24 Billion Pairs of Shoes

Twenty-four billion pairs of shoes were sold in 2018 – seven pairs for every person on the planet. And, it’s likely that an equivalent number of shoes were tossed out to make room in the closet for the new ones.

Most of those shoes are partly, or in many cases completely, fabricated from plastic and plastic-like materials, from the squishy soles to the pointy heels to the knit polyester uppers to the brittle eyelet holes. Because of their construction—usually, their many components are stitched and glued and molded together in complicated ways—they’re almost impossible to recycle. So your feet are only a short stopover in their long, long lifetimes, before they pile up in landfills and float down waterways, often living on like zombies for hundreds of years.

Turns out that plastics are the best material for shoe construction and there is little hope that much will change in the near future.  There are some efforts to simplify construction and make recycling more viable, but humans are addicted to shoes so the future of footwear remains plastic.