In 2019, 66.6 million pairs of shoes were manufactured every single day – adding up to a total of over 24.3 billion pairs a year.

Despite the biggest sneaker brands’ green claims, they are in fact dragging their feet with small incremental improvements and pledges as currently only 5% of sneakers are sustainable.

The largest sneaker producing countries are listed to be under a potential risk of forced labour (China) and child labour (Vietnam and Brazil) - ILAB 2020 report

Most sneakers are made from petroleum-based materials, an exhaustible non-renewable resource that emits harmful greenhouse gasses, which are not only polluting, but also prevent the heat emitted by the earth to escape, causing global warming.

A key group in shoe supply chains is homeworkers – people who work in their homes to assemble shoes for factories. It is estimated that there are 50 million homeworkers across South East Asia who earn under $8 per day as a family.

Most leather sneakers are tanned with highly toxic chemicals. The Buriganga river that runs across the biggest tannery district in Bangladesh was declared biologically dead as no aquatic life could possibly survive in the highly contaminated water.

Many workers in shoe factories work in extremely poor conditions with no fire escapes, ventilation & appropriate protective equipment.

With roughly 50% of all leather products being shoes, there’s a direct correlation between chopping down rainforests & the sneakers on people’s feet. The biggest sneaker brands have multiple connections to an industry that props up Amazon deforestation.

Workers in Bangladesh’s leather tanneries are found to have a 90% chance of dying by the age of fifty due to exposure to toxic chemicals.

Experts estimate 90% of shoes are NOT recycled. Instead they end up in landfill where the component parts can last for over 100 years.

An estimated 22 billion pairs of shoes end up in landfill each year. That’s enough pairs to fill 44,000 olympic-sized swimming pools!

The footwear industry produces over 280 billion kg of CO2 a year. That’s the equivalent of flying around the world 25 million times.

More than two million kangaroos are killed each year to make sports shoes & football boots. Nike, Adidas, Puma, Umbro & Copa all use ‘K-leather’ in their products.