How Netcare and Adcock Ingram are helping pupils to walk tall
● Vinyl shoes have become a runway favourite, but for health-care companies Netcare and Adcock Ingram, the craze spawned an idea to recycle drip bags to make school shoes.
For the past year, the hospital and pharmaceutical groups have been testing school shoes made from recycled hospital drip bags among pupils in Katlehong, Gauteng.
“There are about 7-million kids in our country who walk barefoot to school and there are a whole lot of challenges associated with that, including fungal infections,” said Nceba Ndzwayiba, director of transformation at Netcare. Not having shoes also drives absenteeism to up to 70% in winter and is one of the most visible signs of poverty.
Environmental responsibility played a part in the project. Drip bags are made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a plastic also used to make things such as flooring, raincoats, boots and shower curtains. PVC is not biodegradable, and countries like Australia repurpose it to make plastic tables and mats.
Ndzwayiba said: “We thought if we can follow a similar model but then link it to the need in our country, it would have a great impact and divert waste from landfills because at the moment all of it is going into landfills.”
The My Walk Made With Soul foundation, a nonprofit organisation set up by Netcare and Adcock Ingram Critical Care — which manufactures medical PVC products such as drip bags and oxygen masks — works with nurses in hospitals who ensure that only uncontaminated drip bags leave Netcare hospitals for recycling. Cleaned drip bags are taken to a company that makes PVC pellets, which are used to make the shoes. The prototypes were made in China and Pietermaritzburg. Netcare is now waiting for machinery from China to make the shoes in SA.
Ndzwayiba said Netcare is finalising a deal with a pellet maker and a shoe manufacturer with the aim of launching in February. It takes 20 drip bags to make one pair of shoes and each pair will cost about R38 to produce.
The shoe initiative has also roped in entrepreneurs in Netcare’s supplier development programme. Southern Basadi, a business of four women, collects up to 2,000 drip bags a week from nine Netcare hospitals in Gauteng.
Delores Mackenzie, a director, said: “It’s an encouragement for us women because we know somebody else’s child will benefit from our work.”
Ndzwayiba said: “Our commitment at the moment is to buy every single pair of shoes made from the Netcare PVC through the Netcare foundation. And then Adcock will [match that], so we are actually looking at an annual project of [about R3m] that still comes back [to the entrepreneurs].
“We realised that from Netcare Gauteng hospitals alone we can make as many as 80,000 pairs of shoes per annum,” he said.
By including other hospital groups and the public sector, every school child in SA could be wearing a pair of free school shoes.
Adcock CFO Dorette Neethling said the project “touches on our core values … The fact that a life-saving product can positively influence the lives of people in the community beyond the hospital wards was an inspiration to us.”