German partners announce world’s first industrial scale recycling system for all shoes
06/06/2018
As a result of this breakthrough, partners Soex and I:Collect say they now have the world’s first industrial-scale recycling system for all footwear types.
Their system builds on six years of work carried out by the Centre of Sustainable Manufacturing & Recycling Technologies (SMART) at the University of Loughborough, by French agency Agence Innovation Responsable (AIR), French company Eco TLC, the French Environment & Energy Management Agency (ADEME) and UK-based footwear recycling specialist In-Cycle.
It works by mechanically disassembling used shoes into their component parts, from which it collects “usable secondary raw materials”, including leather, rubber and foam.
Every year, the partners said at the time of the launch, millions of tonnes of used shoes go into landfill or into incineration plants, resulting in the loss of potentially valuable materials. Already, Soex is collecting tens of thousands of used shoes every day at its sorting and recycling plant in the town of Wolfen, in Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany. Of these shoes, the company says more than 80% are in good condition and can be worn again and these go for sale as second-hand shoes in various places around the world.
Of the shoes Soex receives, 17% are no longer fit for use and need to be disposed of. For years, Soex has argued that destroying these products is not a sustainable solution. Managing director of Soex and of I:Collect (which specialises in in-store collection of used textiles and shoes), Axel Buchholz, has said: “Until now, owing to the complex construction of footwear, no one had been able to create a system able to recycle footwear of all types on an industrial scale and then process the components in an ecologically sound manner. This is why we decided in 2012 to invest in a shoe recycling solution. Our system offers all footwear manufacturers, retailers and consumers a sustainable approach to product end-of-life management.”
The system consists of a shredder, which cuts the shoes up, after which a metal separator extracts any ferrous metals that may have been present. The material then goes through a delamination mill to break up composite materials before an air separator filters the material into leather, rubber and foam. Each of these materials is then ground up separately to make leather fibres and foam and rubber granules, which can be used to make a new product.
Share this story:
