"For decades now, the fashion industry has been on a mission to make products recyclable. But shoes have been a much harder puzzle to crack than clothing. While garments are made from just a handful of materials, shoes are far more complex objects. A sneaker can be made of 50 different materials from foam insoles to leather exteriors to cotton laces, all glued together with adhesives."
"But change is on the horizon. A group of sustainability experts wants to make shoe recycling as widespread as recycling paper or aluminum. Their solution: Radical collaboration among the biggest shoe rivals in the world. Yuly Fuentes-Medel, a fashion sustainability expert who runs MIT's Climate Project, has just launched The Footwear Collective (TFC), a non-profit devoted to building circular solutions for the footwear industry. She's convened eight founding shoe companies-including Brooks, On, New Balance, and Steve Madden-and is recruiting more."
The global footwear industry produces roughly 20 billion pairs annually, mostly nonrecyclable and destined for landfills. Shoes combine dozens of materials—foams, leathers, textiles, adhesives—making recycling technically challenging compared with garments. Several brands have prototyped recyclable shoes, but recycling at scale remains limited. The Footwear Collective (TFC), a nonprofit led by Yuly Fuentes-Medel, convenes major brands to pursue circular solutions and share costs, data, and infrastructure. TFC partners with organizations like Goodwill to collect shoes at scale and manages about 50 targeted projects including developing industrial recyclers and finding secondary markets for recycled shoe materials. Collaboration aims to overcome industry competition and enable large-scale recycling.
Read at Fast Company
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]