Every year, hundreds of thousands of shoes are discarded in Singapore — either sent to landfill or incinerated, releasing toxic fumes in the process. With flip flops and slippers especially, the question of what to do at the end of their life is one we hear often. The honest answer in 2026 is: it depends on the condition of the shoe.
Can You Recycle Old Shoes in Singapore?
The short answer is: sometimes, but true end-of-life recycling remains limited. Here's the current state of play.
If your shoes are still wearable, there are several options. Cloop's yellow textile recycling bins — now at over 450 locations island-wide — accept clean and dry shoes in reusable condition. The Singapore government's recycle.gov.sg directs people to Cloop bins for sports shoes. Items are sorted for reuse, resale, upcycling or international recirculation. Find your nearest bin at recycle.gov.sg/cloop.
If you're a runner, Running Lab's Project Love Sneaker campaign — which ran most recently in April 2026 — accepts gently worn footwear and redistributes it through charitable partners, with donors receiving a $50 shoe voucher per pair. Watch for the next edition of that campaign at Running Lab stores across Singapore.
If your shoes are genuinely end-of-life — worn through, falling apart, or otherwise unwearable — the options are unfortunately limited. True end-of-life shoe recycling in Singapore remains difficult. The materials simply aren't being processed at scale yet.
What Happened to the ActiveSG Shoe Recycling Program?
This original post mentioned ActiveSG's shoe recycling program, where rubberised shoes were donated and ground into granules for running tracks and playgrounds. That program — a collaboration between SportSG and Dow — collected over 400,000 pairs of shoes, but only around 70,000 were successfully repurposed. The program hit capacity and wound down, and the experience exposed a real challenge: collecting shoes is the easy part. Finding uses for the processed material at scale is the hard part.
The Soles4Souls Asia charity, another popular option for donating used shoes, also discontinued Singapore operations in 2022.
The honest takeaway: Singapore's shoe recycling infrastructure has made progress but still can't absorb end-of-life footwear at the volume the city generates. Which is why buying shoes that last longer matters more than ever.
Before You Donate: Think About Why They Wore Out
If you're at the point of donating or discarding your shoes, it's worth asking how long they actually lasted. Fast fashion footwear — particularly cheap foam flip flops — often ends up discarded after a single season. That's not a recycling problem, it's a materials problem.
At Indosole, the goal has always been to take that calculation off the table. Our recycled tire soles, made using SETT (Sole Engineered Tire Technology), are engineered from one of the world's most durable materials — the same rubber that withstands thousands of kilometres on the road. Most customers wear their Indosoles for years. We back that up with a 12-month warranty, not because we think they'll fail, but because we're confident they won't.
Can Indosoles Be Recycled? And What If You're Visiting Bali?
We get asked this a lot, and we want to be upfront about it. We'd love to collect old footwear in Singapore — but the cost and logistics of collecting and delivering used sandals from Singapore to our manufacturing location in Bali make it unworkable for now.
However, if you're visiting Bali, you can drop off any brand of old flip flops, slides or sandals at any Indosole Bali store location. They don't need to be Indosole — any brand is accepted. Those collected sandals are processed together with flip flops and sandals retrieved from Bali's rivers by our partner Sungai Watch, and the foam is turned into Riverfoam — a new recycled material that's now being used across a growing range of Indosole products.
What Riverfoam becomes:
- The Riversole flip flop range — soles made from reclaimed river sandal foam
- Riverfoam Yoga Mats — coming soon
- Riverfoam Coolies — available now through our custom product program
The waste already exists in the region. We're putting it to use there, and expanding what we can make from it. Every old sandal dropped off in Bali is one less piece of foam heading to a river or a landfill — and one step closer to becoming something new.
Learn more about the Sungai Watch collaboration here.
The Most Circular Choice: Buy Shoes That Last
The most effective way to reduce shoe waste isn't recycling — it's extending the life of every pair you own. A pair of Indosole flip flops or slides worn for five years represents a fraction of the footprint of five pairs of cheap alternatives worn for one year each.
Every Indosole sole is made from 40% recycled tire, 30% natural rubber and 30% new material. There are no plugs on the underside — that traditional breaking point on old-style flip flops — and the ENVRO Fiber straps soften and mould over time rather than degrading.
When your Indosoles do eventually reach the end of their life, the sole itself — being dense rubber — can go in with rubberised items at a Cloop bin if it's separated from the strap, or in general waste. We're continuing to explore better end-of-life options and will update this post as the landscape in Singapore changes.
Shop Women's Indosole | Shop Men's Indosole
Resources mentioned in this post:
- Cloop bin finder: recycle.gov.sg/cloop
- Singapore government shoe recycling guide: recycle.gov.sg/items/sports-shoes
- Recyclopedia Singapore — shoes: recyclopedia.sg/items/shoes
- Running Lab Project Love Sneaker: Running Lab stores island-wide
