We can recycle a plastic bottle in our sleep. We have (almost) no idea what to do with a shoe.
Less than 1% of discarded footwear in Europe is recycled. Here is why, and what it would take to change that.
Every year, the world makes 23.8 billion pairs of shoes, which is roughly three pairs for every person alive. And when those shoes are worn out (or just out of fashion, or missing a partner, or slightly soiled) almost none of them become anything useful again.
Less than 1% of discarded textiles and footwear globally is recycled. Not 10%. Not 5%. One. The rest goes to landfill, to incineration, or on a long journey to markets in UAE, China, Pakistan, and India that were never designed to be Europe’s cleanup crew.
This is not because nobody cares, but because shoes, as objects, are genuinely one of the most complicated things we have ever tried to keep in circulation. And it is because, until now, no one had looked closely enough at the problem to know exactly where to start.
Together with Circle Economy, we spent the last year looking. This is what we found.
The engineering that makes shoes good also makes them nearly unrecyclable.
Here is something most of us have probably not thought about: a single running shoe can contain up to 65 distinct parts, assembled in over 360 steps. That foam cushioning under your heel is a precisely engineered material designed to absorb impact thousands of times. The rubber outsole that grips wet pavement is a separate compound, bonded using high heat and permanent adhesive.
All of that engineering is exactly what makes shoes so hard to recycle.
Clothing, for comparison, is mostly mono-material. A cotton T-shirt is mostly cotton, and a polyester fleece is mostly polyester. Imperfect, but intelligible. A shoe is more like a small, tightly assembled machine: rubber bonded to foam bonded to textile bonded to synthetic leather, held together by industrial glues designed specifically never to come apart. In our analysis of 1,200 post-consumer shoes, 52% were bonded with permanent adhesives. Only 19% were stitched.
To recycle a material, you first need to identify it. And to identify it, you need to separate it. Neither of those things is currently done for most shoes, at any industrial scale.
When our teams ran NIR scanning technology (the same type used in clothing sorting) across the sample, 37% of sole materials returned no result at all. The main culprit: carbon black, the pigment used in almost all dark soles. It absorbs the infrared spectrum rather than reflecting it, making the scanner effectively blind. In our sample, 97% of black soles were unidentifiable. And 24.6% of all soles were black.
But this is a story about a technology being applied to footwear at a meaningful scale for the first time, not a story about a dead end. Overall, more than 60% of materials were successfully identified: a strong baseline for a first-of-its-kind study. And the carbon black problem, while real, is already attracting solutions, which are being actively developed for exactly this constraint. The gap is known, and the field is moving.
Picture 100 shoes entering the system. Here is where they end up.
Our research found that footwear collected in Europe splits into the following fractions, roughly:
The “cream” fraction ( the only shoes that reliably stay in Europe for resale) represents just 4 out of every 100.
But here is the finding that surprised even our research team: 24% of non-rewearable shoes showed no physical damage whatsoever. They were discarded because the style was out of demand in second-hand markets, or because they arrived as a single shoe without its pair. A quarter of the “waste” pile was not actually broken. The system just had nowhere to put it.
We are not dealing with broken shoes. We are dealing with a broken system around shoes.
The circular economy that nobody credits
So where do the shoes actually go? Unsurprisingly so, footwear collected in Europe flows overwhelmingly outward. Only about 5% of sorted shoes end up in local second-hand shops. Here is roughly where the rest flows:
Pakistan is the world’s leading importer of post-consumer textiles and footwear. One key reason: exporting waste is cheaper than paying for incineration at home.
But that dynamic only applies to the lower-quality fractions. The highest revenues in the post-consumer footwear system actually come from local European resale: the small cream-quality fraction that never leaves. The problem is that cream represents only around 4% of collected footwear. Everything else needs somewhere to go, and for most of it, export remains the path of least resistance.
These informal markets are doing something genuinely impressive. Skilled traders are looking at bales of mixed, unsorted footwear and determining, by eye and experience, what can be saved. Cobblers are resoling and repairing what arrives damaged, while resellers are extending the life of products far beyond what any European system managed to do. This is circular economy activity, at real scale, happening right now.
But it is also happening at real cost. The footwear that cannot be sorted, cannot be repaired, cannot be resold, that lands there too. An estimated 5–6% of what arrives in Pakistan often cannot find a use even after the additional round of sorting. It is incinerated, or left. The informal workers who built this system receive none of the EPR funding or circular economy investment that flows through European sustainability frameworks. They are bearing the residual cost of a problem they did not create.
The pattern has a name. It is the same one we used in the Project Rewear piece: waste colonialism. Waste that Europe cannot or will not process at home does not disappear. It travels. It becomes someone else’s problem, someone else’s environmental burden, and someone else’s gutters.
One country is doing this differently. Here is what France figured out.
France is THE pioneering EU country that, with a mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility scheme, specifically covers footwear alongside textiles and household linen.
Under this system, shoe brands and importers are legally required to finance the collection, sorting, and treatment of footwear at end of use. The body that oversees this (Refashion) has also supported the development of CETIA’s Sensor HUB, an automated system that uses X-ray imaging to identify what is inside a shoe before it is sorted.
France has also published a Best Practice Guide on Footwear Design for Recycling, and has active recycling technology development through partners, including CETIA and THE 8 IMPACT, both of whom contributed data to this study.
The result: 90% of collected footwear in France is reused. It is not a perfect system: the recycling rate is still low because industrial-scale recycling solutions for footwear barely exist yet, but the infrastructure and the policy incentive to build them are in place. No other European country has reached this point for footwear specifically.
Three things need to change at the same time.
No single intervention closes this loop: it requires coordinated action at the product level, the infrastructure level, and the policy level.
Design footwear differently from the start. Use reversible adhesives or mechanical fasteners where possible. Reduce decorative disruptors (trims, overlays, patches) that serve no structural purpose. Choose materials that NIR scanners can read or mark the materials for sorters to identify. Embed circular design principles, not as an afterthought, but as a constraint from the first sketch. The upcoming Circular Design Guidelines (Phase 2) will make this practical and specific. ;)
Build infrastructure for preprocessing. Sorting facilities need to be able to clean, repair, and refurbish lightly damaged shoes, not just route them to landfill or export. A quarter of the non-rewearable fraction shows no physical damage. Cleaning and refurbishment systems could recover a significant share of that. AI-enabled sorting technology, adapted specifically for footwear (not borrowed from apparel), is also needed.
Separate footwear from clothing in policy and data. Footwear is fundamentally different from apparel in composition, construction, and end-of-life challenges. Treating it identically in regulation and trade classification means the sector is permanently invisible in the data, and thus impossible to govern effectively. France has shown that a footwear-specific EPR scheme is workable. It needs to become the European standard, not the exception.
Does any of this change what you should do with old shoes?
Somewhat: but the honest answer is that individual action operates at the margins here. The structural constraints are industrial, not personal. Still, a few things do make a difference:
→ Pair your shoes before donating. Single shoes are automatically sorted as non-rewearable. Tying or pairing them at the point of disposal is one of the lowest-effort ways to preserve reuse value.
→ Clean them first. Visible contamination (mud, heavy soiling) pushes shoes down into lower quality grades. A wipe-down before donation is worth more than you might think.
→ Obvious one but… Repair before replacing. The economics of repair are genuinely difficult for cheap footwear: it often costs more to repair a €25 shoe than to buy a new one. But for quality leather shoes or sturdy boots, resoling and repair extends a lifespan significantly. The infrastructure for this is declining (the Netherlands has seen years of falling cobbler numbers), but it still exists.
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