A ‘second life’ for your old sneakers? Florida company recycles and reuses them.

Whether you’re a marathon runner or someone who just takes the dog on a walk, chances are you’ve bought multiple pairs of sneakers in a year.

But when those brand crisp new white shoes turn brown, the soles go thin or your toes poke through a hole, they eventually get thrown in the Goodwill pile during spring cleaning or in the trash. Either way, your old shoes are likely to end up in a landfill.

Moe Hachem thinks there’s a way to give those shoes a “second life.” He’s founded a Miami shoe recycling and reuse company, Sneaker Impact, with the aim of reducing the environmental and climate footprint of the massive athletic shoe industry. It’s not a new idea but he’s taking steps to address “waste colonialism” criticism that other shoe and clothing recycling enterprises have faced over dumping the wrong stuff in the wrong places.

“Our team inspects each and every pair that comes here,” Hachem said. “Every shoe is accounted for. We are prolonging the life of the shoes.”

There are thousands of Sneaker Impact drop-off locations in gyms, specialty sneaker stores and run clubs around the United States, including local spots like FootWorks Running, Brickell Run Club and the University of Miami that get sent to its 75,000-square-foot facility in Little Haiti.

Every day thousands of shoes are delivered and added to the piles of piles of merchandise, boxes, and bags that stack up to the facility’s ceiling. Hachem’s family has been in the used retail merchandise business for decades, and there are still thousands of old clothes in the building but sneakers, since 2020, have been the company’s focus.

The deliveries include the gold standard for reuse and reselling, clean trendy name brands like Nike Air Force 1, Jordan’s and seemingly brand new HOKA and On-Cloud running shoes. They all get mixed in with sneakers with holes and ripped soles, which nobody is likely to want to wear again.

Every shoe that comes in is sorted by quality and the big “second life” decision: Are they intact enough to be shipped out and resold or bound for the recycling process, which means cannibalizing it for useful components. “End-of-life” shoes with worn-out treads or other major issues get sent to the grinding room.

Through the shoe grinder

One of the biggest challenges of recycling sneakers is sorting out the multicolored piles that come out of the grinder. Many shoes have more than 15 materials, including plastic — and how they’re glued together doesn’t make them easy to recycle. But with new and more expensive equipment, Hachem expects Sneaker Impact to make a dramatic expansion: from shredding and sorting hundreds of shoes a day to thousands of shoes an hour.

The new sorting machine is tall enough to need a step stool to get up to the top to dump buckets of the ground-up sneakers into the opening, and within minutes, it spits out product by color and material depending on what’s selected on a touch-screen. During a test run when the Herald visited, the machine was able to spit out black pieces with about 85% accuracy. Hachem said they’re still working out the bugs.

He’s experimenting with using recycled foam and rubber to make new products too. Floors around his office at the Miami headquarters are made entirely from rubber and foam from recycled sneakers. He imagines that rubber flooring might be a good choice for playgrounds while foam might add extra comfort under carpets.

Sneaker Impact has also partnered with California-based companies, Community Made and Blumaka, to use the materials to create prototypes of new sneakers, slides and boots that he unveiled for the first time to the Herald. The slides have a similar comfort to Crocs.

But the majority of the shoes are shipped outside of the U.S. to be sold in second-hand markets, mainly by boat to Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and Bolivia in 20-foot shipping containers with 10,000 pairs of shoes packed in each. Shoes that are dirty or have holes but have their soles and treading intact are also sent to be repaired or washed at overseas marketplaces, he said.

“You’re not only reducing waste but creating micro-business opportunities,” Hachem said. “In developing countries, these shoes are a necessity. If a perfectly fine sneaker has been worn for 100 miles and you’re shipping it to the right market, we don’t think it’s the right call to grind it and shred it.”

‘Waste colonialism’

Old clothing, particularly shoes, are a growing waste problem. Some statistics show that 300 million pairs of shoes are thrown out every year and sneakers can take more than 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill.

Efforts to “recycle” clothes have had mixed success. The U.S. is the largest exporter of second-hand clothing in the world and sends out more than a billion pounds of used clothing each year — but the majority of is unsellable and basically trash, according to the Or Foundation which has played a leading role in documenting fashion waste.

“Waste colonialism is throwing our trash into developing countries,” said Francesca Bellumini, an associate instructor of sustainable fashion at Columbia University who lives in Miami.

Over the years, retail companies like Zara and H&M have caught flack for getting paid to send products that litter the global south. Bellumini calls it “corporate green-washing.” What doesn’t get sold from Goodwill or Salvation Army gets baled up and sold to textile buyer, likely to also end up in another country.

For example, the Or Foundation found that at Kantamanto, the world’s largest secondhand clothing market located in Ghana, roughly 40% of the millions of items that pass through every week leave the market as waste.

“The beach has piles of clothing taller than I am,” Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of the non-profit, Or Foundation, said to the Herald on a call from Ghana. “We are removing 20 tons of textile waste a week. And we could be doing more.”

Ricketts said things escalated for two reasons: low-quality products making up the majority of the supply and Ghana not having the financial resources to build a landfill or incinerator. She described low-quality products as anything that requires the vendor to invest money to make the product resellable.

“If a retailer is in debt and they get a bale of product and they have to wash everything and repair everything that takes money, and they might not have that money,” she said. “If it’s good enough for someone in America, then sure it’s something that probably will be worth it for a retailer here.”

Sneaker Impact has had contracts with Ghana in the past and said it’s not currently shipping there but Hachem acknowledges there are similar concerns in the Caribbean. He said his company is working to send products to places that actually need or can use them.

“Sending a sweater to Ghana, even if it’s a nice North Face, is not the right place,” Hachem said. “Sending a size 13 shoe to Bolivia, or Honduras is the wrong market. You can send the same pair to Ukraine and it would be useful.”

Bellumini appreciates how Sneaker Impact is attempting to create a circular market from a ground-up approach:

“The problem is huge and wicked at this point and there’s no one solution,” Bellumini said. “I’m not saying that the action of one person, or the action of one individual or brand or enterprise is not working. Actually, it starts from one person or one Moe, and I have never seen somebody dedicating so much money and so much time and so much effort into solving a problem.”