The team has already developed a computerised tool that advises footwear designers on materials selection and helps them explore whether particular combinations of materials would make recycling harder or easier. In parallel, with EPSRC funding, collaboration is also under way with major footwear manufacturers to explore how shoes could be designed differently in future to make them easier to recycle. The Loughborough team is now talking to a recycling company interested in incorporating the process into its operations.
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Low-cost air-based technologies developed by the project then separate the materials by exploiting their different sizes and weights: an air-cascade separator first removes lighter textile particles and other fine leather and foam residues by blowing them away from heavier granules then a series of vibrating air-tables separate rubber from foam and leather by stratifying the granulated materials, with lighter granules ending up on top of heavier ones.įor each recovered material stream, there are a variety of applications. The shoes are turned into 3-4mm fragments using a granulator. Next the shoes are automatically shredded and granulated, with the granules automatically separated into four waste streams: leather, foams, rubber and other material.”
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“In our process, the first, manual step is to pre-sort shoes into broad types, such as trainers, and to recover metals, such as eyelets. “Footwear is incredibly difficult to recycle as it can contain up to forty different types of material, many of which are stitched or glued together,” says Professor Shahin Rahimifard, who led the project. It was developed and tested at the University’s Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC), whose 10 year research programme was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
The system is able to granulate and segregate leather, plastic foams and rubber so that they can be re-used in products ranging from rubber playground surfacing to new shoes.
It is the world’s first comprehensive system for separating and recovering useful materials from old footwear, and has already been successfully trialled. A newly developed recycling process created by Loughborough University could make landfill sites filled with old shoes a thing of the past.
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