Sneaker Impact’s Miami location with shoes piled up – credit Sneaker Impact

In Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, a local business sorts through thousands of donated sneakers to decide the best way to keep them out of landfills.

Whether pristine or worn out, each pair will have a future either as recycled material or with a new owner who’s going to appreciate and continue to use them.

Sneaker Impact was founded by a man seeking a more environmentally friendly way to do business, and second-hand shoes is a good gig—the only competition is the landfill. Americans will own an average of 250 pairs of shoes in a lifetime, and that is unfortunately where many will end up.

“It’s all about accountability, sending the right product to the right market,” Sneaker Impact founder and CEO Moe Hachem told CBS News. “Sneakers are a necessity in the developing world. They are a form of transportation.”

Sneaker Impact receives around 1 million pairs of shoes every year through volunteer partners like running clubs, meaning that the cost to secure raw materials is virtually reduced to the labor of retrieving and sorting them.

Once in the Little Haiti facility, they are grouped together according to various criteria and stuffed into bags in orders of 200 to be sent around the world for resale.

“You’re not only reducing waste here at home, you are creating microbusiness opportunities in a developing country,” Hachem said.

MORE GREAT RECYCLING BUSINESSES: Chicago Bicycle Refurbishers Pedal Good to the World for 26 Years With 150,000 Bikes Saved from Landfills

Those that are condemned are shredded and sorted into foam and fabric, which are then sold as raw materials where they could be used to make carpet mats, floor mats, etc.

Sneaker Impact sells a gym sandal that’s made of 85% sneaker foam, a durable, flexible, and weather-resistent material that seems fragile because of the intense job it’s asked to do: namely, pound the pavement for hours at a time every week.

WATCH the story below from CBS Evening News..

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