Fashion for Good: Closing the Footwear Loop
Fashion for Good announced "Closing the Footwear Loop," a major initiative bringing together 14 leading fashion and footwear brands and their existing circularity programmes to tackle the industry's complex circularity challenges. This collaborative project aims to enable the transformation of footwear's current linear "take-make-dispose" model into a circular one, driving innovation across the value chain.
Participating brands include: adidas, DEICHMANN, Dr. Martens, Footwear Innovation Foundation (affiliated with FDRA), Inditex, lululemon, ON, Otto Group, Puma, Reformation, Target, Tommy Hilfiger, Vivobarefoot, and Zalando.
Footwear: A Complex Challenge
The global footwear industry churns out 23.8 billion pairs of shoes annually, a figure that highlights both its scale and its environmental footprint. Each shoe is composed on average of more than 60 different components , ranging from fabrics and plastics to rubber and adhesives, intricately assembled to meet performance, aesthetic, and cost demands. This complexity, however, hinders the adoption of circular practices, leaving the sector lagging behind in circular innovation compared to other areas of fashion.
While consumers and the industry alike are increasingly calling for more circular solutions, the reality is stark: the most recent studies conclude that approximately 90% of footwear ends up in landfills , contributing to an ever-growing mountain of waste. Unlike other areas of fashion where innovation has been more readily integrated, footwear's multi-material construction and complex design complicate efforts to sort, disassemble, or recycle effectively.
This challenge is exacerbated by a lack of reverse logistics infrastructure and the absence of design principles that prioritise circularity. Current practices largely focus on linear production models — manufacture, use, and discard — failing to address the lifecycle of products. The sector's lag in scaled innovation compared to apparel underscores the urgency for systemic change, as the environmental consequences of inaction continue to mount.
While this complexity presents a significant hurdle, brands are already exploring innovative solutions, including material science advancements and take-back programs, to address these challenges and pave the way for more circular footwear.
These individual efforts complement the collaborative work within “Closing the Footwear Loop”, creating a synergistic approach to driving industry-wide change.
Fashion for Good is working with ecosystem partners The Footwear Collective, Global Footwear Future Coalition (GFFC), and Global Fashion Agenda to drive a collaborative approach across the industry.
Closing the Footwear Loop was born out of Pioneering the Future of Footwear and addresses multiple key intervention points: lack of end-of-life infrastructure, complex multi-material designs, and a need for unified circularity approaches. This project will deliver:
- Detailed mapping of European footwear waste streams (in collaboration with Circle Economy), providing crucial data on volumes, materials, rewearability, and recyclability. (Report & business case assessment due 2025)
- A roadmap towards circular footwear design, developed with Fashion for Good Alumni circular.fashion, outlining principles for material selection, durability, recyclability, repairability, and responsible chemical management. (Guidelines due 2025)
- Validation of end-of-use innovations, including trials and impact assessments, to overcome current bottlenecks and drive industry-wide adoption. (Recycled material outputs due 2026)
Fashion for Good