Click the links below to listen to the full podcast episode:
The global footwear market is a multi-billion dollar industry that has a huge carbon footprint. In this episode, Tad and Julianna sit down with Andy Polk, Senior Vice President at the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America (FDRA), to discuss FDRA’s sustainability and innovation working groups, how FDRA is working with members to drive product innovation in footwear, how you can access FDRA’s Digital Shoe Sustainability Summit, and more.
Can you tell us about the work you are doing with FDRA, Specifically with the sustainability and innovation working groups?
Our sustainability working group we formed a couple of years ago is actually the most active group that we have. We do a monthly zoom call and we get 150 companies on these calls to discuss a specific topic. We try to be a platform where people can have a discussion and ask questions and be kind of a safe space.
I think there's a big concern, around sustainability being such a big topic, people are sometimes afraid to admit they don't know what they're talking about. Also, some of these companies have been doing footwear for 20-30 years the same way, and there's some fear of making adjustments and changes. So a lot of what we try to do is get people on the call and socialize ideas to them.
Our mission around sustainability is kind of threefold for us. We're not trying to be the experts. We're trying to introduce folks to people like you who are the experts to do the real work. Our goal is to benchmark where we are as an industry.
So if we did an LCA, what is the benchmark for a kid's shoe? What is it for a leather shoe? What is an average that people can look at and understand to say, ‘Oh, we need to look at this section of waste. We need look at this section of emissions and then judge ourselves against the averages.’ We want to benchmark whole shoes, material types, and other things so we can focus on best practices.
We know that you are working with your members to drive sustainability into the footwear industry, tell us more about some of the activities you are doing to achieve this?
I'll give you basically the research that we came up with on the shoe waste program that we launched. We worked with Target, Fila, and Steve Madden, and we targeted around 20 factories in China. So each of them gave us a factory list of the main facilities they wanted to focus on.
We hired a company called Elevate Global that we worked with for a decade as an organization. They actually went in and started looking at the waste in the factories: foam waste, leather, cutting waste, and all these extra components that just sit around after you're done making the product.
For the most part, especially in China, the factory just ships them straight to the landfill. They don't have the expertise to know who they could sell it to, or what materials could be recycled. So the project was really around what materials and components can be recycled? How do we train the factory to sort those? And then how do we find buyers for those products to come in and get it?
So we actually found that we were able to reduce waste in all these factories by tons, and we found new revenue streams for factories to sell that extra waste to someone and keep it out of the landfill. The idea is to get to zero waste for all that. Obviously we're not near that, but I'd say we cut half of it out already within a year or two.
Then we took our learnings and we expanded the project and program. Now we've got another 20 or 30 companies coming online to train their factories, using the same playbook to expand the impact of that across the industry.
So this is year two, next year is year three, and we'll hopefully expand it to Vietnam which is another big footwear base for manufacturing for the U.S. and European marketplace. We are constantly looking, tweaking, and figuring out how to better train these companies and spread those best practices. So the brands can pay a minimal fee, they can have their factory pay it, or they'll share it with the factory. Then out of FDRA we subsidize it.
Can you Tell us about the fdra shoe sustainability summit?
So it's for anybody who wants to learn more about shoe sustainability. This is especially for shoe companies, but even I’ve found that we learn a lot about sustainability from non-shoe industries. It's very affordable. We have a three part series that focuses on waste management and recycling, and then it goes to design development and construction. So we're looking at that circular model and changing design and development at the start.
Finally, we get to materials. We flipped it because everybody expects us to start with materials first, but there's a lot of great work being done on material sustainability, but we felt like we had to get people thinking first about their waste stream, then about design and development process, and then about the material.
From our surveys, we have learned that 70% of professionals feel like they don't have enough education to make the right choices on sustainability and develop a strategy. So really this whole summit is filling those knowledge gaps on all the different, hot topics in our industry. It is about having a holistic look at strategy.
The goal is to help you create an overall strategy for your company and for your brand going forward. It's not just a checking the box here or there on your ESG, it is helping you create a company that reduces cost, reduces waste, creates brand new product types, and increases your ROI. The sessions were recorded and can still be accessed at the link below!
Video Content
ABOUT Andy Polk
Andy Polk is Senior Vice President at the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America (FDRA). FDRA is the footwear industry’s business and trade association representing over 95% of the entire industry including brands, domestic producers and retailers. As SVP, Polk oversees the association’s products, services, advocacy strategies and programs. He leads the industry’s most active and robust working group on innovation and sustainability — helping brands and retailers reduce their environmental footprints while developing and selling new dynamic shoes. Prior to FDRA, Polk served as a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Congress from 2002 – 2011. In 2012, Polk earned his master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).