A local company in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood sorts through thousands of donated sneakers to determine how best to prevent them from ending up in landfills.
Every pair, whether immaculate or worn out, will eventually be recycled or find a new owner who will value and use them going forward.
A man looking for a more eco-friendly business model founded Sneaker Impact, and selling used shoes is a lucrative venture with the landfill as the only rival.
Unfortunately, many of the 250 pairs of shoes that Americans own over the course of their lifetimes end up in that category.
“It’s all about accountability, sending the right product to the right market,” Sneaker Impact founder and CEO Moe Hachem stated. “Sneakers are a necessity in the developing world. They are a form of transportation.”
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The cost of obtaining raw materials is essentially reduced to the labor of retrieving and sorting the approximately one million pairs of shoes that Sneaker Impact receives annually from volunteer partners such as running clubs.
After arriving at the Little Haiti facility, they are sorted based on a number of criteria and packed into 200-bag orders to be shipped for further sale all over the world.
“You’re not only reducing waste here at home, you are creating microbusiness opportunities in a developing country,” Hachem stated.
Condemned ones are shredded and separated into fabric and foam, which are subsequently sold as raw materials for the production of floor mats, carpet mats, and other items.
The gym sandal from Sneaker Impact is composed of 85% sneaker foam, a strong, flexible, and weather-resistant material that appears brittle given the demanding task it must perform—namely, pound the pavement for hours on end every week.
