Hey Mr. Green,
What do I do with my old stuff, like used shoes? I hate the thought of filling our landfills if my junk can be someone else's treasure. How do I learn what can be reused or recycled and where to send unwanted items? --Kirstin in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin
My favorite resource for information about recycling almost anything is Earth 911. You specify what you want to recycle, type in your ZIP code, and get the location nearest you.
Regarding footwear, there are an estimated 1.5 billion pairs of unworn shoes languishing in U.S. closets—enough, maybe, for the most desperate shopaholic, or all the world's shoeless. But there are plenty of organizations that recycle them, including Soles4Shoes, which takes all types of "gently worn" shoes. For women's shoes, there's SimplySouls. For sports shoes only, there's Nike—but don't let its recycling program convince you that Nike is environmentally innocent, and don't get all utopian about recycling, as Sole4Soles does with its slogan "Changing the world, one pair at a time," or SimplySouls' "Saving the Earth, one shoe at a time." It's gonna take a bit more effort than basking in the glow of a recycling ritual to fix the environment.Nike takes worn-out athletic shoes and grinds them into Nike Grind, which sounds like runner’s boredom but is actually a substance used in those cushiony athletic surfaces. Critics charge that while Nike has made some improvements since the 1990s, it dumps or burns scrap rubber in Indonesia—and that laborers in Nike and other shoe and sportswear factories in Asia lack the right to organize, are fired for union activity, and cheated out of pay. See, for example, this site or this one. Since Nike itself admits that there are still problems, it wouldn't hurt to remind the company to try harder to solve them.
