days, and we stopped once we learned how much it has to prove.
Can I bury or compost my shoes in the garden?
We do not give you a disposal instruction, and here is the honest reason. Returning to nature is a property of the materials, not a recipe for your back yard, and the sole in particular needs conditions a garden does not provide. Even incineration only helps in a proper facility, and a lot of discarded footwear ends up burned in the open somewhere far away. So we would rather take responsibility for the end of life ourselves than tell you to bury it and hope.
What does "biodegradable" actually mean?
That microbes can break a material down into water, CO2 and biomass. On its own the word says nothing about how long or under what conditions, which is why regulators now treat unqualified "biodegradable" claims as misleading.
Are shoes sold as "biodegradable" really biodegradable?
Often the claim is true in spirit but cannot be said honestly, because the proof is missing. The law asks which part, how long, and under what conditions, and most labels answer none of those. Some materials also only fragment into pieces too small to see, which is microplastic, not a return to nature. So a thing can genuinely break down and still fail the test that lets you claim it.
Which part of a plant-based shoe takes longest to break down?
The sole. Natural rubber comes from a tree and can be broken down, but it is the slowest part and needs the right soil and microbes. Our honest projection is a few years, and like a fallen log it is food the whole time, not fragments left behind. Even then it is a fraction of the hundreds of years a synthetic sole can persist.