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Clothing the Footwear Loop

Last updated: Jun 1, 2026

Photo from Fashion for Good

Summary

The “Closing the Footwear Loop” project is a major initiative led by Fashion for Good, bringing together 17 leading fashion and footwear brands and their existing circularity programs to tackle the complex challenges of circularity in the footwear industry. The project aims to transform the current linear “take-make-dispose” model into a circular one.

Fashion for Good has launched Closing the Footwear Loop, a groundbreaking initiative to address the footwear industry’s significant circularity challenges. With 23.8 billion pairs of shoes produced annually, the complexity of multi-material designs and the lack of end-of-life infrastructure result in 90% of footwear ending up in landfills.

Closing the Footwear Loop was born out of Pioneering the Future of Footwear and addresses multiple key intervention points: design for circularity guidelines, sorting waste for circularity technologies leading to increased reuse or recyclability, disassembly of various footwear components to reuse or regenerate materials, recycling and creating value from high value materials.

Building an infrastructure and foundation for footwear circularity is key. This initiative aims to transform the linear production model into a circular system by mapping European footwear waste streams to assess recyclability, developing a roadmap for circular design principles to improve durability and repairability, and validating innovative end-of-use solutions through trials and impact assessments.