As the push to recycle and repurpose apparel strengthens, one of the notoriously hardest items to reuse is footwear, with millions of pairs of discarded shoes ending up in landfills each year.
Innovation platform Fashion for Good wants to do something about that. The group released a new report in partnership with Amsterdam-based circularity nonprofit Circular Economy, “Closing the Footwear Loop: Material Flow and Composition Analysis of Non-rewearable Post-consumer Footwear Waste in Europe,” that explores the challenges and opportunities of footwear circularity.
Related Stories
The report combines literature review, interviews with recyclers, sorters and industry experts and on-the-ground pilots analyzing data from 1,200 individual post-consumer shoes in the European Union.
You May Also Like
The report found that footwear accounts for 9 percent by weight of total discarded textiles that are collected, whereas household textiles account for 90 percent. Of that 9 percent, 50 percent of post-consumer footwear waste is not re-wearable—classified as unusable in its original form due to a variety of factors ranging from damage to low secondhand market demand. But nearly half of those shoes classified as non-wearable had no physical damage, indicating a missed opportunity for refurbishment and cleaning for secondary market usage.
Forty-six percent of post-consumer footwear waste is re-wearable, while the remaining 4 percent is contaminated and hindered from recycling due to damage from moisture, paint, heavy dirt, chemicals or other contaminants. Fashion for Good’s report also revealed that 90 percent of re-wearable footwear from the EU is exported, primarily to the United Arab Emirates, China and Pakistan.
Fashion for Good cited data that the global footwear industry produces around 23.8 billion pairs of shoes each year, while some 90 percent of discarded footwear ends up in landfills or incinerated. And when lumped in with the overall textile stream, global recycling for footwear remains below 1 percent.
“Footwear’s inherent complexity with multi-material construction, permanent bonding techniques, limited disassembly infrastructure, and the need for pairing individual shoes has resulted in a system where reuse and recycling are structurally restrained, despite growing regulatory pressure and brand ambition to circularize products,” the report said.
Indeed, Fashion for Good found that 51.9 percent of post-consumer footwear had permanent adhesives, while only 19 percent was stitched and 8.7 percent had mixed assembly. More than half had blended uppers and various materials in the sole, such as SBS (16 percent), EVA (15 percent), rubber and SBR (14 percent). Only 10.5 percent of shoes shared the same material for both the midsole and outsole.
Another obstacle to footwear recycling is external embellishments such as logos, patches and trims, which Fashion for Good found that 90 percent of post-consumer shoes bear. And the use of carbon black in a quarter of black soles is nearly impossible for NIR-based sorting systems to read, as these components absorb infrared spectrum light, ruling out polymer identification by a sensor.
As has been suggested for post-consumer apparel textile recycling, the report calls for footwear companies to design shoes for disassembly and material separation needed for recycling, without compromising durability or long-term performance. That also includes improving other design choices such as better material labeling, use of non-carbon black pigments and limiting multi-material and complex attachment disruptors to improve sorting accuracy.
Infrastructure development is also key, according to the report, specifically focusing on opportunities to increase the re-wearble percentage of footwear.
“Enhancing the economic viability of post-consumer footwear resale can be achieved by integrating cleaning, repair, and refurbishment services within sorting infrastructures, or by further developing AI-enabled sorting technologies for re-wearable items,” the report said.
Fashion for Good also suggests investing in dedicated preprocessing capacity to enable component separation, contaminant removal and refurbishment. Strengthening the end-of-use value chain—collecting, sorting, reuse and recycling—also will improve material recovery and minimize waste.
“Collaboration among brands, recyclers, and innovations is required to scale recovery pathways and validate new materials,” the report said. “A reliable data foundation on post-consumer footwear flows is imperative, as lacking this information limits informed decision-making and long-term planning.”
From a regulatory standpoint, Fashion for Good’s recommends separating footwear from apparel frameworks, as tailored policymaking will better address the structural complexity of shoes. This will allow for evidence-based policies and implementation of reliable data systems to inform circularity programs such as EPR and ESPR. This also will help provide transparency needed to guide infrastructure investment and scale recycling technologies, while also standardizing shared definitions, material taxonomies and reporting to ensure industry-wide compliance.
Ultimately, the report reveals the potential for large-scale post-consumer footwear recycling and reuse, but only with a shift in the approach to not only collection, sorting and processing, but initial product design, as well.
“Post-consumer footwear waste shows potential for valorization, transforming a previously overlooked area into a viable material stream as an alternative to fossil-fuel-based inputs,” the report said. “Achieving circularity for post-consumer footwear waste demands coordinated action at the product, service, system and data level, rather than relying on technological development alone.”