New life for old ski boots
With funding from the European Commission’s LIFE programme, footwear group Tecnica has launched an ambitious ski boot recycling project that it believes could help it change its business model.
Ski boot brand Tecnica has said it hopes to collect at least 7,000 pairs of used boots this coming winter as part of an initiative called Recycle Your Boots (RYB). Winter sports enthusiasts in Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Spain, Norway and Sweden have the opportunity, when buying a new pair of Tecnica ski boots at any of 150 retail partners that Tecnica works with, to hand over an old pair for recycling. The used boots can be from any brand.
Using funding from the European Commission’s LIFE programme (an environment and climate action fund), and working closely with partners that specialise in logistics, materials recycling and academia, Tecnica will break the old ski boots down into their component parts. It will then use the materials to make new boots and ski equipment.
The Montebelluna-based company has said it believes the idea of preventing used boots from going into landfill and, instead, becoming part of a process to make new products, will appeal to ski enthusiasts around the world. It aims to continue the programme in forthcoming seasons, extending it to other European countries and to North America.
Roles to play
Marketing manager, Maurizio Priano, says there is a large cast of characters with different roles to play in this project.
Ski enthusiasts have to be willing to hand over an old pair of boots when buying new ones. The old ones then have to be shipped to Italy for specialist partners to carry out the exercise of separating the different materials for recycling. Then there is the production of new materials and the assembly of new ski boots for new customers to buy.
Bolzano-based logistics service provider Fercam is in charge of transporting the used footwear from retail partners back to Tecnica. Sales director, Francesco Comerlati, says the transportation company has worked on the basis of minimising the number of collections and optimising the routes between pick-up points. Nevertheless, he has calculated that this initial phase of Recycle Your Boots will involve a combined journey of roughly 52,000 kilometres. This will generate carbon emissions, of course; Mr Comerlati puts the figure at 42.5 tonnes of CO2-equivalent. An integral part of the project is to try to compensate for this through an offsetting programme, which specialist consultancy Carbonsink has helped it identify.
Ski boots in a new light
Head of innovation for the Tecnica group, Giorgio Grandin, says ski boots break down into 120 components, most of which, across the short history of the modern ski boot, have ended up in landfill at the end of the product’s life. Mr Grandin describes what is left after recycling an old ski boot as “small grains of plastic and a pile of aluminium”. But he views this in a new light, saying it is material that is “just waiting to be recast and reused” by means of an in-house process that he describes as an innovative mix of craftsmanship and state-of-the-art manufacturing. He says Recycle Your Boots is the beginning of “a new way of conceiving ski boots” and a new way of mapping out the lifecycle of these expensive footwear products.
His marketing colleague, Maurizio Priano, agrees. All of this constitutes more than just a recycling project, he claims, calling it instead a whole new business model for the group. He insists: “The different materials that the ski boots are made of can be regenerated into new products. This offers great savings in energy consumption and CO2 emissions.”
Technical expertise
Laprima Plastics is one of the technical partners for Recycle Your Boots. Its founder, Filippo Dall’Amico, says the plastic problem that the world has in the twenty-first century is not the plastic in itself. “It’s the attitude and behaviour of people that have turned plastic into a problem,” he explains. He set up Laprima in 2005 and, since then, has processed more than 4 million tonnes of scrap material, with 98% of that going back into the production cycle to make new products. The problem that people have turned plastic into may be complicated, but Mr Dall’Amico refuses to move his focus from one simple point: if you make products out of “second-generation materials”, it enables you to consume fewer natural resources.
The University of Padua completes the line-up of partners for Recycle Your Boots. A researcher at the university’s centre for research on quality and the environment, Dr Alessandro Manzardo, is a specialist in lifecycle assessment and sustainable development. He has worked with the other organisations involved in the project to work out the impact of making ski boots from virgin materials and dumping them when their usefulness seems to have come to an end. “We wanted to understand that impact,” he says, “and then work to reduce it.” For any sustainability project to be what Dr Manzardo calls “efficient and effective” it has to involve all phases of the lifecycle, from raw material to end-of-life disposal.
In Maurizio Priano’s estimation, the raison d’être of the group and its brands is to enable winter sports lovers to enjoy to the fullest every moment they spend in the snow. “If we want this to be possible in the future,” he says, “we have no choice other than to do our part to defend our playground.”
Footwear group Tecnica says a new approach to product lifecycle is essential for future generations to have a chance to enjoy the snow.
All Credits: Tecnica
