PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
The current most important environmental challenge of footwear industry is the enormous amount of waste generated at the end-of-life phase, with most shoes being disposed in landfills: in recent years the fast fashion trend has further worsened the situation. Less than 5% of 24 billion pairs of shoes produced per year are recycled or reused and the rest goes to landfill or is stocked in the wardrobes for years (World Footwear, 2019): shoes can’t be recycled because are often made from a mix of materials (leather, foam, rubber, plastics, textiles, metals) and poly-laminates glued together, which are very difficult to be separated. RE-SHOES wants to provide an alternative, circular and sustainable solution for footwear end-of-life management. The project aims to implement a new circular economy business model based on the collection, sorting and recycling of post-consumer outdoor shoes from which to obtain secondary raw materials to be used for manufacture a new generation of high-quality recycled shoes. The solutions presented in the project have the ambition to bring virtuous recycling practices beyond the state of the art within the footwear industry, as they are aimed at developing an end-of-life management of shoes that allows to maintain the value within the production cycle. In this scenario, in fact, end-of-life footwear is used as a source from which to derive again new materials to be used directly in the production of new recycled shoes, instead of being used for purposes and products of lower quality, probably in different sectors than the one of origin.