Kudos to the Fashion for Good team, FastFeetGrinded, and the team of participating brands for these insightful outcomes! ?? At Looptworks, we very much feel the pulse of your observations—particularly with material recovery challenges and how necessary collaborative innovation is to actually drive circular solutions. This is really indicative of a very important step forward that your work is doing for the industry: the focus on sequencing multiple technologies and filling data gaps in impact assessments—in themselves, really inspire because it's the systemic approach required to tackle such a complex challenge. Exciting opportunities exist to translate the lessons from apparel into the footwear space, and this sets the path toward scalable, sustainable change. Cheers to unlocking new possibilities in footwear circularity; we will keep an eye on this space for your continued success! #textilecircularity #footwearcircularity #innovation
What did we learn from our collaborative pilot with FastFeetGrinded? Footwear is traditionally made using a vast array of different materials, resulting in design complexity that makes it difficult to recover materials in a technically and economically feasible manner. In addition, the lack of widespread footwear recycling solutions and infrastructure hinders the recovery of footwear products. Therefore, collaborative and innovative efforts are needed to enhance footwear circularity. To tackle this challenge, Fashion for Good launched a collaborative pilot with partners adidas, Inditex, Target and Zalando, in collaboration with innovator FastFeetGrinded, aimed at testing and validating the footwear recycling process and supporting the uptake of recycled materials in footwear. The brands closely evaluated the outputs of FastFeetGrinded’s process for quality and purity, aiming to showcase the potential of FastFeetGrinded’s footwear recycling technology and pave the way for scalable solutions. Some of our reflections and findings from the project were:? ? Open-loop recycling is achievable using purely mechanical recycling, however, for closed-loop recycling further technology advancements are necessary to achieve higher purity outputs.? ? Sequencing of multiple technologies along the footwear waste supply chain, from waste aggregation through recycling will help overcome some of the performance challenges.? ? Impact assessments for footwear recycling are challenging due to limited base case data availability in the industry. As such, complexities arise with evaluating emerging recycling technologies through a comparative LCA.? ? Sustainable innovation in footwear is fairly nascent compared to apparel and there is a lot of work to be done. We have an opportunity to leverage our learnings from the apparel space to build an ecosystem that takes into account the interdependencies and nuances at each stage of the production process. Collaborative action is the key to unlocking this approach which is why Fashion for Good is working closely with all stakeholders on this topic. Watch this space as we head into 2025! Click here to read our reflections: https://lnkd.in/ekMAvVFv Project Lead: Jyotsna Gopinath Sophie van Kol #Sustainability #Innovation #FashionForGood #circularity #futuretech