{"id":3225,"date":"2019-09-23T20:04:30","date_gmt":"2019-09-23T20:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/?p=3225"},"modified":"2019-09-23T21:03:09","modified_gmt":"2019-09-23T21:03:09","slug":"featured-article-a-step-towards-sustainability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/2019\/09\/23\/featured-article-a-step-towards-sustainability\/","title":{"rendered":"Featured Article: A Step Towards Sustainability"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The problem with the shoe industry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no doubt that everyone loves getting a fresh new\npair of shoes. Whether it\u2019s for the first day of school, a new sport season, or\na formal occasion, everyone loves getting a new clean pair of shoes. Most of\nthe time these purchases are unwarranted and are not an absolute necessity, but\nwe live in a consumer world where people buy off of impulse and make purchases\nto enhance their life, confidence, or social image. Shoe are something that can\nhelp with all these categories. In the past decade the shoe industry has\ndramatically changed. What used to be shoe making for function has now turned\ninto shoe making for \u201chype\u201d. This has caused many to stockpile shoes, sometimes\nowning over one-hundred pairs of shoes, with most of them never being even\ntaken out of the box. People impulse buy and often times forget about shoes,\nand when trends change could easily replace a perfectly good pair of shoes with\na newer model. This isn\u2019t all bad though because the shoe industry,\nspecifically sports shoes, has increased fifty five percent since 2017. But\nwith buying into the \u201chype\u201d there comes an underlying problem. Everyone thinks about\nwhat their next shoe will be, but no one ever thinks where your old shoes will\ngo. Most shoes end up in landfills, an estimated three hundred million pairs of\nshoes made it into landfills last year. From this most of them will be there\nfor the next fifty to one-hundred years. So, it\u2019s time to ask ourselves, how do\nwe bring sustainability into the shoe industry?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think back to your first pair of shoes. The first pair you\never got. Most likely you\u2019ve outgrown them by now and just tossed them in the\ntrash without even giving it a second thought. There lies the biggest problem\nin the shoe industry. People are switching out shoes at an unprecedented level.\nAccording to a survey I distributed, 50% of college students said they owned\nbetween 11-20 different pairs of shoes and of these students 87% said they\nthrew away 1-4 pairs of shoes every year. Why do people switch and throw away\nso many shoes? It is part of the consumer culture; everyone wants new new new\nand just trashes the old. But once you stop and think about the environmental\nimpact that shoes have on the world then you might think twice about throwing\naway your next pair of shoes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n