Recycling worn-out footwear from delivery staff, repurposing them into impact-resistant flooring for playgrounds and corporate childcare centres.

Activities

From the ‘Old shoe makes good game’ project, winner of the second edition of the company contest ‘Together 24 SI’, comes a circular economy initiative.
A team of employees at Poste Italiane, noticing the vast number of shoes discarded each year by postmen – due to wear, deformation, or damage – wondered how they could dispose of them in an environmentally friendly way.
From this challenge the Old Shoes, New Purpose project was born, aiming to transform these unusable items into something new and useful for the community.
This year, around 25,000 work shoes used by postmen and plant operators are collected and, from the by-products of their shredding, transformed into anti-trauma tiles to be placed in the flooring of Poste Bimbi company nurseries in Rome and Bologna.
The shoes are collected every two months at Poste Italiane logistics centers across Italy and transported to the Ancona mail sorting center, where they are processed and transformed for this new purpose.

Result & Impact

5500 kg of old shoes can be used to make 50 square metres of anti-trauma flooring for children. Our target for 2025 is to assure at least 4000 kg of safety shoes collected and sent for recovery and reuse.
With this project, employees can participate in both the design and the final result.