From trainers to tennis balls, football kits to fishing wire, sport generates enormous quantities of waste. Much of it ends up in landfill. Yet the power of sport to achieve impressive physical feats can be harnessed to change this story. With the right mindset, dedication, and effort, the sports industry can demonstrate how to shift the needle on material flows.
For the last decade, the race has been on to break the two-hour marathon barrier, a feat seen until recently as superhuman. Eliud Kipchoge managed to dip under in 2019 under controlled, time trial conditions, and in 2023, fellow Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum ran tantalisingly close in an official road race. The secret to clocking these game-changing times? A new breed of super shoes.
The latest trainer technology incorporates a carbon plate in the mid-section with serious cushioning, to give athletes the extra few percent efficiency over the course of a race. The problem? These trainers only last for the equivalent of two marathons – a vanishingly small amount of time. At the end of their all-too-short lives, these super shoes, like the estimated 22 billion pairs of shoes thrown away around the world each year, are simply binned.
Made from a complex concoction of compound fibres and materials, these super shoes are not easily recyclable in practice or at scale. Whether through lack of will or lack of a way, as little as 5% of shoes are recycled. Like so many other household textiles, most end up being incinerated, landfilled, or leaked into the environment. The humble trainer has a heavy environmental footprint.
Game over
The problem is not just trainers. The same story plays out across the sports sector, creating mountains of waste. Take tennis balls. Some 330 million are produced and used each year. These pressurised rubber balls coated with glue and wrapped in wool-nylon felt are designed to be indestructible (although tell that to dog owners), not recyclable. However once the pressure drops, the not-so-bouncy balls are retired. Like super shoes, they have a short shelf life and don’t last so much as the length of a professional match. Also like super shoes, 95% of discarded tennis balls will end up incinerated or landfilled.
The top ten football clubs alone sold more than 17 million polyester shirts in 2021 in a profitable income stream; football apparel is an industry worth EUR 113 billion. Like many technical sports fabrics, polyester is a synthetic material, derived from fossil fuels, which releases microfibres when produced, washed, and discarded. Microfibres do not biodegrade, instead leaking into the environment and ecosystems. New kit is released most seasons, quickly outmoding the last release. Personalisation can limit reusereuseThe repeated use of a product or component for its intended purpose without significant modification. opportunities. Like shoes, like balls, the vast majority of football kits end up incinerated or landfilled. As a result, UEFA calculates that merchandise is a major contributor to clubs’ carbon footprints, paralleling the broader economy; the fashion industry currently contributes up to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The list goes on. An estimated 10 million bike inner tubes are discarded each year in the US; so are 5.5 million wetsuits, most made of neoprene, a heady cocktail of hard-to-recyclerecycleTransform a product or component into its basic materials or substances and reprocessing them into new materials. chemicals. 420 million golf balls are lost each year, a sport which also uses billions of tees, many of them plastic. Anglers discard about 400 million metres of line annually.
The root cause of all this waste is our linear economylinear economyAn economy in which finite resources are extracted to make products that are used - generally not to their full potential - and then thrown away ('take-make-waste').. Materials are extracted to make products that are used for a short time and then ultimately thrown away.
Not only is it a huge waste of resources and damaging to the environment, it’s a huge waste of money. Joanna Czutkowna, CEO of consultancy company 5thread and a specialist in circularity within sports apparel points to the example of professional football kit: "60% of professional football kit is either incinerated or sent to landfill at the end of the season,” she says. “Financially this is equivalent to the transfer fees of Jude Bellingham.”
Play on
Sport is a key part of a vibrant society. It keeps us healthy, fosters a sense of competitive collaboration, and preserves vital green spaces. In a circular economycircular economyA systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. It is based on three principles, driven by design: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and regenerate nature., waste and pollution are eliminated and products and materials are circulated at their highest value. What happens to them at the end of life is considered right at the beginning. The consequences of decisions made at the design stage that determine around 80% of environmental impacts. As with every sector in the economy, we can’t recycle our way out of this. While recycling is undoubtedly a necessary component, we need to ensure that products and materials are designed, from the outset, to be used more and kept in use through maintenance, reuse, resale, and refurbishment in order to preserve their embodied value.
Some great examples already exist in the sporting world: it is, after all, a business sector which takes its behavioural cues from the competitive mindsets and pacesetting achievements of its individual players. Plenty of new innovations are reducing the environmental impact of sports equipment, through measures such as material efficiencies or lightweighting.The best ones take a circular approach from the outset.
Trainer brand Vivobarefoot has developed a compostable, 3D-printed shoe that showcases a novel approach to material use and product design, using a natural fibre that is designed to be returned to nature after use and minimising waste. Swiss company On has designed its Cyclon trainers to be recycled in both principle and practice. As well as being made from as few materials as possible, mostly a biomaterial derived from castor beans, the shoes are sold through a subscription model, incentivising customers to send old pairs back for recycling.
A number of companies are working to tackle the tennis ball issue. Wilson has designed a tennis ball which it says keeps the fresh-ball feel four times longer, and comes packaged in a cardboard tube. Renewaball operate a closed-loop process that recycles new tennis balls from old. Bounce collects used tennis and padel balls for recycling or downcycling, for example into tennis court surfacing.
German company Schwalbe has been recycling bicycle inner tubes since 2015, saving 9 million tubes from landfill in 5 countries across Europe. By turning them back into inner tubes, another closed-loop system, the material – butyl rubber – is kept in use at its highest value, for longer. The company calculates that reusing butyl in this way offers an 80% energy saving compared to producing new butyl.
When it comes to wetsuits, Patagonia has developed a way to molecularly break down wetsuits and loop many of the materials back into the manufacture of new wetsuits. In addition, it and other major brands including Billabong and Xcel have been experimenting with moves away from hydrocarbon- (or, curiously, limestone-) based neoprene, often manufactured using harmful chemicals. Instead, plant-based rubber substitutes such as Yulex are being trialled. When wetsuits do reach the end of their useful life, companies like Circular Flow and Turtl Project can turn them into yoga mats, bags, and coasters.
It’s not just the products that need to be redesigned; it’s also the business models that supply them. The surf sector offers some good examples of circular business models in practice. Patagonia has long offered wetsuit repairs as part of its Ironclad Guarantee, and Finisterre is offering customers a rental service for its natural rubber wetsuits.
Retailers are playing their part to support and showcase circular economy options too. Companies like Decathlon and Hardloop – both headquartered in France – offer resale options to find new homes for second hand sports equipment, keeping it in use for longer. In the States, Play It Again Sports operates a network of shops for buying and selling used sports equipment, from ski boots to baseball mitts. Some brands are trialling collection schemes for unwanted shoes and sports gear to divert them from landfill or other fates. The increasing visibility of resale, repairrepairOperation by which a faulty or broken product or component is returned back to a usable state to fulfil its intended use., and reuse in the sports industry offers promising green shoots for the mainstreaming of circular business practices.
No new balls please
No one business or organisation can single handedly shift sport’s waste problem. Collaboration is key to accelerating and scaling the transition to a circular economy. Sporting bodies have an important role to play in convening actors and fostering teamwork.
In 2023, UEFA published circular economy guidelines as part of its wider sustainability strategy, with apparel and equipment as one of its four focus areas. Acknowledging the role that regular sponsorship changes – and the resulting proliferation of new kits – had played in driving emissions and creating waste, the football industry body noted that its current business model prioritising sales volumes needs to change. Such a move is an encouraging shift in the wider cultural movement away from linear business models, and is not at the cost of economic benefits. Our Circular Business Models study estimated that the introduction of circular business models in the apparel sector could represent a USD 700 billion opportunity.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) – tennis’ world governing body – convened a squad of manufacturers, officials and recyclers to spur creative approaches to tennis ball design. It is investigating repressurising techniques and has created a prototype tennis ball made of a single material, without a fabric covering, and now plans to present the ideas to manufacturers and value chain actors to stimulate innovation across the sector.
Echoing industrial innovation, it’s not just ball design that is being reconsidered, but the system of using them in the game. There have been suggestions to reduce demand by changing the rules of the game, adjusting regulations to reduce the frequency of ball changes in tournaments (Wimbledon alone gets through 55,000 each year). A circular approach is at the heart of these initiatives. “First of all, [we need] to try and reduce the number of balls that are being used,” says Jamie Capel-Davies, head of science and tech at ITF. “Then reuse balls as best we can. Recycling is third.”
Competitive Advantage
As the world’s gaze turns to Paris for the latest chapter of the Olympic Games, aiming to be the ‘greenest ever’, the sporting community has an opportunity to spotlight not just world-class athletic performances, but world-class ways of doing business, and the role that policymakers can play in leading the charge.
There is no credible path to reaching global climate and biodiversity targets without changing how we do business. And, as the Olympic motto reminds us, we can go faster, higher and are stronger if we work together.
"Sport has a really big role to play in terms of sustainability,” surmises Capel-Davies. “It can use its profile to try and encourage sustainability to set an example for others in this area. We want to try and use that influence as positively as we can."
