The Idea in Action

Footwear and sporting goods are designed to last. Shoes, and in particular shoe soles, are built to withstand abrasion, flex and repeated impact, but most are not designed to be taken apart or recycled once they reach end of life. As a result, large volumes of technically valuable materials are discarded every year. In Europe and the United States alone, up to 750,000 tonnes of tennis balls are thrown away annually, alongside millions of pairs of shoes that are incinerated or landfilled.

While progress has been made in apparel, complex end products such as footwear remain particularly difficult to recycle at scale. Conventional recycling approaches often degrade material quality, producing down-cycled outputs that fail to meet the technical requirements of modern shoe soles. This has left brands with few viable alternatives to virgin materials.

THE 8 IMPACT was founded to address this challenge, proving that materials recovered from end-of-life footwear and tennis balls can be regenerated into high-performance inputs suitable for new shoe soles, while significantly lowering environmental impact.