In Conversation with KUORI: Transforming food waste into biodegradable outersoles
Image by Thibaut Wenger
12 February 2026
Can you tell us about KUORI, how it started, and what the organisation does?
KUORI is a spin-off from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). Sarah initiated the project as a semester assignment focused on developing a circular material, inspired by observing the large volume of banana peel waste in her shared compost and its unique flexibility and durability. Sarah expanded the research during her bachelor’s thesis and founded KUORI after completing her Industrial Design degree in 2022.
KUORI develops partially bio-based, biodegradable, elastic, recyclable materials designed to replace fossil-based elastomers such as TPU, EVA, and synthetic rubber. The company combines industrial performance with circular design principles, now primarily using olive pits and walnut shells as biofillers while continuing to explore additional food side streams.
KUORI’s core product platform, BIOWA, is a family of thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs) tailored to applications ranging from fast-degrading, home-compostable grades to durable, recycling-optimised formulations. Its flagship BIOWA 80A grade, developed for footwear outsoles, addresses microplastic pollution by ensuring abrasion particles are biologically degradable.
In parallel, KUORI is developing next-generation elastic materials, including a bio-based, biodegradable, and chemically recyclable crosslinked rubber (“Material C”), based on peer-reviewed research and KUORI’s patent-pending technology, expanding circular solutions across elastic material applications.
What problem is your innovation solving and how does the technology work?
The core problem we address is microplastic pollution. Whenever plastic products are used, tiny particles are worn off through friction. A well-known example is shoe soles: with every step, microscopic particles are abraded and released into the environment.
These particles — known as microplastics — are persistent. Once released, they accumulate in soils, waterways, and ultimately in food and water systems. While the long-term health effects are still being researched, there is growing evidence that microplastics pose risks to both ecosystems and human health.
Instead of focusing solely on making entire products industrially compostable at the end of life, KUORI takes a different approach. We focus on the full lifetime of our materials and on the particles that are inevitably released during use. Our materials are intentionally designed so that abrasion-derived micro-particles can biologically degrade in natural environments rather than persist for decades. At the same time, the bulk material — for example, a shoe sole — remains durable during use and can be recycled or, where appropriate, industrially composted at the end of life. This dual strategy allows us to tackle microplastic pollution at its source without compromising performance or circularity.
What have been the biggest successes so far?
A major KUORI success has been collaborating with industrial partners to transition from laboratory materials to application-oriented prototypes and pilot-series including shoe outsoles, flip-flops, and other consumer products. These partnerships enabled early identification of market-adoption barriers — such as processing requirements, performance expectations, and cost sensitivity — which were directly integrated into material development.
In parallel, our continued research efforts led to a significant technological breakthrough. In the search for 100% biobased elastomers, KUORI developed and patented a novel approach to crosslinked rubber systems that are biobased, biodegradable, and chemically recyclable (Material C). This innovation addresses a long-standing gap in the biomaterials field: the lack of high-performance, crosslinked elastomers that combine mechanical robustness with circular end-of-life pathways.
Together, these developments demonstrate KUORI’s ability to bridge scientific innovation with industrial requirements. By aligning material design with real-world performance constraints, we are laying the foundation for scalable, circular elastomer solutions capable of meeting the demands of high-performance applications.
What role does collaboration play in bringing innovations to scale?
Collaboration is central to how KUORI brings material innovation to scale. We work closely with several leading universities in Switzerland — including FHNW, ZHAW, the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, and EPFL — to access scientific expertise, testing infrastructure, and material characterisation capabilities. These collaborations enable rigorous development and validation of material properties, which is a critical prerequisite for brands before considering a material transition.
Equally important are our collaborations with brands. Beyond financing pilot projects, they contribute essential application-specific knowledge, such as performance requirements, regulatory constraints, and processing expectations. This ensures that our materials are developed for real-world use cases rather than laboratory conditions.
Partnerships with compounders and injection moulders are another key element in scaling. They provide the industrial facilities and processing expertise required to manufacture and process our materials using conventional equipment. By integrating our materials into existing production systems, we enable rapid adoption without the need for capital-intensive, in-house manufacturing infrastructure.
In addition, we actively collaborate with like-minded startups across the circular economy ecosystem to accelerate innovation and market adoption. A key example is our collaboration with Algenesis Labs and their Soleic® technology platform. By joining forces, we explore how such biodegradable polymer systems can be further adapted, compounded, and tuned for different applications, performance requirements, and processing conditions.
These collaborations allow us to combine strong academic validation with KUORI’s expertise in material formulation, customisation, and industrial scalability. Working together, we aim to translate promising circular material technologies from the laboratory into real-life, market-ready applications. Exchanging insights on circular design, degradation behaviour, regulatory requirements, and application-specific constraints helps reduce development risk and enables faster deployment across the value chain.
Together, this network of academic, industrial, and entrepreneurial partners enables KUORI to move efficiently from material development to scalable, real-world impact.
In what ways does your innovation deliver tangible value to the industry, such as financial returns, operational efficiency, or enhanced business viability?
KUORI delivers tangible value by enabling brands and manufacturers to respond proactively to increasing regulatory pressure and changing customer expectations around sustainability. Our materials allow partners to reduce environmental risk, particularly from abrasion-intensive applications such as footwear, while continuing to deliver high-performance products using established industrial processes.
Beyond material performance, we actively work with brand partners on take-back systems and recycling concepts. By designing materials that are compatible with mechanical or chemical recycling and by supporting closed-loop strategies, we help reduce long-term dependency on virgin raw materials and improve resource security. While recycled materials may not always be cost-competitive today, these systems create strategic value by stabilising supply chains and preparing brands for future regulatory and market requirements.
What’s next for you?
Over the past years, we have siginificantly increased the biobased content of our BIOWA platform, while simultaneously improving material performance and price efficiency. Building on several years of close partnerships and application-driven development projects, our next focus is to transition these efforts into commercial-scale applications where BIOWA can create the greatest possible impact on microplastic pollution.
At the same time, we continue to further develop and scale Material C, a crosslinked biobased rubber designed for high-performance elastomer applications where abrasion — and therefore microplastic release — cannot be fully avoided. Our current efforts are focused on the industrialisation of this technology through commercial partnerships and public funding initiatives. By targeting some of the largest sources of largely unavoidable microplastic emissions, such as braking components, wheels, and tyres, we aim to enable meaningful reductions in persistent microplastic pollution even in the most demanding use cases.
Together, these initiatives position KUORI to expand into demanding performance markets while addressing one of the most under-recognised environmental challenges of modern materials.
Lastly, what advice would you give consumers trying to be more sustainable?
We often expect circular materials to outperform fossil-based materials, be significantly more sustainable, and cost exactly the same — all at once. That’s a very high bar. Conventional plastics have benefited from decades of optimisation, infrastructure, and industrial backing. Biomaterials are still building that ecosystem.
So instead of looking for perfect solutions, look for progress. Ask brands for transparency. Ask for data. Try to understand the full value chain — where materials come from, how a product performs during use, and what actually happens after you’re done with it. Because a product being technically recyclable does not mean it will actually be recycled.
Build your judgment on transparent information, not just labels. The more consumers value systemic thinking and real accountability, the faster better materials can scale.
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