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Sports Shoes Recycling Plan subsidized by Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) fund is at experimental stage
To conduct experiment of non-presorting recycling method, SJ Group selected sports shoes as target of recycling and reused.?The main reason to choose sports
shoes as target of recycling is that sports shoes are considered as fashionable accessories nowadays and high replacement rate causes huge amount of
non-recyclable consumer waste.?Furthermore, sports shoes contain compound materials including rubber, fabric, plastic ..etc., which make it a suitable products for
experiment of non-presorting recycling method.
Since the technologies to recycle whole shoes without pre-sorting is proved to be workable, R&D team of the Group is focus on the reuse of recycled materials
from used sports shoes. The primarily idea is that recycled rubber can be used in producing soles, recycled plastic; insoles and other recycled materials can be
applied in producing “Green Slippers” and shoe boxes.?However, to make end products out of recycled materials required rubber open-celled foaming, plastic
closed-cell foaming and injection technologies of the Group.
Sports Shoes Recycling Plan was initiated in 2005. The project was subsidized by Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) fund of Ministry of Economic
Affairs in 2009. The Plan congregated parties of materials testing, waste treatment, RD of reuse and user of recycled materials to be responsible for collecting,
transportation, and reprocess of used sports shoes, testing, applications and reuse of recycled materials.?The experiment is on going currently, and products
were produced.
The Plan was supported by 3 main sports goods distributors, Smile Sports Goods, Iheng Sports Goods, and Momentum Sports Goods.?Recycling boxes are
placed in stores of the distributors to collect used sports shoes. Consumers can get NT@100 coupon for purchasing new shoes by providing one pair of used
shoes to recycle.
Stores for collecting used sports shoes
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