When talking about sustainability in the footwear industry, often the focus is on reusing, recycling or re-purposing existing materials to make new shoes, while often forgetting waste reduction in the early stages of shoe manufacturing.
In Australia, more than 500,000 tonnes of textiles and leather end up in landfill each year. Leather alone takes approximately 25-50 years to break down and this is without considering additional shoe materials such as plastic and rubber, and the time it takes for those materials to decompose.
Footwear designer, Felicity Cooney, uses a zero-waste cutting pattern for her shoe designs to reduce the waste created from her side of the business exchange.
She said that to help reduce waste materials from the manufacturing side, footwear businesses need to spend time learning what their customer is actually interested in buying.
“I think a lot of times, big companies need to have a more 360 degree look at how their company runs – I know this sounds like a bizarre way to start talking about this – but a lot of times designers never spend time on a sales floor, and a lot of the time marketing people speak to the people who edit the collection to see what gets produced and what doesn't [and] they don't have the best cycle of communication.
“So some head person will say, 'hey! I want this dress with orange polka dots on it,' and the designers think, 'orange polka dots is not going to sell,' it's not what's done well in the past, it's not this, it's not that,' but they just let it ride because it's their superior [saying it].
“So they order thousands of metres of fabric and it gets cut from the line because no wholesale accounts buy it. So then that fabric that they've ordered has been wasted.
“So I think the [footwear and] fashion industry needs to look at an organisational flow-chart and maybe actually speak and interact with their customers a lot more, to really fine-tune what they need to actually produce in the first place.
“There is a lot of wastage and I think that's one of the reasons I started my own company because I was working at a company and I kept seeing all this waste, in terms of like, 'oh we'll just make this in seven other colours,' and I would think, 'that's too wide a range.'
“You need to be narrow and focused so you don't have all this excess waste going on around you.
“I think as well, higher-end brands need to get better at working with places like The Outnet, so they can sell off their surplus stock at a discounted price and actually have it continue to be in [the market].
“Nothing's more wasteful than a piece of clothing [or a pair of shoes] that's made that's just sitting in a factory, not doing anything, not getting any use because it's been cut from a line.
“I think brands need to get much better at getting rid of their dead stock so that they can cut out that wastage.”