'Sole'ful purpose: Fighting social inequity by recycling worn-out sports shoes

Kitschy-cotton with a cross-laced foothold; beige burlap with white shoelace straps, startling fuchsia with a simple rope toe-hold—would you believe these slip-ons are resurrected old running shoes?
Runners tend to wear out between three to four pairs of shoes annually, and discard them without a second thought. However, Ramesh Dhami, who came to Mumbai from Uttarakhand to become an actor but ended up becoming an athlete, couldn't bring himself to get rid of his old shoes. "They are too expensive to throw out," he thought, and began modifying them for use as slippers. This was over two years ago.
Shriyans Bhandari, from Udaipur, a third-year Bachelor of Management Studies student at Jaihind College, and Ramesh have known each other since 2012, courtesy their runs at Priyadarshini Park. In December 2013, they decided to do something about the massive shoe waste.

With 350 million sports shoes discarded annually and at least 1.2 billion people around the world who can't afford footwear, recycling branded non-biodegradable shoes didn't just make environmental sense, it made sociological sense too. Neither Shriyans, 20 nor Ramesh, 21, had any experience with shoe design, but once the idea took hold, they ran with it. They experimented for a month and developed a way to convert used shoes into slippers. Winning entrepreneurship competitions at IIT, Bombay, and Raisoni College, Nagpur, gave them Rs.500,000—enough get their venture Greensole, off the ground.

"We will make the world green," says Ramesh, a state-level athlete, whose passion easily makes up for his lack of formal education. The boy, who ran away from home at age eight and survived in Mumbai with help from the Sathi Foundation, is now a fitness coach. Shriyans, who recently enrolled in the Management of Entrepreneurial Leadership programme at Babson's College, has studied at Mayo College, Ajmer. He authored Birds of Aravallis and participated in the Harvard India Conference, New Delhi, 2015. While Shriyans handles Greensole's marketing, business development and finance, Ramesh looks after design, manufacture and delivery.

Of the 350-odd shoes, which runners drop off every week in the big green boxes that serve as their collection centres—at Priyadarshini Park and Jaihind College, Mumbai, Mayo College and the Siligudi Army Camp and EICASA Institute in West Bengal—about 5-6 per cent are too worn out to recycle. The shoes that still have a few good miles in them are given to athletes at Sports Authority of India (SAI), in exchange for their old shoes. The rest are reheated to separate the sole, which is washed and treated with Toluene. Cotton and nylon are used to refurnish the upper section of the shoe, as are trekking ropes that have been retired after a year of use, laces and other salvageable shoe parts.

With the practical experience they gained and some help from Kolkata's Footwear Design and Development Institute (FDDI), the two have come far. They now have two industrial design patents for their product. They also have 14 volunteers from across the world, two interns and four labourers helping them out in the manufacturing unit they have set up in Kurla.

In an attempt to break even and make Greensole self-sustainable, they are selling the slippers, priced at Rs 149 a pair, to NGOs and corporates that distribute them to people who don't have any. They hope to retail the shoes through stores such as Fab India, Westside and Ethnicity soon. People have begun approaching them privately to recycle shoes that have sentimental value. Shriyans and Ramesh think that winning a few international competitions will give them enough funds to scale up, experiment further and increase their production efficacy so that they can cover around 20,000 feet this year.

Won't the big brands whose soles are being recycled take issue with this? "They aren't recycling their own waste; so how can they stop us doing a good thing? We are also converting the shoe into something completely different. In fact, they could tie up with us, and we could put to good use the 0.5% (7.5 million) shoe wastage they have due to defects," reasons Shriyans.

Grateful for the support and mentorship they have received from IIT Bombay and Puneet Kumar of the National Entrepreneurship Network, Shriyans and Ramesh believe that getting more people, including celebrities, on board will help spread awareness. After India, they intend to help neighbouring countries such as Bhutan and Nepal, before reaching out to Africa. They hope that WHO and UNICEF will eventually ship them containers of used shoes from countries that have no cobblers.

Meanwhile, if you're open to letting someone else walk a mile in your soles, you know what to do. St. Xaviers College and Marine Drive will soon join the list of drop box locations; you will even be able to search for the nearest box with the upcoming Greensole app.