An air-based automated material recycling system for

postconsumer shoes products

The increased availability of cheap produced in higher quantities goods, coupled with quickly
changing consumer fashion trends has led to a sharp upsurge in the intake of products in many
industrial sectors. The worldwide per capita usage of footwear considerably has increased, from 1
pair of shoes per calendar year for everyone on the planet in 1950 to almost 2.6 pairs of shoes in
2005. In the EU, it's estimated that the quantity of waste arising from postconsumer sneakers could
reach 1.2 million tonnes per year. The eyesight of No Waste to Landfill thus remains as one of
the major difficulties of 21st century for the shoes sector. This target is very ambitious as presently
less than 5% from the 20 billion pairs of sneakers produced worldwide every year are recycled or
reused. Nevertheless, increased raw materials costs, producer-responsibility problems and
forthcoming environmental legislations are anticipated to challenge the way the footwear industry
deals with its end-of-life products.
It is argued that in many situations, materials recycling sometimes appears as the most suitable
means of coping with discarded sneakers. However, for long-term sustainability of such footwear
recovery activities an economically practical materials recycling system should be founded. In the
automotive and electric/digital sectors, where European Maker Responsibility directives, such as the
End-of-life Automobiles directive and the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive have
already been released, several materials recycling worth chains have now been founded. This has
been feasible because these products regular contain a large percentage of conveniently recoverable
metallic components to facilitate an economically lasting value chain. However, shoes products
typically contain a huge mixture of components, such as for example rubbers, polymers, leather and
textiles that have fairly low recycled worth.
Therefore understanding and developing options for footwear recycling is of major concern to the
footwear sector and this paper will discuss the development of an automated material recycling
system for combined postconsumer footwear waste. The very first area of the paper begins by
introducing the various EoL choices for footwear and outlines the issues of EoL shoes recycling. The
paper describes the recycling strategy that has been developed after that, provides a simple
economic evaluation and outlines some potential applications for recovered materials. The later part
of the paper after that presents the outcomes of experimental studies with three common varieties of
shoes products. Finally further function is certainly talked about and conclusions are attracted.
As discussed by Staikos and Rahimifard there are four primary EoL choices that may be considered
for postconsumer shoes products, as illustrated in Fig. 1, these are: landfill, incineration/gasification,
recycling and reuse. For each of the EoL options there are many environmental impacts, financial
benefits and specialized requirements that must be considered.
Land-filling is considered the most undesirable option, because of the obvious negative
environmental impact, depletion of resources, raising landfill fees and in a few national countries the
limited availability of landfill space. Incineration continues to be regarded as a controversial
technology with environmental problems over the discharge of polluting emissions. Reuse entails the
assortment of put on or undesired shoes for distribution mainly within developing countries.
Charitable organisations like the Salvation Army Trading Company Ltd. (SATCOL) and Oxfam,
together with community municipalities and government bodies will be the main supporters of reuse
strategies in the UK. However, it is argued that because the financial power of developing nations
grows the demand for second hand shoes can start to fall. Furthermore, not absolutely all shoes that

are collected could be reused, because of their poor circumstances, and in such circumstances
material recycling sometimes appears as the most suitable choice.
Nike is currently the only shoes manufacturer that is engaged in postconsumer footwear recycling
on a commercial scale. Their scheme continues to be labelled the Nike reuse-a-shoe program
and offers been developed to recycle put on and defective shoes. Customers can return any brand of
unwanted athletic shoes via Nike's world-wide network of collection points placed within retail
stores. The collected sneakers result in one of two central recycling vegetation - in america or in
Belgium. In these plant life the shoes are shredded and subjected to some mechanical recycling
procedures to split up them into three material streams: Nike Nike Fluff, Nike Foam and Grind.
These materials are then useful for various sports related applications such as running monitor
underlay, playground golf ball and surfacing court underlay. The Nike reuse-a-shoe system
has been working for over a decade and Nike statements to get recycled around 25 million pairs of
shoes to date. However, the scheme is not designed to deal with the recycling of other nonathletic
types of postconsumer footwear waste. Therefore, a more common recycling approach as outlined in
this paper must deal with various types and varieties of footwear products.
Postconsumer shoes products are a untapped commodity with a significant prospect of recycling
largely. This highlights environmentally friendly and economic benefit that can be extracted from
establishing a sustainable shoe recycling chain. However, current materials recycling facilities and
operators are either incapable of dealing with the precise material blend in footwear products or do
not provide the best method of recovering maximum worth from postconsumer shoes waste. Among
the major requirements for establishing sustainable recycling procedures within the shoes sector
would be to investigate appropriate recycling processes to successfully independent postconsumer
shoes into well-defined mono-fraction materials streams. The evaluation of varied postconsumer
shoe waste has however shown the materials recycling of mixed footwear products is an incredibly
challenging problem. You can find two particular issues that present a significant challenge to
materials recycling of shoes, namely the diverse range of shoe types with several construction
methods and the great number of different materials used.
The footwear industry employs a multitude of materials to produce a diverse range of different kinds
and styles of shoes. Based on Weib you can find around 40 different components used in the
developing of a footwear. Leather, rubber, foam, textile and plastics are between the simple
materials most commonly found in shoe manufacture, with each material possessing its specific
characteristics. There's also numerous metallic elements present in shoes products. These include
noticeable metallic parts, such as for example metal eyelets, buckles and decorative components and
other metallic elements that are embedded in the footwear for structural purposes frequently, such
as metal steel back heel works with, metal feet caps and shanks. The removal of these metallic parts
presents a substantial task for the materials recycling of shoes - the metals tend to be present as a
small % of the total shoe by pounds and are generally highly entangled with other parts and
components. At their most simple, shoes are comprised of as few as two components per pair, for
instance flip-flops, with foam rubber and singular strap, or could be complex constructions with 60
or even more elements per pair, such as in many modern sports shoes. Nevertheless, most serves as
a possessing a subset of parts and components which are generally common to all sorts of shoe.
These include; top parts, grindery items and lower parts. A typical shoes product will be assembled
from several elements using a selection of becoming a member of technology, such as gluing,
moulding and stitching. Previous analysis has shown that due to the complexity of shoe design and
building it is theoretically difficult and time consuming to manually disassemble and individual
footwear products into functional recycled material channels. It really is argued that because of the
relatively low material beliefs manual processing in this manner would not become an economically
sustainable activity for large scale footwear recycling. In addition to complete manual disassembly,

the authors have also explored the semi-automated separation of shoes parts based on slicing or
tugging/tearing. However, because of the huge range of footwear styles and sizes these approaches
have had only limited success with certain sub-categories of shoes. Thus these technology are not
regarded suitable for the large scale processing of the numerous tonnes of blended footwear waste
currently sent to landfill.
The complex materials combination of modern shoes and the wide variety of construction techniques
used necessitates the usage of an automated recycling process, based on technologically feasible
and commercially viable recycling technologies. Such extremely mechanised recycling systems are
employed by additional industries because the primary method of recycling end-of-life products in an
economically lasting manner. Recycling products this way entails shredding or granulation
generally, in a way that the product is usually split into different components and/or materials types.
After fragmentation subsequent separation machines exploit the differences in materials properties
to provide automated separation into different material streams. In extrusion systems most cases
these technology work for separating materials such as for example plastic and steel that have
distinctly different properties. However, problems arise when trying to split up components with
related properties often, like the different types of polymers and rubbers which are typically within
shoes products.
Recycling technologies regarded as technically and economically simple for footwear products
include: shredding and granulation technology; air-based separation gadgets; liquid-based density
separation; and, for recovery of the metallic components, eddy and magnetic current separation and
simple sensor based detect and eject chutes. Other commercially available recycling
technologies such as for example electrostatic separation products and advanced sensor structured
sorters are also considered for shoes recycling. However, there has to be additional research in to
the technical and economic feasibility of such recycling technologies for mixed footwear products. At
present material parting based on particle size and excess weight is probably the most cost-effective,
high-capacity process that may be used to automate the parting of footwear waste on an commercial
level. A recycling system based on fragmentation and air-based separation technologies has
therefore been created for the materials recovery of footwear products. The process is layed out in
Fig. 3 and has been made to procedure the vast majority of shoes types and styles i actually.e. sports
leather and shoes and boots based sneakers with rubber soles. Along the way there are three main
steps, these are: sorting, metal removal and material parting. Experimental studies possess derived
the typical mass purity and balance of the main recoverable material fractions.
It really is envisaged that a commercial shoes recycling system includes a sorting stage to separate
sneakers into different categories that may then be processed in batches. In this true method the
yield and purity of the prospective material types can be improved. For instance, to reclaim foam
components in the appropriate manner shoes which have high foam articles, such as sports shoes,
should be recycled from leather based shoes separately. It is because the parting of low density
foams from leathers is present a significant challenge with the proposed air-based technology.
There are several options that are currently being considered for the removal of the metallic parts in
postconsumer footwear waste. The very first involves removing metal utilizing a manual removal
procedure. For example, sneakers could possibly be pre-shredded to expose the embedded metal
parts, which would then be sent to a picking line for manual removal and sorting of metallic items.
However, initial experimentation shows that dependant on the labour price this manual intervention
may possibly not be an economical lasting activity.
The next option is mechanical separation using specialist metallic separation equipment i.e.
shredding followed by magnetic, eddy current and induction sensor structureddetect and

ejects chutes. When control metal parts, shedding is generally required because granulators are
often unable to procedure metals without incurring economically unsustainable put on and damage.
The shredding process does needless to say add further complexity and cost to the footwear
recycling process plan.
Initial experiments have already been conducted with an over-band magnetic separator during
shredding trials with commercially obtainable equipment. Although no complete analysis from the
separation was conducted, initial visual inspection from the waste streams showed good recovery of
the ferrous metals when shoes were shredded to 20-30 mm. As sneakers contain both ferrous and
non-ferrous metals there will be a certain percentage of nonferrous metals still present after
magnetic parting. A subsequent separation stage is needed to remove these non-magnetic steel
particles therefore. This may be done with an eddy current separator - nevertheless, it is argued that
these separators do not provide the most officially or economically feasible methods to remove the
little percentages of nonferrous metals present in the waste stream. A cheap means to distinct the
rest of the metals after magnetic separation is by using a sensor based detect and eject chute
such as those employed to safeguard plastic procedure equipment from international metals parts.
Nevertheless, with this technology, a certain amount of extra material will be ejected combined with
the metal parts, which may reduce the overall yield of recycled materials.
Apart from specialised metallic separation processes there are other technologies that could be used
to eliminate the metallic parts from shredded shoes waste. Initial experiments using a basic sinkfloat liquid1 structured density separation process have proved that it's possible to effectively
independent metals from rubber/foam/leather and spotlight the potential of using a commercial
dense press separator like a hydrocyclone to eliminate the metallic content material within shredded
footwear waste.
However, you may still find worries on the technical feasibility of totally removing most metallic
quite happy with the above mentioned technologies. As metal contamination can considerably
reduce the worth of the various other recycled components, it really is argued that there is a
dependence on the reduction as well as eradication of metallic components at the shoes design
stage.
The next stage of separation aims to liberate rubber granulates from the PU and EVA based foams
from sports shoes, or for leather based shoes the rubber from leather. The right means to offer this
separation is a vibrating air-table. As depicted in Fig. 4b, the air-table uses surroundings and
vibration to split up the heavier rubber that techniques in the table through the lighter materials
that stratifies on top and slides down the table. Separation performance depends upon optimisation
of various process guidelines extremely, which include: the angle from the vibrating deck; the
vibration frequency; the fresh air speed; and the top characteristics from the deck. To make sure
maximum separation performance the authors are suffering from a customised air-table that is
specifically designed and optimised for the parting from the granulated rubber from foam and
leather materials in footwear products.