Technology helps the footwear industry meet the challenge of recycling more efficiently and effectively

Every year, millions of pairs of shoes, trainers, boots, ankle boots, flip-flops, sandals and slippers reach the end of their useful life. Unlike many other consumer products, footwear poses a particular recycling challenge: a single shoe can combine rubber, foam, textile, leather or synthetic leather, metal eyelets and adhesives – all bonded together in ways that make separation extremely difficult.

Recycling is not easy

This material complexity is the central obstacle to footwear recycling. Where a plastic bottle or a glass jar is made of a single material that can be sorted and reprocessed relatively easily, a shoe is effectively a small multi-material assembly. Mechanical separation – physically pulling apart soles, uppers and components – is labour-intensive and often only partially successful, while the bonded nature of many materials means that even after separation, individual fractions may still contain traces of other materials that limit what they can be recycled into.

As a result, much of the footwear that reaches end of life today is downcycled into lower-value applications – such as shredded rubber for playground surfaces or running tracks – rather than being recycled back into new footwear or similar products.

Embracing Industry 5.0

Improving on this picture requires a combination of approaches associated with what's increasingly called Industry 5.0 – technology that works alongside human expertise rather than replacing it, with a strong focus on sustainability outcomes. In practice, this means sensor-based sorting systems that can identify the different material fractions within shredded footwear waste, robotic systems that can assist with disassembly of components that are still difficult to separate mechanically, and closer collaboration between footwear manufacturers and recyclers to design products that are easier to take apart at end of life.

Optical sorting technology has a clear role to play here: once footwear has been shredded, sensor-based sorters can separate the resulting mixed-material fragments by type – rubber, foam, textile, and others – producing cleaner fractions that open up higher-value recycling pathways than would otherwise be possible. As footwear brands face growing pressure to address the end-of-life impact of their products, the combination of better product design and more capable sorting technology offers a realistic path towards genuinely circular footwear.

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