Restore: Footwear designed to ease its repair, recycling, and remanufacturing

Abstract

The way a shoe is constructed and assembled traditionally makes it hard for the shoe to be disassembled and recycled at the end of its lifecycle. Only 13% shoes are recycled annually, which is a lot less than their amount in production. (Warn, Reframing End-of-life) This product proposes a new system for design for disassembly. Elimination of glue and its replacement with methods like stitching, and snap fit modules are integrated in this design to cater to this problem and enable repair. It disassembles in specific steps which are intuitive for the person disassembling. This design employs materials which are made by recycling agricultural and plastic waste. These are also readily available here in Pakistan and affordable for the locals. Its primary goal of easy assembly and disassembly has been assessed by producing a real time prototype and disassembling it to get separate parts. This solution has been proposed to benefit the environment by reducing the environmental impact of shoes and eliminates resource depletion by bringing materials back in production. By moving away from the traditional methods, a closed loop production process can be achieved in the footwear industry