25 billion pairs of running shoes are made every year. This is enough trainers to go round the earth 300 times. If you didn’t already know, they are mostly made from plastic and are almost always un-recyclable. Because of this, 300 million pairs of trainers are thrown into landfill each year in the UK alone.

We believe (as do The Green Runners and One Tree at a Time) that it is the responsibility of the big brands to step up and make more effort to make their shoes last longer and use materials that can be easily repaired and recycled. Essentially, it’s time for footwear manufacturers to make sustainability an integral part of their operations, so we can all tread a little lighter on our planet.

To understand more about the issues people have with the shoes they use for running, hiking etc, The Green Runners have created a survey to gather data on your trainers. They want to understand what faults they are developing, how many miles you are using them for before they break, the relationship between price and quality and how you currently dispose of your old trainers.

They plan to do a couple of things with this information. Firstly, they want to help outdoor enthusiasts prolong the life of their trainers by offering advice on how to maintain them and repair certain elements. Secondly, they want to go to the brands with the data to highlight areas where they could improve shoes to make them last longer.

If you’re an outdoor enthusiast, runner, hiker or someone that regularly wears trainers (that’s most of us, right?) then you can help The Green Runners encourage change by taking the survey yourself.