There are 24 billion pairs of sneakers made every year. 95% of those end up in landfills or incinerated. Sneakers are notoriously difficult to recycle. A typical pair can contain dozens of different materials — EVA foam, rubber, polyester, nylon, plastics, and more – bonded together with adhesive, prohibitively expensive and labor intensive to separate and recycle.
Most footwear brands that advertise the use of recycled materials incorporate them into only selected elements, often the mesh upper, while retaining conventional EVA midsoles and rubber outsoles. Those individual materials may be recyclable on their own, but once assembled into a sneaker, it becomes a far more complex problem. It costs more to deconstruct a sneaker than it does to construct one.
A new sneaker company, however, ANIMA, has just launched a 100% recyclable sneaker, by reinventing the process and the materials from which a sneaker is made. “Most companies are trying to solve it at the end, once the product has already been made”, said Andy Griffiths, Chief Commercial Officer and co-founder of ANIMA, in a recent interview with STYLE of SPORT. “We came at a closed loop solution from the beginning of the problem.” Read More
