Life Cycle Assessment of Two Alternative End-of-life Scenarios for Leather Safety Shoes

Abstract

This paper provides a brief overview of the environmental impact of footwear industry and the end of life solutions. Nowadays almost 23 billion pairs of shoes are produced worldwide every year and most of them are landfilled after their use. Currently the lifetime of a pair of shoes is falling because of the customer preferences and the fast fashion trend at market and fashion industry. As a result, huge amounts of wastes are being landfilled. The aim of this paper is to analyses the environmental implications of shoes landfilling and incineration end-of-life scenarios. To achieve it, these two scenarios were applied in a life cycle assessment of a pair of shoes performed for this study.

Leather waste management scenario in Developed and Developing nations: A Comparative

“…In term of footwear production, China tops the chart with 14,200 million of footwear followed by India (2, 209 million), Brazil (900 million) and Vietnam (770 million). It was identified that only less than 5% of 20 billion pairs of shoes produced in a year is recycled whereas the remaining goes to incineration or landfill [29]. By understanding the CSR policy, a renowned sports shoe manufacturer Nike introduced a recycling program called ‗NikeGo Places'.…”