An air-based automated materials recycling system for

postconsumer footwear products

The increased option of cheap mass produced goods, coupled with quickly changing customer
fashion trends has resulted in a sharp upsurge in the intake of products in lots of industrial sectors.
The world-wide per capita usage of shoes has increased considerably, from 1 pair of shoes per
season for everyone on earth in 1950 to nearly 2.6 pairs of shoes in 2005. Within the EU, it is
estimated that the quantity of waste arising from postconsumer shoes could reach 1.2 million tonnes
each year. The eyesight of No Waste to Landfill hence remains as one of the main issues of
21st century for the footwear sector. This focus on is quite ambitious as presently less than 5% of
the 20 billion pairs of shoes produced worldwide every year are recycled or reused. However,
increased raw materials costs, producer-responsibility issues and forthcoming environmental
legislations are expected to challenge what sort of footwear industry handles its end-of-life products.
It is argued that in lots of situations, materials recycling is seen as the utmost suitable method of
dealing with discarded sneakers. However, for long-term sustainability of such shoes recovery
actions an economically practical material recycling system should be founded. In the
electrical/digital and motor vehicle sectors, where European Maker Responsibility directives, like
the End-of-life Automobiles directive and the Waste materials Electrical and Electronic Equipment
directive have been presented, a number of materials recycling value chains have been established
right now. This has been feasible because these products standard contain a huge percentage of
very easily recoverable metallic components to facilitate an economically sustainable value chain.
However, shoes products typically contain a huge mixture of components, such as for example
rubbers, polymers, leather and textiles which have low recycled worth relatively.
Therefore understanding and developing options for footwear recycling is of main concern to the
footwear sector and this paper will discuss the development of an automated material recycling
system for combined postconsumer footwear waste. The first area of the paper starts by introducing
the many EoL choices for shoes and outlines the challenges of EoL footwear recycling. The paper
then identifies the recycling strategy that is developed, provides a simple economic analysis and
outlines some potential applications for recovered materials. The later area of the paper after that
presents the outcomes of experimental studies with three common sorts of shoes products. Finally
further function is normally discussed and conclusions are drawn.
As discussed by Staikos and Rahimifard there are four main EoL choices that can be considered for
postconsumer shoes products, while illustrated in Fig. 1, these are: landfill, incineration/gasification,
reuse and recycling. For each from the EoL choices there are various environmental impacts,
financial benefits and specialized requirements that must definitely be considered.
Land-filling is considered the most undesirable choice, because of the obvious bad environmental
influence, depletion of assets, increasing landfill taxes and in some countries the small availability of
landfill space. Incineration is still considered a controversial technology with environmental issues
over the launch of polluting emissions. Reuse consists of the assortment of worn or unwanted shoes
and boots for distribution mainly within developing countries. Charitable organisations like the
Salvation Army Trading Company Ltd. (SATCOL) and Oxfam, as well as regional regulators and
municipalities are the primary supporters of reuse schemes in the UK. However, it is argued that as
the financial power of developing nations increases the demand for used shoes can start to fall.
Furthermore, not all shoes that are collected could be reused, due to their poor conditions, and in
such situations material recycling sometimes appears as the utmost suitable option.

Nike is currently the only footwear manufacturer that is engaged in postconsumer shoes recycling
on a commercial scale. Their scheme has been labelled the Nike reuse-a-shoe programme and
has been developed to recycle worn and defective athletic shoes. Customers can come back any
brand of unwanted shoes via Nike's worldwide network of collection points placed within retail
stores. The collected shoes result in 1 of 2 central recycling plants - in america or in Belgium. In
these plant life the shoes are shredded and put through some mechanical recycling procedures to
split up them into three materials streams: Nike Grind, Nike Foam and Nike Fluff. These
components are then used for numerous sports activities related applications such as for example
running track underlay, playground surfacing and golf ball courtroom underlay. The Nike reusea-shoe plan has been working for over a decade and Nike statements to have recycled around 25
million pairs of sneakers to date. However, the scheme isn't designed to cope with the recycling of
additional nonathletic varieties of postconsumer footwear waste. Therefore, a far more universal
recycling strategy as outlined within this paper must deal with numerous kinds and styles of shoes
products.
Postconsumer footwear products are a largely untapped commodity with a significant prospect of
recycling. This highlights environmentally friendly and economic benefit that can be obtained from
establishing a sustainable shoe recycling chain. However, current materials recycling services and
operators are either incapable of dealing with the precise material combine in footwear products or
do not provide the most practical method of recovering optimum worth from postconsumer shoes
waste. One of the main requirements for building sustainable recycling procedures within the shoes
sector would be to investigate appropriate recycling procedures to successfully individual
postconsumer sneakers into well-defined mono-fraction materials streams. The analysis of various
postconsumer footwear waste has nevertheless shown that the material recycling of combined shoes
products can be an incredibly challenging problem. There are two particular problems that present a
significant challenge to material recycling of sneakers, namely the diverse range of shoe types with
several construction techniques and the significant number of different components used.
The footwear industry employs a wide variety of materials to make a diverse selection of different
kinds and varieties of shoes. Based on Weib there are around 40 different components used in the
manufacturing of a shoe. Leather, rubber, foam, textile and plastics are between the simple
components mostly found in shoe manufacture, with each material possessing its specific
characteristics. There are also many metallic parts within shoes products. These include visible
metallic parts, such as for example metal eyelets, buckles and ornamental parts and other metallic
components which are embedded in the shoes for structural reasons frequently, such as steel
metallic high heel helps, steel toe caps and shanks. Removing these metal parts presents a
substantial task for the material recycling of shoes - the metals are often present as a small
percentage of the full total shoe by weight and are generally highly entangled with additional
components and components. At their easiest, shoes are made up of only two parts per pair, for
example flip-flops, with foam sole and rubber strap, or can be complicated constructions with 60 or
more components per pair, such as in many contemporary sports shoes. However, most can be
described as possessing a subset of parts and parts which are generally common to all varieties of
footwear. These include; top parts, lower parts and grindery items. An average shoes product will be
assembled from a number of components using a variety of signing up for systems, such as for
example gluing, moulding and stitching. Previous analysis has shown that due to the complexity of
shoe design and building it is officially difficult and time consuming to manually disassemble and
individual shoes products into usable recycled material channels. It is argued that due to the
relatively low material beliefs manual processing this way would not become an economically
sustainable activity for large scale footwear recycling. Furthermore to complete manual
disassembly, the authors have also explored the semi-automated parting of footwear elements based
upon slicing or tugging/tearing. However, due to the huge range of shoes styles and sizes these

strategies have had only limited achievement with certain sub-categories of sneakers. Thus these
technology are not considered suitable for the large scale processing of the many tonnes of mixed
footwear waste currently sent to landfill.
The complex materials combination of modern shoes and the wide selection of construction
techniques used necessitates the use of an automated recycling process, based on technologically
feasible and commercially viable recycling technologies. Such highly mechanised recycling systems
are employed by other industries because the primary means of recycling end-of-life products in an
economically sustainable manner. Recycling products this way involves shredding or granulation
generally, in a way that the product is definitely split into different components and/or material
types. After fragmentation subsequent separation machines exploit the variations in materials
properties to supply automated parting into different materials streams. Generally speaking these
technologies are effective for separating materials such as for example metal and plastic that have
distinctly different properties. However, problems often arise when trying to split up materials with
comparable properties, such as the various kinds of polymers and rubbers which are commonly
found in shoes products.
Recycling technologies considered to be technically and economically simple for shoes products
consist of: shredding and granulation systems; air-based separation products; liquid-based density
parting; and, for recovery from the metallic components, eddy and magnetic current separation and
basic sensor based detect and eject chutes. Other commercially available recycling
technologies such as for example electrostatic separation devices and advanced sensor based sorters
are also considered for shoes recycling. However, there has to be additional research into the
technical and economic feasibility of such recycling systems for mixed footwear products. At the
moment materials parting based upon particle pounds and size is probably the most cost-effective,
high-capacity process that might be used to automate the separation of shoes waste on an industrial
range. A recycling system based on fragmentation and air-based separation technologies has
therefore been developed for the material recovery of footwear products. The process is defined in
Fig. 3 and offers been made to process the vast majority of shoes designs and types we.e. sports
shoes or boots and leather structured shoes and boots with rubber soles. Along the way there are
three main measures, these are: sorting, metal removal and materials parting. Experimental
research have got produced the normal mass stability and purity of the primary recoverable material
fractions.
It really is envisaged a commercial shoes recycling system will include a sorting stage to separate
shoes or boots into different types that may then end up being processed in batches. In this manner
the produce and purity of the mark material types can be improved. For instance, to reclaim foam
components in the appropriate manner shoes which have high foam articles, such as sports activities
shoes, should be recycled from leather based shoes separately. This is because the separation of low
density foams from leathers exists a significant problem with the proposed air-based technologies.
There are several options that are becoming considered for the removal of the metallic parts in
postconsumer footwear waste. The first involves the removal of metal using a manual removal
process. For example, shoes could be pre-shredded to expose the inserted metal parts, which would
then be sent to a picking line for manual removal and sorting of metallic items. However,
preliminary experimentation shows that depending upon the labour cost this manual extrusion
equipment intervention may not be an economical sustainable activity.
The next option is mechanical separation using specialist metallic separation equipment i.e.
shredding followed by induction sensor centered, magnetic and eddy currentdetect and ejects
chutes. When control metal parts, losing is generally necessary because granulators tend to be

unable to process metals without incurring economically unsustainable put on and damage. The
shredding process does needless to say add further complexity and cost to the footwear recycling
process plan.
Initial experiments have already been conducted with an over-band magnetic separator during
shredding trials with commercially obtainable equipment. Although no complete analysis from the
separation was conducted, preliminary visual inspection of the waste streams showed good recovery
of the ferrous metals when sneakers were shredded to 20-30 mm. As sneakers include both ferrous
and nonferrous metals you will see a particular percentage of non-ferrous metals still present after
magnetic parting. A subsequent separation stage is certainly therefore had a need to remove these
non-magnetic steel particles. This may be done with an eddy current separator - nevertheless, it is
argued that these separators usually do not provide the most technically or economically feasible
means to remove the little percentages of nonferrous metals within the waste materials stream. A
cheap means to individual the rest of the metals after magnetic separation is by using a sensor
based detect and eject chute such as those employed to safeguard plastic procedure
equipment from international metals parts. However, with this technology, a certain amount of
additional material shall be ejected combined with the metal parts, which may decrease the overall
produce of recycled materials.
Apart from specialised metallic separation processes there are other technologies that could be used
to eliminate the metallic parts from shredded footwear waste. Initial tests using a simple sink-float
liquid1 based density parting process have tested that it is possible to successfully individual metals
from rubber/foam/leather and focus on the potential of utilizing a industrial dense press separator
like a hydrocyclone to remove the metallic content present in shredded footwear waste materials.
However, you may still find concerns on the technical feasibility of removing all metallic content
with all these technologies completely. As steel contaminants can considerably reduce the worth of
the additional recycled materials, it is argued that there surely is a dependence on the reduction as
well as elimination of metallic components at the shoes design stage.
The second stage of separation aims to liberate rubber granulates from the PU and EVA based foams
from sports shoes, or for leather based shoes the rubber from leather. A suitable means to provide
this separation is really a vibrating air-table. As depicted in Fig. 4b, the air-table uses surroundings
and vibration to split up the heavier rubber that goes up the desk through the lighter material that
stratifies at the top and slides down the table. Parting efficiency is extremely dependent upon
optimisation of varied process parameters, which include: the position of the vibrating deck; the
vibration frequency; the fresh air speed; and the surface characteristics of the deck. To make sure
maximum separation efficiency the authors have developed a customised air-table that has been
specifically made and optimised for the parting of the granulated rubber from foam and leather
components in shoes products.