Directly related to my New Year's resolve to exercise more aka Stay Alive Longer, I recently realized I needed new kicks. But what to do with the old ones? Easy...stick them in the front hall closet! Until I was reminded by a timely Green As a Thistle post to recycle the old ones. I also consulted my bookmarked Tiny Choices’ post on recycling running shoes to figure out what to do.
My favorite ideas:
- Giving them to shoes4africa.org if they have some miles left in them. Better they be used by a runner than trashed. Email tobytanser@aol.com for info about where to send your shoes (you'll mail them to Africa yourself unless you can drop them off in Manhattan, and, as Tiny Choices points out, if they're stolen, it's probably by someone who, well, needs sneakers).
- Sending the sneaks back to Nike in Oregon (but check if you're going this route as they have local drop-off points in many cities) so that they can be ground up and made into playing fields, helping close the loop on the shoe production process via the Reuse-A-Shoe program.
*Photo courtesy of Bazil Raubach.SXC (it's his daughter, not me, sigh).
4 comments:
AH! That's great! I have two pairs of running shoes I've just been holding on to because it seemed like such a waste to just toss them, but I know I needed new ones for better support.
I hope they protect African feet nicely!
Thanks for the great post.
Where do you get all of this information? You are amazing! I'm not kidding.
Thanks for the great tips! And for visiting my blog . . .
http://lamarguerite.wordpress.com
This is great. I happen to have a couple of pairs in need of recycling myself, and now I will be responsible about it.
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