Spruce Traction

According to the DFB (German Football Association), around 90,000 football matches take place on German football pitches every weekend. The majority of them are played on unsealed natural turf surfaces, which are predominantly played on by players wearing football boots with plastic studs. Spruce Traction is dedicated to the problem of plastic abrasion of football boots on grass pitches and offers a direct solution for all common football boots with a screw thread. Innovations in the sportswear sector, especially in soccer, are extremely limited to performance. There is rarely room for sustainable design concepts. The products, especially shoes, have to work and simply perform just like the athlete. As part of the project, I looked into the problem of plastic abrasion from soccer boots and the resulting microplastics. In my search for a suitable alternative material, I came across spruce resin through Max Kochës „Forbidden Honey“ project. Due to its hydrophobic material properties and the possibility of pressing it into shape in a liquid state, the resin could be well suited for use as a cleat.

By chance, I quickly moved away from pure resin during the material studies, as it turned out to be extremely brittle and fragile and ended up with the original waste product, the filter residues, which consist mainly of resin-soaked pieces of bark and turned out to be much more pressure-resistant and abrasion-resistant when pressed. To enable an immediate application context, I used the common M5 screw thread with hexagon nut and developed studbolts made of aluminum, which are pressed over and can thus be applied to all football boots with a screw thread across all brands. In the end, I was looking for a low-threshold way to make the concept accessible and developed Spruce Traction, a kit that enables the restoration of worn down studs made of spruce granulate. The kit contains a two-part mold, twelve pre-pressed spruce screw studs including the studbolts and other accessories needed to reproduce studs easily and simply. The kit can easily be used at home thanks to the enclosed instructions.