Many additional temporary workers cause new shoe waste that could be avoided. "At the end of the year, shipping service providers in particular hire many seasonal employees who receive new work shoes. These expensive special shoes are thrown away after a few weeks,” complains  Marcello Faraggi, President of the European Shoe Shine Association (ESSA). "This environmental outrage, which has been silently tolerated up to now, is also unnecessarily expensive for the companies". ESSA has now started a Europe-wide awareness-raising campaign for the recycling of work shoes.

This means that a "shoe life" can be multiplied. Workers benefit from increased comfort with clean and disinfected shoes. At the same time, the purchasing departments of the companies are happy about reduced budgets for new work shoes, which then only have to be bought less often. "The savings potential is between 20 and 30%," Faraggi quotes empirical values reported by ESSA members in Germany and Belgium over the past five years. "We are talking about reduced expenditure of several thousand euros per company and at the same time the shoes are reliably treated against bacteria and viruses such as the COVID-19 virus."

In a new test report, ESSA explained the procedure for reconditioning work shoes based on a practical run through of heavily used work shoes of safety class S3. “This service must comply with European safety standards. At the same time, only cleaning and disinfection methods should be used that have the least possible impact on the environment," says Thomas Ganick, ESSA Vice President from Frankfurt, referring to service companies that have been certified accordingly by ESSA.

ESSA estimates the avoidable shoe waste in the EU at  300 million pairs of shoes per year. In Germany alone, 15 million pairs of shoes are avoided every year that end up unnecessarily in the garbage, says Faraggi.

More information at: www.workingshoes.info