Adidas, Inditex, ON Running, PVH, Reformation, Target and Zalando are supporting the latest Fashion for Good initiative aimed at accelerating and validating the next generation of footwear innovations.

The initiative will address the key intervention points needed to drive footwear circularity spanning four work streams across the supply chain.

These are:

- Materials – scouting and validating sustainable alternatives for footwear materials.

- Defining circular design in the footwear space and collectively driving guidelines to build a circular infrastructure.

- Sorting, disassembly and recycling – developing a comprehensive data set on post-consumer footwear waste flows.

- Laying the foundation for a footwear traceability data protocol to build traceability for evidence to substantiate sustainability claims.

Call for action

Industry wide collaboration will be vital to overcome the various roadblocks Fashion for Good says, and it is launching a call for action, asking all relevant innovators to apply and collaborators to join the movement.

Around 23.9 billion shoes are produced globally each year, often made using over 40 different components from a range of different materials including TPU, EVA, PU and rubber. The industry faces significant challenges due to this high complexity of shoe construction and this, combined with a low collection rate, results in a vast majority of discarded footwear ending up in landfills.

Fashion for Good will double down on its work in this space, building on existing projects including the Fast Feet Grinded pilot, which is testing and validating a new footwear recycling process.

“Over the past seven years we have consistently broken norms across various segments and are now leveraging our expertise to radically reimagine footwear,” says Katrin Ley, managing director of Fashion for Good. “By doubling down on our efforts, we aim to drive circularity and validate sustainable solutions in a segment ripe for disruption.”

“Adidas has been a partner of Fashion for Good for over six years now and through this partnership, we have collaborated on a number of different sustainable innovation initiatives that are benefitting the fashion industry,” added the brand’s SVP of product operations Sigrid Buehrle. “Now we want to build on this know-how and expand our focus into the footwear space. Currently, there is a limited portfolio of low-impact materials which also meet the necessary performance requirements that are also scalable. We hope this initiative will help overcome some of these hurdles.”

www.fashionforgood.com