Footwear Brands, Retailers Join Pilot to Recycle Shoes

Major footwear brands and retailers have signed on to test and validate a recycling process aimed at innovating the shoe sustainability industry.

Adidas, Inditex, Target, and Zalando have begun working with a new pilot being launched with Fashion For Good and FastFeedGrinded, a footwear recycling innovator. According to Vivo Barefoot, 90% of shoes are headed to landfills or incinerators at the end of their lives with consumers.

FastFeetGrinded’s process can deconstruct any type of pre- and post-consumer shoe, breaking it down into its macro-components. Those macro-components are then ground down into smaller high purity granulates which can be repurposed.

Retail and brand partners in the pilot will divert their pre- and post-consumer footwear to FastFeetGrinded, where materials will be recycled and transformed into new material granulates.

“This project will be a first in the footwear industry to allow us to understand the sustainable recycling technologies and infrastructures needed to accelerate the transition towards a circular future,” said Katrin Ley, managing director of Fashion for Good. “By fostering collaborative partnerships like this, where companies come together to share knowledge and validate innovation, we pave the way for scalable solutions.”

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