One Roadmap, Three Shoes

The average shoe is made of more than 60 components, glued, layered and bonded together. That's what makes it work, but it's also why so few shoes are recycled once they're thrown away. Around 90% of disposed footwear ends up in landfill or incineration.

In June we covered Phase 1 of Fashion for Good's Closing the Footwear Loop project. Run with Circle Economy, it analysed 1,200 discarded shoes to find out why. The answer kept pointing back to decisions made long before anyone wears a shoe: the glue, the blended materials, the black soles.

So what should brands do differently? Phase 2 is Fashion for Good's first answer. Working with circular.fashion, it has produced the Circularity Guidance Quick Sheet, with a separate roadmap for the leather boot, the running shoe and the lifestyle sneaker. Designers get their actions, but so do sourcing, quality, merchandising and marketing.

Here is everything footwear teams need to know...

How the Quick Sheets Work

Each sheet takes you through the same three steps:

1. Place your shoe on a matrix. Where it lands tells you whether to lead with making the shoe last longer (Design for Longevity) or making it easier to recycle (Design for Recyclability).
2. Choose your route. Each of the four strategies is marked as a priority, supporting or optional for your shoe. They are Circular Inputs (safer, recycled and renewable materials), Design for Recyclability, Design for Longevity and Enable Circulation (resale, recycling and customer engagement).
3. Act on it. Each strategy comes with three key actions and the key teams to involve.

Circular Inputs is the foundation for every shoe. Where the three shoes part ways is whether a longer life or easier recycling comes first:

There's no single circular strategy for footwear. The right starting point depends on what a shoe is for and how long it's meant to last.

The Takeaways

1. Every shoe starts with safer materials, but not at the cost of performance.

All three sheets start with chemical safety. Brands are pointed to established restricted-substance lists, such as those from ZDHC and AFIRM, and asked to get their factories to commit to them. Each sheet then builds its own list of preferred materials, backed by recognised certifications, for example Leather Working Group ratings for boots and the Global Recycled Standard (GRS) across all three.

Every sheet also warns that recycled and bio-based materials don't always last as long as virgin ones. So performance comes first. Boots and running shoes need to meet tested performance requirements before recycled-content targets are set, while lifestyle sneakers, with lower performance demands, have more room. The boot sheet also says the sole shouldn't wear out before the upper.

Bottom line: Recycled content that shortens a shoe's life is a bad trade, so set content targets against performance requirements first.

2. How a shoe is put together matters as much as what it's made of.

Boots show how construction can help on both fronts. Traditional methods such as Goodyear welting, Blake stitching and stitchdown attach the sole with stitches rather than relying on glue, so it can be replaced when it wears out and separated for recycling at the end. The boot sheet specifically says to avoid direct injection, where the sole is moulded straight onto the upper.

Running shoes are harder. Most use strobel construction, where the upper is stitched to a fabric base and the sole is glued on. It's light and performs well, but the sheet admits it's difficult to take apart. It also warns that leftover glue makes it harder for sorting machines to identify the materials. That matches Phase 1, which found that 51.9% of shoes were held together with permanent glue, including nearly all performance shoes.

Lifestyle sneakers sit in between. Where the sole and upper will be shredded separately, the sheet asks for an assembly method that lets the sole come away cleanly, and the same for laces, insoles and sockliners made from different materials.

Bottom line: Assembly method shapes both repair and recycling, so it should be a deliberate choice rather than a factory default.

3. Sneakers get the strictest rules, because they're the easiest place to start.

Because easy recycling is the priority for the lifestyle sneaker, its sheet is the most specific about materials:

• An upper made from no more than two fibres, with one clearly dominant
• A sole made from one family of materials
• No metal or plastic trims, decorations or coatings unless they're essential
• Any functional extras that can't be avoided kept together in one area, with fabric loops used in place of hardware

The sheet is realistic about how sneakers are recycled today. They're most likely to be shredded whole, so every part needs to be compatible with recycling.

Phase 1 showed why this matters. Lifestyle shoes were the biggest group among the 1,200 non-rewearable shoes analysed, at 37.5%. Over half of all uppers were blended materials, and nine in ten shoes had at least one logo, patch or trim that gets in the way of recycling.

Bottom line: High volume and lower complexity make the lifestyle sneaker the most achievable place to start designing for recyclability.

4. Shoes that keep looking good stay in use for longer.

One of Phase 1's most surprising findings was that a quarter of non-rewearable shoes had no physical damage at all. Most of the visible damage was cosmetic, too. Soiling showed up on about half the shoes analysed and discolouration on 27%, far more often than tears or holes, at 16%.

The sneaker sheet responds to this directly. It lists colour bleeding, dirt, scuffs and short-lived trends among the reasons sneakers get thrown away. Designers are asked to make shoes that stay looking fresh with little effort from the owner, and that hold their shape through daily wear, without the heel collapsing or the toe wearing through.

Bottom line: Plenty of shoes are thrown away because they look worn out, not because they are, and designers can do something about that.

5. Running shoes should be built to last longer, then given a second life.

The running sheet asks for stronger materials in the areas that take the most strain, the toe, sides and heel, rather than simply adding more layers. It also asks designers to make the outsole (the grip underneath) and the midsole (the cushioning) wear out at about the same rate, so one doesn't fail while the other still has life left.

Runners also get practical care advice, such as tracking kilometres, rotating between pairs and loosening the laces when putting shoes on and taking them off. And once a shoe stops performing for running, the sheet suggests promoting it as an everyday sneaker rather than throwing it out.

Bottom line: Performance footwear can have a second life, as long as brands are honest with runners about when the first one ends.

6. Repair has to be affordable, and people need to know it's an option.

For boots, repair is nothing new; resoling is a long-established trade. The sheet points to a benchmark of around 30% of the original retail price for repair to make financial sense, though it doesn't spell out exactly how that figure is applied.

Sneakers are a different story. Most customers don't expect to repair them, and the sheet says as much. Its advice is to educate customers first, then make repair easy to find and easy to use.

Bottom line: Repair only works if customers know it exists and it costs a sensible fraction of a new pair.

7. Each type of shoe needs its own route back into use.

Each sheet suggests different ways to keep shoes and their materials in circulation once a customer is done with them:

• Leather boots: trial resale and rental, which suit long-lasting, good-looking products, and trial Digital Product Passports, digital records of what a product is made of
• Sneakers: trial resale, and build recycling partnerships with other companies in the supply chain
• Running shoes: build recycling partnerships, and trial Digital Product Passports without compromising performance

The sneaker and running sheets also suggest starting with recycling schemes shared across several brands, which bring scale, then moving to your own scheme for more control.

Bottom line: Shared recycling schemes give a scale no single brand has. Brand-owned programmes come second.

8. Much of the work happens outside the design studio.

Each strategy on the sheets names the key teams to involve:

• Circular Inputs: chemical compliance, raw materials and sourcing
• Design for Recyclability: design, product development and sustainability
• Design for Longevity: quality, design and product development
• Enable Circulation: sustainability, strategy, merchandising and marketing

The sheets also make a useful distinction. Safer materials and keeping shoes in circulation are company-wide decisions. Recyclability and longevity are decided product by product.

Bottom line: Half of these actions sit with teams that never touch a sketch.

Building on the Sheets

Fashion for Good itself points out that the footwear sector has, until recently, lacked shared design principles for what circular footwear should look like. The Quick Sheets are a first attempt at filling that gap, and a one-pager can't cover everything. Read alongside the Phase 1 data, there are three places where teams can take the sheets further.

Bring the Phase 1 sole findings into your briefs. Phase 1 found that 97% of black soles could not be identified by NIR scanners, and black soles made up a quarter of the sample. Its recommendation was to move towards non-carbon black pigments. The sheets don't go into sole colour, so sole and outsole teams can carry that recommendation into their briefs alongside them.

Apply the thinking to other types of shoe. Starting with three types of shoe keeps the guidance focused. But the same matrix approach could help with other categories. Sandals are an obvious one, making up 25.2% of the non-rewearable shoes analysed in Phase 1, although that share probably reflects a Spanish sample collected in spring and summer.

Turn the actions into your own targets. The sheets are deliberately illustrative rather than a certification standard, which makes them easy to pick up across teams. The next step is for each brand to turn the actions into its own targets and thresholds.

Phase 1 showed where Europe’s shoes end up. Phase 2 hands teams a first set of actions to change that, and half of them sit outside the design studio.

Try it with one shoe from your own range. Place it on the matrix, look at the twelve key actions, and count how many your teams are already doing, and who's doing them. Phase 3, which will test pre-processing and recycling innovations, is still to come.

The Closing the Footwear Loop Phase 2 Circularity Guidance Quick Sheets were developed by Fashion for Good in collaboration with circular.fashion.

📥 Download the full Quick Sheets for the leather boot, running shoe and lifestyle sneaker from Fashion for Good.