Problem Statement
The diversity of constituent materials makes footwear disassembly and recycling very challenging – some footwear is made with over 40+ materials. Scaled technology does not exist that can deconstruct footwear into its composite parts – creating a mixed waste stream. Around 95% of used footwear goes to landfill or incineration. There are many factors that must be considered when thinking about material usage for footwear, especially adhesives – e.g. in sports shoes they need to be able to tolerate flexural stresses and present high comfort and durability.
What do we hope to achieve by working in this area?
Fashion for Good is doubling down their work in this space, building on their existing projects including the Fast Feet Grinded pilot, which tests and validates Fast Feet Grinded’s footwear recycling process. Expanding on existing workstreams Fashion for Good will collaborate with our footwear focused partners, including adidas, Inditex, ON Running, PVH Corp., Reformation, Target, and Zalando.
How do we address this area?
To effectively address the challenges in footwear sustainability, Fashion for Good identified the key intervention points across the shoe lifecycle and structured work into four core workstreams:
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Design – Defining circular design in the footwear space and collectively driving guidelines to build a circular infrastructure
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Materials – Scouting and validating sustainable alternatives for footwear materials including TPU, PU, EVA, leather, and rubber
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End of Use: Sorting, Disassembly, & Recycling – Developing a comprehensive data set on post-consumer footwear waste flows, including (non-)rewearable fractions, volumes, construction and composition. As well as scouting and validating solutions for repair, end of use, disassembly and recycling of footwear
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Traceability – Laying the foundation by amalgamating a footwear traceability data protocol to build traceability for evidence to substantiate sustainability claims
Related Projects
Fast Feet Grinded Collaborative Pilot
The aim of the pilot was to test and validate the FastFeetGrinded footwear recycling process by evaluating the quality of outputs and understanding the environmental impacts of the process. FastFeetGrinded is a company specialising in footwear recycling that accepts all types of footwear as feedstock to produce sorted material granulates with zero waste streams. FastFeetGrinded aims to deconstruct any type of pre- and post-consumer shoe, separating footwear into substituent components, which are then subsequently grinded down and processed to create material streams for repurposed use.
