Yuly Fuentes-Medel, helmer-in-chief of the newly formed Footwear Collective, is still unsure about the title she wishes to use.
“Master of the universe? Shoe queen of whatever?” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) fabric innovation manager told Sourcing Journal, workshopping some possible options.
Whatever it says on her business card, Fuentes-Medel is a woman on a mission. She’s here to deliver the fashion industry from its massive footwear waste problem, a major impediment to the creation of a truly circular economy, where one person’s trash is another person’s material treasure.
The problem with footwear starts with the complexity of its design. A single sneaker can comprise dozens of disparate components—think cotton, leather, metal, polyester and polyurethane—that are meant to boost performance or induce comfort, making them difficult, if not downright impossible, to tease apart. In a best-case scenario, shoes can be pulverized at the end of their life and turned into mulch for playgrounds or running tracks. More often than not, however, they’re tossed into a landfill or incinerator, generating greenhouse gas emissions that fan the flames of climate change.
“I have worked in industry transformations in the past with other industries and the shoe has been neglected for so long in terms of innovation,” Fuentes-Medel said.
The idea for a footwear-focused nonprofit started floating around after MIT hosted a circularity summit for a number of prominent shoe purveyors in March 2022. The discussions culminated in a so-called “footwear manifesto,” one that acknowledged the vast opportunities for brands and manufacturers to jointly invest in sustainable material choices, after-sale platforms and consumer education.
Of the 100-plus individuals surveyed for the paper, 72 percent of whom were employed by footwear companies, 84 percent agreed that the shoe industry lacks a collective understanding of how shoe circularity can be measured. That lack of alignment, many respondents agreed, has resulted in scattershot, brand-specific efforts that have failed to create scalable, sector-wide impact with standardized metrics and common goals.
“When we were doing that, the industry said, ‘Well, now we need to find a nonprofit that is going to do the actions for innovation in the footwear industry; who are they?’” Fuentes-Medel said. “And people were like, ‘Ah, no, we don’t have one.’ So that started this whole new adventure for me.”
And so The Footwear Collective, launched under the auspices of climate advocacy group EarthDNA, was born. With boldface names such as Brooks Running, Crocs, Ecco, New Balance, Reformation, On, Target and Vibram among its inaugural funding partners, the group’s mandate is at once simple and complicated: to put “all the industry together to start thinking collectively about the solutions that we need in order to make shoes sustainable and circular.”
“These guys came in like, ‘O.K., we need action, we need to think big; we have done enough of contaminating the planet; we need to create a pipeline that breaks through the industry,’” Fuentes-Medel said. While speaking about “closing the loop” is all well and good, few shoemakers are actually doing it. The dearth of market incentives is one issue. The lack of sufficient infrastructure, both physical and digital, to drive momentum is another.
Then there’s the consumer element.
“How do you retrain people to embrace the idea that now you have to be part of building circular products?” she said.
To make all this work, the footwear sector needs a “fundamental paradigm shift” from competition to pre-competitive collaboration, Fuentes-Medel said. Right now, The Footwear Collective is identifying these pre-competitive spaces and building out the data that will be required to power them.
Establishing systems that facilitate circularity at scale has been a “colossal challenge” for the entire footwear industry, said Katy O’Brien, senior manager of sustainable innovation at New Balance, which published an internal low-waste design guide and is conducting repair trials in its U.S. and U.K. factories, in addition to continuing its shoe repair program in Japan.
“Traditionally, footwear brands have separately managed a common supply chain and kept to themselves, allowing for the protection of trade secrets and IP,” she said. “As we all face the massive challenge of decarbonizing and reducing waste in our supply chain, it makes sense for us to work together, to make sustainable change at scale.”
The Footwear Collective is referring to the first batch of brands as “Cohort 1.” The plan is to have a Cohort 2, 3 and so on because its work will not succeed unless a large swath of the sector gets involved.
“They’re also helping to provide data that will enable the first set of ideas that we have,” she said. “ So where should we activate the catalytic projects? How are we going to enable the brands to be accountable for their company’s inefficiencies?”
Building a circular shoe can be an expensive and labor-intensive endeavor, Fuentes-Medel said. Firms like Adidas, On and Salomon have tried to simplify the problem by using monomaterials that can be ground up, melted down and re-extruded. Thousand Fell designs its low-tops for disassembly, using a system of collection, grading, sorting and separation that it spun out into the textile-to-textile recycling platform known as SuperCircle, which Reformation taps for its RefRecycling initiative. But joining forces can save retailers time and money. Many of the solutions already exist, but they need the buy-in in order to grow beyond the capsule level and therefore move beyond mere marketing spin.
“We have to be really good in empowering the SuperCircles of the world, the Circs of the world, the other recyclers that exist in the world that we don’t know about,” she said. “So hopefully we bring a lot of money and philanthropic dollars to support that so we can start building more scalable solutions.”
Carolyn Swenson, senior materials manager for footwear and a product innovation leader at Reformation, agreed. Tackling circularity, she told Sourcing Journal, requires the industry to “reimagine footwear—the way it’s designed, made and dealt with at end of life.”
“Reformation shoes are recyclable via RefRecycling [and we’ve] specifically been working on circular opportunities for post-consumer shoe waste integration into new products, delamination for easier shoe disassembly with the hopes of utilizing materials at their highest value and more circular ways of building products,” she said. “But greater innovation is needed to address these issues at scale across the industry. We believe that a collective approach is the best path towards creating an industry-specific circular solution.”
It’s not just the brands that Fuentes-Medel has her eye on.
“One of the ideas I had is all of these big sportsplayers that make a lot of money and they use a lot of shoes. Why not get donations from them?” she said. “I can say, ‘Michael Jordan, we need you in The Footwear Collective.’”
This story was reported by Sourcing Journal and originally appeared on sourcingjournal.com.
