Helping Our Planet

70,000 donated sneakers saves 500 cubic meeters of landfill space.

With the GreenSneakers program you can be assured that your organization is engaged in helping the planet through reuse and/or recycling. With GreenSneakers, we give donated tennis shoes a second chance at life by making them available as affordable footwear for people in need around the world. By doing this, the donated shoes are kept out of the landfill where they may take anywhere from 50 - 1000 years to break down (Liberty Sports Magazine, Nov. 10, 2009)

"...if you throw it in a landfill, it darn near lasts forever."

It's no secret that athletic shoes require large amounts of petroleum in their creation. "With a few rare exceptions, such as bamboo-enhanced sock liners, our shoes are made exclusively from heavily processed crude oil. We're wearing gushers." (Runners World; The Runners Footprint, Nov., 2008, P 67).

With this reality, the need to make donated shoes available for reuse or recycling should be very apparent, though by some estimates only 1 in 100 pairs are recycled annually. (Runners World; Nov., 2008, P 77). GreenSneakers provides a great way for an organization to implement an environmentally friendly fund raiser to help meet their own missional needs that also delivers global impact to people in need around the world.