New shoes from old
With a group of partners, outdoor footwear brand Scarpa has won EU funding for a project to turn material from old shoes, including leather, into raw material for new shoes that will perform just as well.
Specialist ski and outdoor footwear group Scarpa has launched a new recycling project in which it will aim to collect 15,000 used pairs of its Mojito shoes in one year from customers across Europe. It will deconstruct the Mojitos and use the materials it recovers to make new shoes. Retail partners in France, Germany, Austria and Italy will collect the old shoes and help give a second life to the materials they are made from.
Scarpa has said a key component of the project is a technique based on hydrolysis that reduces the recovered leather to a collagenic material. The Veneto-based footwear company has worked with a research team from the University of Bologna, led by associate professor Martino Colonna, on the development of this technique. Another project partner, Castelfranco di Sotto-based leather manufacturer Conceria Sciarada, will use this collagenic material as a filler in its production processes. In other words, residue from the leather in the old shoes will contribute to the production of new leather for new shoes.
Other materials that the project generates will go into footbeds, midsoles, outsoles, and toe and heel reinforcements for new footwear. Scarpa has said the new shoes it will make from the recovered components will have up to 70% recycled content in their composition.
Manifesto commitments
Now in its eighty-fifth year, Scarpa has drawn up, and strives to live by, its own ‘Green Manifesto’. “It guides how we make our shoes,” the company’s corporate social responsibility and sustainability manager, Tiziano Giordano, says of the strategy. “Our production has to be sustainable and the Green Manifesto is a commitment to sustainable values.” He describes it as one of the first steps towards a target Scarpa set itself in 2019, to become a public-benefit company, which is to say a business that wants to be economically successful and make a profit, but to make a positive impact on society and on the planet at the same time.
It was at this point that Scarpa began measuring all of its activities, Mr Giordano explains, leading to internal lifecycle assessment (LCA) reports, an improvement plan and the Green Manifesto. “We make a balance-sheet type of assessment of where we are and then draw up a programme of improvements in sustainability, in the same way as making a budget.”
Successful funding bid
In 2020, it analysed its material use. In 2021 it started working with its supply chain to reduce its impact. One year after that, the company won the right to set up a formal project under the European Union’s LIFE Programme. This programme will provide total funding of €5.4 billion between 2021 and 2027 for what the EU calls “green innovation and cleantech solutions”.
Scarpa has called its project ‘Re-Shoes’ to emphasise what it will do to reuse and recycle footwear materials, including leather, and to make its shoes more circular. Re-Shoes is a continuation of the work that began in 2019, Tiziano Giordano says, a natural follow-up to the close scrutiny of its way of doing business and the changes that began to flow four years ago. Re-Shoes is co-funded; it has total funding of €2.7 million, with €1.6 million coming from the LIFE Programme and the rest coming from the project partners.
Securing a share of LIFE Programme funding is hard work. The project document for Re-Shoes runs to 120 pages and took years rather than months to complete. Scarpa knew what it wanted to do from the outset, but bringing the right partners on board takes time and will almost inevitably require some adjustment to the original plan. All partners are happy to be involved in the project now.
Iconic product
It chose to start with the Mojito, which it describes as an urban outdoor lifestyle shoe, because it regards this as one of its “most iconic products”. It began selling the shoe ten years ago and, since then, customers have bought a total of 2 million pairs. The product has always been popular, but looking at it through the lens of LCA, it had also been a source of end-of-life challenges, until now.
As part of the Re-Shoes project, each used Mojito that Scarpa is able to recover goes through an alkaline hydrolysis process. It is as a result of this that the leather in the upper dissolves, while other materials, such as backing fabrics, rubber, and heel- and toe-reinforcements remain. The dissolved leather delivers the collagenic material that Conceria Sciarada is able to use, and following separation the other materials go for recycling too. Material in the outer soles is ground up to go into new midsoles, for example, while rubber scraps, through the work of another of the project partners, soling materials developer Rubbermac, go into new outer soles. “We are on the right path,” Mr Giordano says. “The new shoes have recycled leather, recycled rubber and recycled textiles. In the past most of those scraps would go to landfill.”
Closed loop
His colleague, Marta Stocco, part of the communications team at Scarpa, pays tribute to the role of the footwear company’s network of distributors in making sure used Mojitos avoid landfill and become part of Re-Shoes. “Once we had the distributors on board, they began to involve the retailers,” she says. “Now a network of retailers that stock Scarpa footwear have received an information kit about the project, brochures for their customers and a box for collecting the used shoes.”
She explains that there is an app for the project, developed by digital technology specialist Innovando, another of the partners involved. Retailers are able to use the app to register when each used pair of Mojitos goes into one of the boxes. An RFID tag will go onto each returned shoe and this will allow consumers to follow the Re-Shoes journey of their old footwear, either by expressing an interest in receiving emails about it, or by using a code on the Scarpa website.
Another part of the tracking effort the project partners are putting in involves leather manufacturer Sciarada. It will keep a note of the batches of leather in which it uses the post-Mojito collagen material to make sure the new leather the filler helps generate goes into new pairs of the shoes. “We want this closed-loop set-up,” Mr Giordano says. “We also want the new shoes to be really attractive for customers and to reach the same performance levels as the old ones.”
As part of the Re-Shoes project, Scarpa’s retail partners in France, Germany, Austria and Italy are collecting old pairs of the brand’s Mojito shoes.
All credits: Scarpa
