“NO SHIT” 1: Recycling sneakers at the end of their life

As you now know, at MEEKO we like transparency. And we like to give potential consumers useful information that will help them more easily identify when they are being made fun of or not.

We are therefore working on a number of subjects on which we believe that too many brands manipulate information to embellish reality.

The first of these articles deals with the end of life of sneakers. This is one of the key issues when talking about durability on this product. It is therefore not surprising to see a certain number of young brands offering solutions, to the point of making a commercial argument out of them. Among these solutions, one is particularly on the rise: recovering used sneakers so that they can be recycled, creating new sneakers from old ones, and so on.

On paper, it's dreamy. So is it really possible / relevant for a brand in full launch like MEEKO?

We don't think so for two reasons:

The collection logistics to be deployed are beyond the reach of a young shoot : collection points that mesh the entire territory are necessary (ie own shops or resellers who agree to play the game). To think that his customers will return their old sneakers by post (and probably at their expense) is a bit utopian (to put it mildly). Out of 1000, 2000 or 3000 pairs sold, how many will be returned? 1%?

Recycling is far from always being the right solution : even if we managed to collect all these sneakers, what would we do with them next? Recycling them already presupposes having a trainer that can easily be disassembled to isolate the different components and then recycle those that can be. Very few factories are able to manage this type of process for classic shoes. It seems to me that to date there is only one in Europe, in Germany. Some brands think of their basketball from the start so that it can be easily disassembled and recycled (Panafrica for example) but this is far from being the case for everyone.

Beyond the technical feasibility of recycling, very large volumes are needed before a quantity of usable recycled material can be produced. In a podcast, Antoine, one of the founders of the M.Moustache brand, explains that, despite a large quantity of used sneakers recovered from their shops, recycling only provided them with enough material to make soles for a new collection. . Although we are optimistic for MEEKO, we do not think that our sales volumes over a 1 ^st year allow us to get enough recycled material to do something with it. Especially since the energy expenditure necessary for recycling operations is often very heavy.

It is a good thing to seek answers to this important problem. However, beware of ads that look good on paper but will be difficult to hold. The brand of sneakers Ngo took 3 years before being able to set up any kind of action, M.Moustache took 8. It is surely not for nothing...

That's why we don't think it's so easily feasible for a young brand to set up this type of program. For the moment we have chosen to make our community as aware as possible first of all about the maintenance of their sneakers (via natural products) then about upcycling or donating to associations for the most disadvantaged.

Extending the life and usefulness of our sneakers as much as possible will already greatly reduce the carbon footprint linked to their production. Waiting to be able to do even better 😊

Thank you for reading this article, to receive more information of this kind and to know our news, you can subscribe to our newsletter below. One email per week, guaranteed without spam!

The MEEKO team