Circular rock climbing shoes

Long description

Rock climbing shoes are not designed and discarded sustainably, which is very controversial because we rely on nature to do our sport. Clean Climber reacts to this situation by re-uing, repairing and recycling shoes.

Currently 160.000 pairs of climbing shoes (80.000 kg) are discarded yearly by climbers, the sole wears out in 3-6 months. These shoes can easily be repaired, but as climbers don’t know this, they end up in the trash bin.

All climbers train in climbing gyms, so this is where they can drop off worn shoes for recycling or repair and pick repaired shoes up. We communicate to the climbers how and why we have these programs and we will do the logistics of the climbing shoes to our partners. The Clean Climber Foundation has started in 2018 and has since then become part of the climbing community.

We start in the Netherlands and will expand from there. We’ve formed an alliance with SCARPA shoes in Italy, Monk gyms, Mountain Network gyms, recycler Sympany, sportmat manufacturer Stockz, cobbler Stultiens, the Circular Footwear Alliance, leather recycling experts Leather Made Smart and more. The Bin helps circular initiatives scale up and is thus guiding us in this process. The loop can be closed for some recycling streams like rubber and textile (where the gyms have shown their intention to buy sport mats from recycled shoe rubber and buy insulation material from recycled textile) and will be investigated for other recycling streams.

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