A team of reporters once hid GPS trackers inside eleven pairs of worn sneakers, dropped them into recycling and takeback boxes, and waited to see where "recycled" actually goes. Most of the signals ended at a furnace. That is the honest answer to whether you can recycle shoes: mostly no. The vast majority are close to impossible to recycle, and the few that do get processed are usually ground down into something lesser.
This is the reality of what happens to old shoes, why the system is stuck, and what is actually worth doing with the pair on your feet right now. We are not guessing about where they end up. The trail has been followed, and it is not pretty.
Why shoes are so hard to recycle
Built to be made, not unmade
A single pair of shoes can contain up to 65 separate parts and take more than 360 steps to assemble. Leather or plastic uppers, foam midsoles, rubber outsoles, textile linings, metal eyelets, all permanently bonded with heavy-duty glue. To recycle any material, you first have to separate it. A shoe is engineered never to come apart.
The glue is the quiet villain here. The very adhesive that keeps a shoe together for years of walking is exactly what makes it unrecyclable at the end, because once every part is fused into one block, nothing can be cleanly pulled back out. So even when footwear is collected for recycling, separating it into clean streams of rubber, foam and fabric is rarely worth the effort, and most of it is simply rejected.
That is why the small fraction of shoe "recycling" that does happen is almost all downcycling. Old shoes are shredded into playground surfaces, gym flooring or building insulation. Useful, but a one-way step down, not a circular loop. The shoe never becomes another shoe.
The limits of automated recycling
There is one engineering exception worth knowing about. A Dutch company, Fast Feet Grinded, built what is described as the world's first machine that can take a whole shoe, of any brand, and mechanically separate it into clean rubber, foam and textile, thousands of pairs an hour, working with major industry names. It proves the technical problem is solvable. But look at what comes out, and you see the ceiling of recycling.
The recovered granules still mostly end up as mats, flooring and secondary parts, not new footwear. And where recycled material does go back into shoes, it does not behave like virgin material: ASICS' sustainability team has said its highest-performance running shoe cannot yet be made entirely from circular recycled content without a significant loss in functional properties. A shoe built fully from old shoes is only just beginning to emerge, and even then it usually needs a heavy injection of fresh material to hold up. The best sorting machine in the world still knocks the material down a grade.
This is the quiet argument for a completely different approach. A material designed to return to the soil needs no specialised sorting facility, causes no quality downgrade and requires no furnace at the end. It just needs to belong there.
Explore the alternative: how we design footwear for a biological loop, on our return-to-nature page.
Where old shoes really go
Landfill, incinerator, or a desert visible from space
Back to those trackers, because this is where the story gets specific. The German research team Flip hid GPS trackers inside eleven pairs of worn sneakers, dropped them into retail takeback and recycling boxes, and followed the signal.
Most were not turned into anything new. They were incinerated, shredded, or quietly exported for resale abroad. One pair, dropped into a major sportswear brand's takeback box, was tracked to a shredding plant in Belgium, where the team also saw what looked like brand-new, unsold shoes being destroyed. That was something a German law already prohibited at the time, and something the EU is now banning across the bloc: from July 2026, large companies can no longer destroy unsold clothing and footwear. The trackers turned a vague promise on a box into a map, and that map mostly ended at a furnace.
The scale behind this is staggering. With over 24 billion pairs made every year and almost none truly recycled, the vast majority end up in landfill or burned. A worn-out synthetic shoe can sit in a landfill for hundreds, even up to a thousand, years.
Before reaching that end, a huge volume of footwear travels the globe. A lot of donated and unsold clothing and shoes is baled up and shipped abroad, and a striking amount of it lands in one place: the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Tens of thousands of tonnes of discarded textiles and footwear pile up there every year, some never worn, tags still attached.
The heap is now so large it is visible by satellite. Local recyclers cannot even put it in municipal landfill, because the synthetic material does not break down and is full of chemicals. It is the quiet end of the line for the "someone else will reuse it" story, and worth knowing before you assume a donation bin solves the problem.
How long do materials actually last? See the decomposition timelines of synthetics versus natural materials on our return-to-nature page.
Why recycling is not the fix we hope for
The honest reality
It is tempting to treat recycling as an insurance policy that cancels out the buying. It mostly does not. The fashion and footwear waste problem is one of sheer volume: roughly three in five garments are landfilled or burned within a year of being made, and the equivalent of a garbage truck of textiles is dumped or burned every second. You cannot recycle your way out of that, because recycling is slow, lossy and rare, while production is fast and enormous.
Researchers who study this are blunt about it. As textile professor Timo Rissanen puts it, the misconception is that recycling solves overproduction and overconsumption. It does not. The real levers are upstream: make fewer and better things, and buy fewer and better things. The most sustainable shoe is the one that did not need to be made twice.
The carbon cost: see the real impact of global footwear manufacturing on our CO2 page.
What you can actually do with old shoes
A short, honest list, best first
- Keep them in use longer. Resole, repair, re-glue, clean them up. The lowest-waste shoe is the one you own and do not replace yet. A good cobbler is cheaper than a new pair.
- Pass them on locally. If they still have life in them, give or sell them to someone who will wear them, close to home. Local reuse keeps the shoe in a real loop. Shipping it abroad through a mass donation bin often does not.
- Use a genuine takeback scheme, eyes open. Some brand programmes do grind old shoes into sports surfaces or insulation, and specialist processors like Fast Feet Grinded separate them mechanically. It beats landfill, but it is still downcycling, not a closed shoe-to-shoe loop.
- Buy fewer, better, longer-lasting pairs. This is the choice with real weight. Material quality and repairability beat any recycling label.
- Next time, choose a shoe that can come apart or come back. Fewer parts, separable materials, or plant materials that return to nature instead of needing a recycler at all.
- And sometimes, wear none at all. It is a strange thing for a shoe brand to say out loud, but on safe ground, going barefoot or wearing very thin shoes is good for you. In one 2021 study published in Scientific Reports, people who switched to minimal footwear gained more than fifty percent in foot strength over six months, along with better balance and a more natural stride. Build up slowly so you do not overdo it, and skip it if you have diabetes or reduced feeling in your feet. The lowest-impact shoe of all is the one you leave at the door.
Where Nooch fits
Our own answer, honestly
Let us be direct: we do not run a big recycling scheme, and we are wary of brands that wave one around as a fix for overproduction. Our answer starts earlier.
We make to order, in two harvests a year, so we do not produce shoes that sit in a warehouse and then head to a desert. No overproduction means no pile to recycle in the first place.
And we build the shoe out of plants rather than a fused stack of synthetics, so the long-term goal is a return to the soil it came from, not a trip through industrial recycling machinery. We are also working on the unglamorous, useful end of this: making the shoe easier to take apart, and giving the outsole a second life. The whole problem with an ordinary shoe is that it was built to never come apart. We would rather build one that knows how to leave.
Learn about our plant-based materials. See how we design for a return to nature.
Frequently asked questions about recycling shoes
Can you recycle shoes?
Mostly not. A shoe is dozens of materials glued into one block and built never to come apart, so it cannot be separated into clean recycling streams. Most shoe "recycling" is really downcycling into surfaces or insulation, and the majority of old shoes are landfilled or burned.
Can you put old shoes in the household recycling bin?
No. Kerbside recycling is not set up for footwear, and shoes put in household bins are sorted out and sent to landfill or incineration. Use a dedicated shoe takeback scheme or a local donation channel instead.
Do donated shoes actually get reused?
Some do, especially through local charity reuse. But a large share of donated and unsold footwear is bundled, exported and dumped abroad, including in places like Chile's Atacama Desert. Investigative tracking has shown that many shoes placed in retail takeback boxes end up incinerated or shredded rather than reworn. Giving or selling them to someone nearby is the more reliable second life.
What is the most sustainable thing to do with old shoes?
Extend their life through repair, then pass them on locally if they are still wearable. Recycling is a last resort, not a first one, because so little of a shoe can truly be recovered for high-grade use.
How long do old shoes take to break down?
A conventional synthetic shoe can sit in landfill for hundreds, even up to a thousand, years. A plant-based shoe is designed to return to nature far sooner, which is a different question from recycling and is covered on our return-to-nature page.