How to recycle shoes

One of the difficulties of downsizing our possessions can be the regret of sending things to landfill.

Fortunately more and more solutions are becoming available so that unwanted possessions can have a second life.

Today I'm looking at shoes. If they are still wearable you can sell them - or give them to a friend. But sometimes they've just reached the end of their usefulness - as happened to my blue sneakers.

I'd got every last bit of use out of them and was thinking they'd be going in the bin. Then I found out about the clunkily-named ASGASOS initiative.

What can be recycled?

Basically sports-shoes. Sneakers, trainers, runners, football boots, and thongs. Sadly no business shoes or workboots. See the full list.

What happens to them?

The shoes are broken down and the usable components (rubber, leather and fibres) are extracted to make new products including gym mats, floors and playgrounds.

Where can shoes be recycled?

I took mine to a JD store, but several retailers are also involved. Here's the full list and a map.

Other things that can be recycled

The brilliant new way to downsize clothing

How to recycle CDs and DVDs

What to do with 128 pens?

Comments

5 Reasons why we hoard - and they're wrong

"Less is More" is one of the catch-cries of downsizing. Often the fewer things we have the more we value them. So it's a great title for a book that's basically a manual for how to de-clutter your home. The introductory chapter of Less is More: How to De-clutter Your Life gives some great insights into why we find it so hard to reduce our stuff. Here are 5 of them - the last one is one of the biggest for me. 1. The cost of holding on. We were raised by our parents and grandparents and in their day items were expensive and space was cheap. It made sense in those days to hold onto stuff just in case you ever needed it. But today housing is expensive and items are cheap. It's hard to change a habit, but now we save much more by downsizing. 2. Keeping it in the family. For some reason we prefer to give things to those close to us. Again this was viable in the days of big families and lots of children to receive hand-me-downs. But these days we have smaller fa...

20 unplugged ideas

May 1-7 is Screen-Free Week . It's about spending time away from the screen and more time with each other - or doing things we love. It's a great chance to break the work-tired-watchTV-ads-shop-work cycle. This list of twenty alternative ideas is great for screen-free week. It's also a great reminder of things we could enjoy if we're shopping and spending less - and maybe working less and enjoying life more.

Will robots take your job?

The future could be very different. It's one reason I started this blog. What will technology mean for jobs? For incomes? For society? So I was excited to find Will Robots Take Your Job? at my local library. What does the book say? There's always been technological change and we've always found jobs. As the more laborious jobs were taken by machines, we took on higher skilled jobs, moving further up the "skill ladder". The main question is whether this time is different. Will the "skill ladder" continue to have higher rungs for humans to move on to? Will these rungs appear as quickly as the current rungs disappear? Either way we're headed for significant disruption. Either large-scale re-training of our workforce or massive unemployment. The author despairs that our leaders seem not to talk about this - and worse still, not have a plan for it. Farmers or horses? In 1870 about 75% of Americans worked in agriculture and used 25 million hors...

But wait... there's less!

Search This Blog