SKECHERS, un-brighten shoes
Have you ever wondered where your shoes end up when their used up to their soles?
Usually, we do not ask ourselves this question. I did a couple of years ago after working for the shoe industry in Asia.
What I discovered was the real downside of the industry, which only adds up to our waste crisis and the pollution across the world :
95% of our shoes end their life in landfills or being incinerated
A few weeks back, I collected a few sample shoes from a collecting point managed by an NGO in France.
I was diving into the sorted shoes box “for landfill” at the collect site. Looking for a piece I would have not tried to disassemble before. The manager stopped me and showed me this kid shoe which you could bump with your hand to light up the sole. She asked me amused:
“And this one, how do you disassemble it and recycle the parts ?”
I was on my ass.
Let’s be honest, I had heard of those shoes before but never came across in my job. The question got me by surprised and I could just answered to her :
“Well, I don’t know, we’ll have to figure out I guess.”
Back at the office, I first wondered how and when this idea came to a designer mind to put a light system in a pair of shoes and what could be the added value.
The craze kept going up until the company which started this trend, bankrupted.
Since then, it seems that a few brands are still putting lights in their shoes, Skechers is one and a few others, amongst one called HoverKicks which sell both kids and adults shoes with LED inside and a funny catch phrase.
Beyond the aesthetic and the gadget, which could bring kids to want to have a pair, it seemed after looking a bit on the internet that it could also transform itself into a bad experience :
Coming back to my disassembly trial
The whole difficulty in recycling shoes today comes from three main points :
- The construction must be made to be disassemble, if not, you would never be able to seperate parts,
- the capacity to reused those materials or recycled them properly,
- a process fast enough so that you can actually make money selling the materials
In the case of the Skechers, none of these criteria is met and even more than that, the electronic light system adds difficulties to the sorting process.
And as said in the introduction, 95% of our shoes ends up in landfills or incinerated, which means that this electronic parts and its battery are going to pollute the ground or our air when reaching the end point.
After finding a problem like this one, I always like a good brainstorm to find solutions
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I’ll be honest, this time the only solution I could find is to stop producing and selling shoes incorporating electronic systems in it. This should be only used if there is a great added value in someone’s life. For example, if this electronic device in someone’s shoes has a health purpose such as helping old people keeping their balance so they don’t fall.
All the other cases should be prohibited for all the reasons above.
Our kids need light on the future, not in their shoes.
As always I am happy to publish reaction/statement from brands about the article, so that they can explain their vision or solution towards creating shoes that would help protecting the environment and adding value to people’s life.
stan[at]zerowasteshoes.com
Zero Waste Shoes is a company helping brands, manufacturers and people to create circular systems for all our shoes.
