Do shoes have a circular future?
In 2022, Puma sent me, along with 499 others including press, brand ambassadors and applicants from the public, a pair of trainers. The idea was that we would wear them for six months before returning them to be composted, as part of the brand’s ‘Re:Suede’ experiment. The project sought to answer some burning questions: could Puma make desirable and compostable shoes? Would people go to the effort of returning them? Could the experiment scale up?
Results were mixed. While the shoes sufficed for a quick walk to the corner shop, they left me with achy, cold feet after wearing them for over eight hours in a field at a festival — lacking the support and cushioning I was used to. Made from hemp, cotton, suede and a synthetic sole designed to biodegrade, the shoes were light on structure and 57 per cent of wearers said they were uncomfortable to wear.
The brand went back to the drawing board and released 500 pairs of the Re:Suede 2.0 for sale in 2024, priced at £104. Buyers were offered free returns, but Puma has not yet shared results of the commercial phase of its experiment.
Now, a surge of products, innovations and initiatives hope to catalyse sustainable change in the footwear industry, a global goliath that pumps out some 24 billion pairs of shoes every year, of which it is widely estimated that 90 per cent ends up in landfill.
But, like Puma, they face an uphill battle. Made from multiple components, materials and adhesives, shoes are extremely difficult to process at the end-of-life stage. Helen Kirkum, founder and creative director of Helen Kirkum Studio, which makes upcycled trainers from post-consumer footwear waste, says the labour of deconstruction — done by hand with a scalpel — is the main factor that drives up the brand’s prices. But few circular solutions exist outside of manual deconstruction, other than shredding for use as sports flooring, furniture, padding and insulation, and even the systems for this don’t exist at the necessary scale.
In February, sustainable innovation forum Fashion For Good announced the launch of ‘Closing the Footwear Loop’, a multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to tackle footwear’s circularity challenges by mapping global waste flows to identify where circular infrastructure is needed, and trialling emerging technologies and business models to capture and process end-of-life footwear. “[Post-consumer waste] sorting companies are not focused on footwear at all,” says Fashion For Good innovation manager Sophie Van Kol. “Compared to apparel, it’s a lot more complex.”
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