Worldwide consumption of footwear per year per person has increased from 1 pair of shoes in 1950 to over 3 currently. In 2022, approximately 23.9 billion pairs of shoes were produced globally. In the EU alone, it is estimated that the amount of postconsumer shoes waste is over 1 million tonnes per year. End-of-Life (EoL) management is gaining more attention in the footwear industry, due to increased raw material costs, environmental legislations and ambitious textile waste management targets, e.g. 50% of textiles must be recycled and 20% must be reused from 2025 onwards. However, the recycling rate of footwear is still lower than 5%. This is due to the wide variety of components, e.g. footwear can consist of up to 40 different components, which makes a circular approach to EoL challenging. It is clear that footwear needs a radical shift to achieve circularity. This shift involves simpler shoe design with similar functionality, consumers willing to buy sustainable shoes and increase the longevity, installation of collection and sorting infrastructure, and cost-efficient recycling processes producing high quality secondary resources from old shoes.

The SCARPA Doctoral Network on footwear circularity has a clear mission: to train a new generation of experts who possess the skills and fundamental knowledge required to understand how footwear should be designed to allow recycling, how consumers play a role in the value chain, how different recycling technologies can create high value recyclates, and how a decision in one part of the value chain influences the whole value chain’s sustainability, including LCA.