“Second Life” for your old sneakers? Florida companies recycle them and reuse them.

Whether you’re a marathon runner or someone who takes your dog for a walk, you could have bought multiple sneakers in a year.

But when these brands’ crisp new white shoes turn brown, the soles become thinner or the toes plunge through the hole, and they are eventually thrown into a pile of goodwill during spring cleaning or in the garbage. Either way, your old shoes are likely to be in landfill.

Moe Hachem believes there is a way to give those shoes a “Second Life.” He founded Sneaker Impact, a shoe recycling and reuse company in Miami, with the aim of reducing the environmental and climate footprint of the large athletic shoe industry. It’s not a new idea, but he takes steps to address the “wasteful colonialism” criticism that other shoe and clothing recycling companies face abandoning the wrong things in the wrong places.

“Our team inspects every pair that comes here,” Hachem said. “All shoes are explained. They extend the lifespan of the shoes.”

There are thousands of sneaker impact drop-off locations in gyms, specialty sneaker shops and running clubs around the US.

Thousands of shoes are delivered each day, added to piles of goods, boxes and bags stacked up to the facility’s ceiling. Hachem’s family has been involved in the second-hand retail goods business for decades, but the building still has thousands of old clothes, but since 2020, sneakers have been the company’s focus.

Delivery includes Gold Standard for reuse and resale, brands with clean trendy names like Nike Air Force 1, Jordan, and seemingly brand new Hoka and Cloud running shoes. They all blend with sneakers with holes and torn soles.

Every shoe that comes in is sorted by quality and big “second life” decisions. They are shipped for the recycling process and cannibalize it for convenient components as they are intact enough to be resold or tied up. “End of the Fall” shoes with worn treads and other major issues are sent to the grinding chamber.

Through the shoe grinder

One of the biggest challenges of recycling sneakers is organizing the multicolored mountains that come out of the grinder. Many shoes have over 15 materials, including plastic, and how they are glued doesn’t make them easier to recycle. However, with newer, more expensive equipment, Hachem expects the impact of the sneaker to make a dramatic expansion. Sort hundreds of shoes per day to thousands of shoes per hour.

The new sorting machine is tall enough to reach the top and throw a bucket of ground-up sneakers into the opening, and within minutes, spit out the product in colour and material, depending on what you choose on the touchscreen. During the test run at the Herald’s visit, the machine was able to spit out the black section with about 85% accuracy. Hachem said they’re still fixing the bug.

He is experimenting with making new products using recycled foam and rubber. The floors around his office at Miami headquarters are made entirely from rubber and foam from recycled sneakers. He imagines that rubber floors may be suitable for playgrounds, but the foam may be even more comfortable under the carpet.

Sneaker Impact has partnered with California-based companies Community Made and Blumaka to use materials to create a prototype of the new sneakers, slides and boots that it first unveiled at the Herald. The slides have a crocodile-like comfort.

However, the majority of the shoes are mainly boats to Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and Bolivia, 20-foot shipping containers packed with 10,000 pairs of shoes each, shipped out of the US for sale on the second-hand market. The sole, or that is dirty, or has holes, but the sole and its undamaged shoes will also be sent to repair or clean in overseas markets, he said.

“You’re not only reducing waste, you’re creating opportunities for microbusiness,” says Hachem. “In developing countries, these shoes are necessary. If you have completely fine sneakers worn over 100 miles and shipped to the right market, I don’t think it’s the right call to grind and shred them.”

“Abolish colonialism”

Older clothes, especially shoes, are an increasing problem with waste. According to some statistics, 300 million pairs of shoes are thrown away each year, and sneakers can take more than 1,000 years to break down in landfills.

The efforts to “recycle” clothing have been successful in many ways. The US is the world’s largest exporter of secondhand clothing, sending out over 1 billion pounds of secondhand clothing each year, but the majority of it is unsold and essentially garbage, according to the OR Foundation, which has played a leading role in documenting fashion waste.

“Waste colonialism throws our trash into developing countries,” said Francesca Bellmini, a quasi-instructor in sustainable fashion at Columbia University who lives in Miami.

Over the years, retailers like Zara and H&M have won Flack for being paid to send products scattered across the global south. Bellumini calls it “corporate greenwashing.” Anything that is not sold by Goodwill or Salvation Army will be sold to textile buyers in bal and will likely become other countries.

For example, the OR Foundation has found that at Kantamant, the world’s largest second-hand clothing market in Ghana, about 40% of the millions of items that pass each week depart from the market as wasted.

“There are mountains of clothing on the beach that are taller than me,” Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of a nonprofit or foundation, told the Herald over a call from Ghana. “We remove 20 tons of textile waste a week, and we can do more.”

Ricketts said things escalated for two reasons. With the low-quality products that make up a large part of the supply, Ghana has no financial resources to build landfills or incinerators. She described a low-quality product as requiring vendors to invest money to make the product resellable.

“If the retailer is in debt and they get a bale of the product and they have to wash everything and fix everything that needs money, they may not have that money,” she said. “If it’s enough for someone in America, it’s probably worth it for the retailer here.”

Sneaker Impact has previously signed a contract with Ghana and is currently not shipped there, but Hakem acknowledged that there are similar concerns in the Caribbean. He said his company is working to send products wherever they actually need or can be used.

“It’s not the right place to send a sweater to Ghana, even if it’s a nice north face,” Hakem said. “Send a size 13 shoe to Bolivia or Honduras is the wrong market. You can send the same pair to Ukraine, which is helpful.”

Bellumini understands that Sneaker Impact is trying to create a circular market from an overview approach.

“At this point the problem is huge and evil, and there’s no solution,” Bellmini said. “I’m not saying that one person’s actions, or one person, brand or company’s behavior is not working. In fact, it starts with one person or one person’s MOE and I’ve never seen someone devote a lot of money and a lot of time and effort to solve a problem.”