Old Shoes Have New Life
Is your closet clogged up with sneakers, tennis shoes, flip flops, cleats, hiking boots, rubber galoshes, and the like? Or do you want to remove "old" shoes and upgrade your shoe closet? Have your children outgrown their shoes and left you to deal with a collection of more or less a dozen pair of shoes?
Instead of throwing old footwear into the trash where they'll end up in a landfill, donate them to Sole4Souls, which collects old shoes and distributes them to those who need them.
This excellent way of reduce and reuse distributes shoes, free of charge, to recipients in over 125 countries as well as the U.S., so recipients could be those in your city who are struggling to make ends meet, or people as far away as Thailand, Nepal, or Kenya.
Soles4Souls also accepts brand new shoes from consumers, retailers, and manufacturers, so that out-of-style inventory won't become trash as new inventory moves in to replace the "old" inventory on the shelves.
Find out where you can drop off your old shoes by clicking here.
Nike also accepts old shoes, grinds down every part of the shoe to make 3 different kinds of surfaces: running tracks, basket ball courts, and tennis courts. Click here to see a brief video that shows how Nike's Reuse-A-Shoe process works.
For a drop off location, click here.
Both sites offer a great way to extend the life of shoes, but they don't take ladies' heeled shoes as these types of shoes don't have the materials that can be ground up to make different surfaces, and the poor in developing countries really don't have a need for high-heeled shoes. More innovation from manufacturers and corporations might, in time, figure out a way to reuse the materials from high-heels, giving consumers more options in recycling goods and buying recycled goods.
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