In 2022, Puma sent me, along with 499 others including press, brand ambassadors and applicants from the public, a pair of trainers. The idea was that we would wear them for six months before returning them to be composted, as part of the brand’s ‘Re:Suede’ experiment. The project sought to answer some burning questions: could Puma make desirable and compostable shoes? Would people go to the effort of returning them? Could the experiment scale up?
Results were mixed. While the shoes sufficed for a quick walk to the corner shop, they left me with achy, cold feet after wearing them for over eight hours in a field at a festival — lacking the support and cushioning I was used to. Made from hemp, cotton, suede and a synthetic sole designed to biodegrade, the shoes were light on structure and 57 per cent of wearers said they were uncomfortable to wear.
The brand went back to the drawing board and released 500 pairs of the Re:Suede 2.0 for sale in 2024, priced at £104. Buyers were offered free returns, but Puma has not yet shared results of the commercial phase of its experiment.
Now, a surge of products, innovations and initiatives hope to catalyse sustainable change in the footwear industry, a global goliath that pumps out some 24 billion pairs of shoes every year, of which it is widely estimated that 90 per cent ends up in landfill.
But, like Puma, they face an uphill battle. Made from multiple components, materials and adhesives, shoes are extremely difficult to process at the end-of-life stage. Helen Kirkum, founder and creative director of Helen Kirkum Studio, which makes upcycled trainers from post-consumer footwear waste, says the labour of deconstruction — done by hand with a scalpel — is the main factor that drives up the brand’s prices. But few circular solutions exist outside of manual deconstruction, other than shredding for use as sports flooring, furniture, padding and insulation, and even the systems for this don’t exist at the necessary scale.
In February, sustainable innovation forum Fashion For Good announced the launch of ‘Closing the Footwear Loop’, a multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to tackle footwear’s circularity challenges by mapping global waste flows to identify where circular infrastructure is needed, and trialling emerging technologies and business models to capture and process end-of-life footwear. “[Post-consumer waste] sorting companies are not focused on footwear at all,” says Fashion For Good innovation manager Sophie Van Kol. “Compared to apparel, it’s a lot more complex.”
Innovators say a rethink is needed if shoes are to have a circular future.
The new guard in circular footwear
Newcomer Solk has designed its signature shoe, the Fade 101, to pick up where Puma’s Re:Suede left off — a lifestyle trainer designed to be composted at end of life. Conceived by the co-founders of Vietnam-based shoemaker Shoefabrik — which counts On Running, Helly Hansen and Vivobarefoot among clients — it was initially conceived in 2019 as a prototype to show clients what was possible in circular footwear. But it evolved into a fully fledged brand the following year when it became clear its makers could develop an end product quicker than they could get brands on board, says co-founder David Solk.
The Fade 101, which launched for pre-orders in June 2025, operates under the tagline “designed on purpose, built to last, compost capable”. It took six years to develop, largely because the brand’s quest for compost capability proved difficult to achieve, says Solk. Each avenue ultimately led back to incumbent materials such as natural rubber, Tencel and leather, because the new wave of biodegradable, bio-based materials on the market just aren’t up to scratch for mainstream footwear, he adds. However, tweaks were needed, such as using a specialised tanning agent on the leather to allow it to biodegrade. The brand also created some of its material solutions in-house to tackle tricky areas like foam and lace caps. The compositions of mysteriously labelled “Made to Fade foam” and “biobased lining” are currently obscured for intellectual property purposes.
While Solk works to make more conventional materials compostable, others are leaning more heavily on novel biomaterials. For example, New York design studio Oxman released the O° shoe in October 2024, 3D-printed entirely from PHAs (bio-based, biodegradable polyester). Elsewhere, the Korvaa shoe, released in June 2025, is a collaboration between material innovation companies Modern Synthesis (which uses microbes to create a proprietary fibre called nanocellulose), Ourobio (which creates bio-based biodegradable plastics), and Ecovative (known for its mycelium leather alternatives).
The Korvaa features an upper made from Modern Synthesis’s nanocellulose; a PHA base scaffold 3D printed by Ourobio; a mycelium-based sole by Ecovative grown directly onto the scaffold; and cotton and lyocell laces and lining. “It’s very much a concept piece geared towards provoking, inspiring and pushing the industry to do better,” says Sarah West Young, head of growth at Modern Synthesis. However, while it shows the possibilities of bringing previously siloed materials together, the shoe has a long way to go before it can be considered robust enough to commercialise.
If the Fade 101 is the commercial response, and the O° and the Korvaa are the conceptual mavericks, the Methods shoe, launched as a Kickstarter campaign in September 2024, sits somewhere in between. Founder Véronique Pustjens-Baer and her team designed the Methods shoe to be disassembled into its components for modular replacements, upgrades, and end-of-life recycling and composting. It consists of a chunky thermoplastic outsole, a cork insole, a knitted Tencel upper, and a vegetable tanned leather wrap, through which Tencel laces are threaded. With 600 pairs produced in the first batch, it’s also a commercial product made to withstand real wear and tear.
Rethinking the design process
Reducing the complexity that makes today’s shoes so difficult to reuse or recycle requires a design overhaul. “[A product] for the most part is designed up until the point that somebody owns it, then the duty of care is lost,” says Kirkum. When end of life is considered from the get-go, the design process and final product look vastly different.
For Shoefabrik, the conventional design process is reversed, says chief responsibility officer Catriona Stevenson, who led materials and sourcing for the Fade 101. Rather than consider appearance first, the design team asks: what can we use that will compost? What materials are available, and what shoe can be made with that? Alongside having to solve material puzzles, the brand had to work out how to put the shoe together without over-relying on glue. The answer was found in the brand’s scribble logo, which the founders refer to as a “krickel-krackel”. To avoid excess glue, the logo is stitched onto the shoe’s side, through the linings, to hold it together. The Korvaa Consortium also turned to stitching, using a traditional technique where string is stitched along the bottom edge of the shoe’s upper then pulled tight to secure it around the lace — or shoe mould — for a precise fit. “We looked backwards to move forward,” says West Young.
This push and pull between tradition and innovation carries over to the design process, too. Minimalist footwear brand Vivobarefoot uses foot scans, proprietary code and 3D models generated by computer-aided-design (CAD) to create its custom fit, 3D-printed Vivobiome sandals, which it says eliminate offcut waste in production. “It’s a pretty radical new way of meeting the customer and creating the product,” says Vivobarefoot chief design director Asher Clark. Yet the split-toe, Japanese tabi structure and barefoot design draws on ancient, artisanal roots.
To make this balance of best practice from the past and new ideas work, brands require certain behaviour changes on the part of the consumer. Solk asks that wearers fully untie their shoes after use to prevent damage and prolong wear, and to expect that their trainers will act more like dress shoes than trainers in the rain, as chemical waterproofing has been removed to enable toxin-free composting. Vivobarefoot requires its customers to attend an in-store foot scan at one of only two UK locations. And the Methods audience must carefully send each component into the correct waste stream at end of life to fulfil the shoe’s circular promises.
All require a hefty spend, too. The Fade 101 sells for £219, the Methods for £194 and the Vivobiome Tabi for £140. By comparison, lifestyle trainers by major brands such as Adidas and Puma often retail for around £75, while basic sandals — albeit not moulded to an individual’s foot — can be found for less than £5. It’s a hard sell when consumer propensity towards value and convenience drives the mass market.
Challenges ahead
Behaviour change is just one in a long list of barriers the footwear industry must overcome.
Others include the question mark overhanging the place of biodegradable or compostable materials within sustainability strategies, with concerns spanning from diverting food sources (such as corn, which is widely used in industrially compostable plastics) to the vague parameters of the term ‘biodegradable’.
Legally, products marketed as compostable must compost within three months. Neither Solk’s Fade 101 nor Puma’s Re:Suede are able to meet these limits. Currently, Solk’s shoe takes a year or two to compost, according to the brand, so it has created its own composting system and employed a chief composting officer to process it internally. Solk considers a shoe taking a couple of years to break down — rather than hundreds — a huge step forward. “We moved past the three-month thing and decided let’s just learn how to make the product fully bio-circular, and we’ll get better and better,” he says.
Vivobarefoot, meanwhile, is hoping to address some of the functional limitations of new-generation materials. It is working with around 30 material innovators to drive scale and increase the availability of quality circular and biodegradable materials in the hope they will be able to compete with oil-based plastics in areas like grip and durability. “There is normally a trade-off at play,” Clark says. The brand hopes to grow from 300 to 500,000 pairs of 3D-printed shoes within the next five years, building up its additive manufacturing capabilities across the UK, the EU, the US and Southeast Asia.
Methods, which is operating its own takeback system, is seeking a partner who will shred its plastic outsoles for recycling. “I think the biggest challenge to scalability is recycling facilities and materials,” says founder Pustjens-Baer. But it was a long journey to even get to production. “Manufacturers had to be convinced first. We were talking to different parties, and some were just closing the doors.” Solk also highlights the challenges of disrupting established manufacturing systems. According to the team, the producers they worked with on early samples would add extra chemicals and tell the brand, “that’s just the way we do things”.
Fashion For Good is hoping that it will be able to answer some of these challenges, when its circular footwear initiative is finalised in the second quarter of 2026. But it won’t be a linear path. The organisation is working with Amsterdam recycling company Fast Feet Grinded to address the purity of shredded recyclate, which is made more complicated because thousands of different plastic formulations and chemical regulations converge in different markets. To achieve lower toxicity, the industry will need more stringent separation standards, says Van Kol, but this requires input from policymakers, whose will to act on sustainability is waning.
Brands and innovators can’t expect a one-size-fits-all guide to emerge. “We’re thinking about the design principles from a decision tree perspective,” Van Kol says. “If we go with a product archetype that is generally used for a longer period, then we should consider more the durability elements; but if it’s trend sensitive, then maybe we focus on materials that have a lower impact on the environment.”
“We have to learn from the waste we’re seeing and feed that back into the design principles,” adds Kirkum. “There’s so much potential for businesses to see how they can use these more circular narratives, not only to help reduce all their waste, but also increase revenue streams.”
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