Lucy Siegle: Steps you can take to put some soul into your soles

Discarded trainers can last up to 1000 years in landfill. Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

Opinion

The trainer remains the number-one fashion poster child of globalisation, a homogenised mass-culture product that's beloved of cultural commentators.

Well, I don't wish to give the world's favourite shoe a kicking, but for ethical warriors they've proved to be a massive headache - there is not only the environmental impact, but also the endless debates over the ethics of the planet's biggest athletic-shoe manufacturers' use of outsourced cheap labour in some of the world's poorest countries.

Like so many of us, you're caught in between. You assimilate by wearing trainers, possibly for sport, but you can't see why their lifespan can't be elongated, saving the resources needed to make a new pair and saving the old ones from being dumped in landfill. Due to the absence of statistics on the number of trainers that go to landfill I'm resorting to observation: whenever I visit a landfill site (and I do this from time to time) I'm amazed by the amount of trainers and football boots you can see.

And in landfill a traditional ethylene vinyl acetate (Eva) trainer midsole can last up to 1000 years.

Most trainer manufacturers have a "sustainable" offering in more holistic materials, including recycled plastic and even a bit of hemp.

The Nike Trash Talk shoe uses scrap-ground foam from factory production. Then there are the brands such as Worn Again claiming an ethical production process and making shoes for disassembly.

In terms of recycling schemes, there are those one-off projects that collect training shoes for "poor communities", although I always worry whether any poor community can actually use a pair of sweat-sodden old shoes.

Adidas, meanwhile, tells me that its recycling programme is currently just for staff in the UK. Against not much competition, Nike's Reuse-A-Shoe has the biggest eco kudos in trainer land.

The Reuse-A-Shoe programme operates in seven countries, including New Zealand and Australia. To date it has recycled some 23 million pairs of shoes worldwide. Collected trainers are remanufactured into resin for sports courts, branded Nike Grind.

And I should brand my quest to provide a real answer to your question the Trudge. Because while all these trainer initiatives make up parts of a sustainable loop, none manages to get over the hurdle that trainers are champions of planned obsolescence.

They are also designed for mass production, so the sole units are usually injection moulded rather than made from sheet soling that can be replaced when the original wears out.

The Society of Master Shoe Repairers asked some of their members on your behalf if trainers can be resoled.

Many have tried, including David, who even invested in a "special cup press with individual sizes, tested for the correct solution and the full range of soles to match", only to find that fickle consumers would rather just buy a new pair.

Some will repair limited tread and colour patterns, so you should save any remaining tread to try all your local shoe menders before you think "Cobblers to this" and buy a low-impact new pair.