To many, a single shoe has no purpose, but to one 12-year-old boy from Curtice, Ohio, a single shoe can mean insulation for a car door or even a new basketball court.
Erek Hansen, known as “EcoErek,” has been organizing recycling collection drives since 2009. Since then, the seventh grader has partnered with multiple organizations to collect old denim and shoes to be recycled into things like car insulation or the padding under carpeting.
“I’ve always loved to recycle because I think we should be less wasteful with our stuff,” Hansen said.
For the past two years, Hansen, of Curtice, Ohio, has partnered with the University’s When You Move Out, Don’t Throw it Out community service project. After students move out each spring, WYMO donates as much of its collected clothing to charities as possible. However, Nick Hennessy, University sustainability coordinator, said sometimes the group gets shoes and clothing that are in no condition to be donated.
“We always get, at the end of the year, boxes and boxes of shoes,” Hennessy said. “A lot of them are too worn to give to charities and things like that. And then a lot of them, too, are just a single shoe.”
Hennessy said the partnership between Hansen and WYMO works well because whatever the group can’t donate, Hansen will have recycled, keeping it out of landfills.
“We definitely work well together as a team because their needs and our needs mesh so nicely,” Hennessy said. “What we end up not being able to distribute or to use in some sort of way, happens to be stuff that they definitely have a need for in their program.”
Recently, Hansen was involved in a project he learned about in a National Geographic magazine.
“They were trying to collect shoes and trying to set a Guinness World Record for the longest chain of tied tennis shoes,” Hansen said. “After they’ve been counted and tied, they’re going to get recylced into basketball courts.”
Hansen arranged to have drop boxes on campus to help collect shoes, which had to be mailed to Washington D.C. by Nov. 9.
“There were drop boxes in the Student Union for two week prior to the Saturday [Oct. 27] football game, and there were boxes at the game, which didn’t work out quite as well,” Amy, Hansen’s mother, said.
The University donated 69 pairs of athletic shoes for this project and another 140 pairs for his general recycling. These numbers are combined with the WYMO shoe donations as well. Hennessy said there are still people bringing shoes in for donation now that the boxes are gone.
Hennessy said he plans to continue the partnership with EcoErek and WYMO and would even like to possibly expand their collecting into the Bowling Green community.
“There really isn’t, to my knowledge, a place to donate unusable shoes in the city of Bowling Green,” Hennessy said. “So, I would like us to partner at some point in time to be able to expand collection sites to include some business in Bowling Green, some key locations off-campus … I think we would do great with a collection like that.”
