If you've gotten into the running boom, have growing kids, or just like wearing a variety of shoes, you might have quite the backlog of sneakers collecting dust in your residence. Fortunately, there's a way to easily dispose of your unwanted shoes responsibly that's both easy and rewarding.

How does GotSneakers work?

GotSneakers is a company focused on recycling and exporting sneakers from various stages of wear to help those in need, or responsibly disposing of sneakers.

To get started, you register for an account, and from there, you can request a free shipping bag for your unwanted sneakers. Simply fill up the bags with sneakers (just sneakers!), and hand them off to your local FedEx to redirect them to Miami.

At GotSneakers' warehouse, they'll sift through your shoes. The company says above 95% of them will make their way to foreign countries, mostly in the Americas. They'll be sold, and you'll get a cut of the profits.

Unsellable sneakers will be processed responsibly, so you can feel good about how you got rid of them.

Why should I use GotSneakers?

The easiest benefit to understand is that, depending on the quality of your sneakers, you can get paid for them. For TCD's Anna Robertson, despite sending in 42 mostly well-worn sneakers from a shoe drive, she received over $20. You can land even more if you send shoes in excellent or good condition.

GotSneakers also gives you an insight into the good you're doing for the planet. The company sends a sustainability impact report that calculates how much water you saved and how much carbon dioxide you displaced by sending in the shoes instead of tossing them. 

Those gains for the planet occur because shoes most frequently end up in landfills, decomposing over up to 40 years. Some 200 million shoes meet their fate in the U.S. every year. Sneaker materials often need to be incinerated, which pollutes the air and soil with harmful chemicals.

GotSneakers can bypass that and get the sneakers to people who actually need them and might not have shoes of their own. The process also slows the demand for manufacturing and shipping new shoes, which also creates a large amount of pollution.

The company says it's recycled and reused over 3.5 million shoes since its founding and diverted over 100 million pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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Are there similar programs to X?

There are local organizations that can take your unwanted shoes, like GotSneakers. The New York Road Runners (NYRR), for example, allows New Yorkers to drop their unwanted sneakers at the NYRR RunCenter. 

Running stores like FleetFeet and brands like New Balance and On may also be able to take some of your shoes at their retail locations.

Sneaker Impact and Soles4Souls are other national organizations that will take unwanted shoes and recycle or find new homes for them. SneakerCycle, meanwhile, is a thrift store for sneakers, which could be a nice earner for those with unwanted pairs in good condition.

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