Sorting and recovery worn-out shoes and production scraps to make secondary raw materials for manufacture new REcycled SHOES

Introduction

The current most important environmental challenge of the footwear industry is the enormous amount of waste generated at the end-of-life phase, with most shoes being disposed of in landfills. In recent years, the fast fashion trend has further worsened the situation.

Waste Generation

Less than 5% of the 24 billion pairs of shoes produced per year are recycled or reused, while the rest goes to landfill or is stocked in wardrobes for years (World Footwear, 2019). Shoes can’t be recycled because they are often made from a mix of materials, including:

• Leather
• Foam
• Rubber
• Plastics
• Textiles
• Metals

Additionally, poly-laminates glued together make it very difficult to separate these materials.

Project Overview

RE-SHOES wants to provide an alternative, circular, and sustainable solution for footwear end-of-life management.

Objectives

The project aims to implement a new circular economy business model based on:

1. Collection
2. Sorting
3. Recycling of post-consumer outdoor shoes

From these activities, the goal is to obtain secondary raw materials to be used for the manufacture of a new generation of high-quality recycled shoes.

Ambitions

The solutions presented in the project have the ambition to bring virtuous recycling practices beyond the state of the art within the footwear industry. They are aimed at developing an end-of-life management system for shoes that allows for the maintenance of value within the production cycle.

Conclusion

In this scenario, end-of-life footwear is used as a source from which to derive new materials to be used directly in the production of new recycled shoes. This approach avoids the use of these materials for purposes and products of lower quality, likely in different sectors than the one of origin.