Ecotan Shoes is a new shoe concept with a zero-waste, ground-breaking design, made from 100% eco-friendly leathers naturally tanned with tannins. This is the first truly bio-circular footwear that can be turned into a fertiliser for organic farming at the end of its useful life. A project that proves that already today it is concretely possible to fully return to nature those resources we initially took on “loan”.

Launched by Silvateam during the recent edition of Lineapelle, Ecotan Shoes was born from the urgency of providing effective solutions to the environmental issues in leather tanning. In the footwear industry, this problem clearly concerns the life cycle of products. Almost 25 billion pairs of shoes are produced annually in the world (according to World Footwear), with sneakers accounting for about 20 billion. 95% of them end up in landfills within a year, and only 5% are recycled. It is all too evident that this consumerist approach cannot be environmentally sustainable in any way.

“To reverse the trend, we have to go to the roots of the production process because, as we know, every waste is a design flaw”, says Alessandra Taccon, Ecotan Project Director at Silvateam.