Can we recycle shoes?

Shoes are complicated to valorise and largely forgotten for a long time compared to textile recycling. But things are starting to change, and techniques are being honed to give our old pair of trainers the new lease of life they deserve.

Points worth remembering:

- Today, no shoe can be said to be recyclable. . We are more likely to refer to it as valorisation. Energy recovery, repurposed into insulation or flooring for sports facilities, etc.

- “Technical” footwear can be brought and left in Sports & Leisure Goods recycling containers (at the entrance of sports stores), and “smart” shoes to recycling banks.

- Technologies are emerging to optimise shoe recycling, but are still in their early stages of development.

- Worn-out shoes are not just like any other form of waste: they are very hard to take apart.

The figures are staggering and sum up by themselves the economic and environmental challenge that we are all unsuspectingly wearing on our feet: in France, each year, close to 400 million new pairs of shoes are bought… and 300 million others are thrown away. If we break this down to the number of inhabitants (68 million), these numbers represent close to 6 pairs bought per year and more than 4 pairs thrown away per year per inhabitant!

Globally, the number of shoes that annually find their way to the bin has risen to 20 billion pairs. More often than not, they unenviable end up either incinerated or in landfills.
In the midst of the climate crisis (among others), and at a time when our lifestyles must evolve towards a more circular one, this is somewhat of an alarming observation.Even more so, given that shoe manufacturing and sales currently represent around 4% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

So, in attempting to reduce this impact, we can, of course, think about making them last as much as possible by taking care of and repairing them…But where do you go once they've reached the “end of the road”? We seek to give them a new lease of life, and imagine a new avenue: recycling.
Today, its effectiveness and making it widespread raise a number of questions and challenges.

Is it possible to recycle shoes?

For a long time, the answer had been no... Today, is it more measured.
If recovery of some parts of worn-out shoes does exist (but only on a small scale, local and artisan level: a sole here, a pair of laces over there…), nothing of note has, however, happened on a much larger scale, all the more so in industrialised countries, where deep-rooted 20th-century habits of getting rid of worn-out items die hard, without much attempt at valorising them.
But the good news is that the last couple of years have changed all this: technical solutions are nowadays being developed, and if it is still complicated to refer to it as shoe recycling, we can nevertheless work on valorising the raw materials.

There are even numerous components that are recoverable and can be valorised: rubber, foam, fibres, leather, textiles and even eyelets for laces. But let's be honest, these elements cannot actually be recovered (mainly for technical reasons): only the sole can really be valorised.

Rather than talking about "recycling", we should, for the time being, be talking about valorisation.

Worn-out shoes go to the same collection points as clothing and linen. In other words, there are multiple options: the number of recycling centres in France has multiplied in just a few years. There are now tens of thousands of these throughout the country.

You can use several effective online locators to find these by entering your address to discover the ones nearest to you. Let's list three effective locators:
- the one from the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME):
- the one from Refashion, the Textile industry's environmental organisation
- and from the Social Enterprise business, Le Relais.

There are a few pieces of general advice to follow to facilitate the future sorting of clothes and shoes bundled together in recycling containers and banks:
. the shoes must be dry,
. the shoes must be paired by tying laces together,
. separate worn-out pairs still usable (in a separate bag) from the worn-out pairs… that are far too worn-out to be used again. This will help sorters to direct shoes towards reuse or recycling.

Good to know: these containers are intended for collecting running shoes, trainers, sandals, flip-flops, boots… but not technical shoes such as inline skates, ski boots, climbing shoes, etc., which must be put in Sports and Leisure Goods containers available when exiting sports stores.

As part of the Extended Producer Responsibility (ERP) scheme, environmental organisations, which were set up by producers and retailers, are responsible for managing the end-of-life cycle of products sold on the market.

What happens to shoes sent to recycling?

You will have understood by now that shoes dropped off in recycling banks are not, strictly speaking, recycled. On the contrary: 90% of shoes collected are exported. They are then given to charities or resale shops that donate or sell them at a fraction of the price.It is an effective way to subsequently give the product a second life while contributing to the social economy.

Shoes that are too damaged to be reused are partially valorised. The ways in which they are put to use vary widely: insulation for buildings (for the textiles parts), flooring for sports facilities (shredding shoe soles)...

A large part of shoes is used to recover energy: : by shredding them, you get "SRF" or solid recovered fuel (also referred to as "RDF" for refuse-derived fuel) to supply, for example, district heating systems.

Please note that all shoes can, in principle, be valorised, but they use different channels depending on the shoe type. As a result, sports and leisure goods such as ski boots, roller skates, safety shoes, etc. cannot be deposited in the usual collection points. They are collected, where possible, through specific channels organised by those in the industry (manufacturers, sellers, etc.). This is a real opportunity for these products to be "better" processed in conjunction with similar products.

Why has recycling for shoes not become widespread?

There is still a great deal of progress to be made to establish an actual recycling sector in France as abroad. One of the main reasons is down to the product itself: the way shoes are currently designed is highly complex to recycle on an industrial scale.

Some models count up to 70 different materials… Creating machines capable of identifying materials that can be valorised and taking apart shoes, piece by piece, material by material, and all of this on a large scale, is a substantial challenge for engineers.

Progress is being made with techniques, giving rise to some hope. In France, for example, innovation is on the march, as shown by a pioneering pilot scheme by the CETIA (innovation platform dedicated to the recyclability of textile and leather items), a research and development platform based in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, in France, of which DECATHLON is a partner. Named "Re-shoes", this pilot project aims to automate and industrialise the sorting and disassembling of shoes with a view to recycling and valorisation.
In concrete terms, this is about creating an intelligent robot capable of separating, with precision and at speed, the shoes' soles from their uppers (the upper part of the shoe covering the foot) to drastically increase shoe soles' recycling potential.

So, what do we do with our old trainers? Ideally, and after having made them last , and repaired as much as possible ... we look if we can find recycling containers, offering them a new lease of life. In short, we encourage the circular economy, which is THE key to reducing the use of natural resources.

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