4 billion pounds a year are spent on trainers in the U.K. alone!

SHOCKING stats here ladies (& gents; well hubby & dad) that I just HAD to share in the hope to change our mindset over our casual footwear choices.

Plus it is absolutely bonkers what is happening in this industry (& I’m only writing my highlights here, I’d massively recommend the show on catch up, which is linked below).

Source: Pinterest

Now I am not a massive trainer fan but after the show I went to count mine & if a non-trainer fan like myself can have 7 pairs what about those who “collect’ them or buy a new pair every week! How many do you have, go check & let me know?

© The Charlotte Edit

But whilst producing them is horrific for the environment, worse still is that every year 300 million trainers are shamelessly “chucked away”, almost always ending up in landfill with the soles alone taking up to 1,000 years to degrade! 

Yes we hear all the time how trainer brands are promising to “clean up their act?” But how sustainable can they actually be? And this is what got me hooked into the programme, & what I saw was not only shocking but it opened my eyes to something I just naively trusted brands were actually doing. Oh how wrong was I!

• The world produced 24 billion shoes last year & 1/4 of them are trainers

• 1.4% global greenhouse emissions come from trainer productions - half the emissions of air travel

If “trainer production” was a country, it would be the 17th largest polluter on the planet

Mega trainer giant Nike have a recycling program called Nike grind. Did you know this, I’d never heard of it? But (as demonstrated on the show) no Nike store takes will your old trainers off your hands for them to be recycled in the uk, thanks Brexit, amongst other reasons I’m sure. PLUS only 0.008% of the Nike Grind trainer range is actually recycled.So in my head what is the point & how is this actually allowed to be passed off as a recycled product?

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Adidas, a further trainer giant, has linked uk with Parley; a company working with the intention of ending plastic waste in the oceans (using plastic collected from the ocean) BUT truth is that most is too degraded to be recycled … So are Parley trainers actually made from plastics recycled from the ocean. NO, they are made up from plastic which has been intercepted from beaches & coastal communities before it reaches the oceans - so it might have ended up in the ocean. Not exactly what we all imagine when hearing “recycled from the ocean” is it?

Parley take plastic bottles, sort and ship them 4,000 miles to become trainers!

So are they potentially greenwashing their consumers …. Ocean plastic means it should come from the ocean, not that their trainers being made from throwaway bottles that have been given out at a luxury hotel - then transported 4,000 miles to Taiwan to be made into shoes!

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Parley say it just comes from tourist resorts (who are on their holidays for the ocean) BUT the plastic bottles aren’t actually needed & supplied from their partnering company! So it is all a huge farce. Plus the Parley Adidas trainers only contain only 20% max recycled plastic! 

So when trainers actually wear out what happens? 

• It is estimated that only 5% of trainers EVER get recycled

• Last year the big 4 ( Nike, Asics, Adidas & Puma) spent £5.5billion on marketing to sell more shoes! Imagine the difference that money could make to cleaning up the oceans programmes instead

• Recycling uses resources (understandably), then each time something is remade & reused it gets harder to recycled therefore it is purely a delayed "time to landfill”, not a reusable circular material!

So where do trainers really end up after you’ve given them to charity? 

It’s thought 22 million pairs of shoes were donated to charity post lockdown but where did they go! 

• 90% of clothing and shoes donated to charity shops get exported

• Ghana receives 60 million tonnes of old clothes & shoes from the uk every year - more than any other country!

• Teams of workers pair up the shoes but around 15% are too worn out so they get burnt causing air pollution

• Those with a 2nd life still end up in landfill!

It’s so tempting to close your mind to the real impact of consumption BUT becoming a parent changed me. We HAVE to stop over consuming and that won’t even start to make any impact! 

Dispatches ‘The Truth About Nike & Adidas’, Channel 4

Source: Channel 4