Where Do Outgrown Kids' Shoes Actually Go? The Truth About Landfill and What To Do Instead
Somewhere in your home right now there is probably a bag, a box, or a forgotten corner of a closet holding shoes your child has already outgrown. I have several. It's one of the strange, quiet realities of raising young kids: their feet grow faster than almost anything else about them, and the shoes can't keep up, no matter how good the fit was the day you bought them.
Most parents don't think much about what happens to those shoes next. This article is about exactly that. Where they actually go, why donation and recycling don't solve the problem the way most of us assume, and what a genuinely biodegradable shoe changes about the whole equation.
How many pairs of shoes does a child actually go through?
A child's foot can grow up to half a size every two to three months during the toddler years, and roughly a full size per year through early elementary school, according to data from the American Podiatric Medical Association. Stack that growth rate across a typical childhood and the number of pairs adds up fast. Most kids will go through somewhere in the range of fifteen or more pairs of shoes by the time they turn ten, not counting boots, sandals, or sport-specific shoes.
That's not a brand trying to make a dramatic statistic sound bigger than it is. It's just what happens when feet grow the way children's feet grow.
Where do outgrown shoes actually end up?
The honest answer is: mostly landfill, even when parents have good intentions.
Donation has real limits. Charities and consignment shops are selective about footwear condition for hygiene reasons, and shoes that are scuffed, creased, or showing wear, which is the case with most outgrown kids' shoes, often don't make the cut. Many donation bins explicitly state they can't accept worn children's shoes at all.
"Recyclable" doesn't mean recycled. Most conventional kids' shoes are built from several bonded materials. Synthetic uppers glued to foam midsoles, glued to rubber or synthetic outsoles. Separating those layers for recycling is labour-intensive and, in most municipal recycling systems, simply doesn't happen. A shoe that's technically made of "recyclable" components rarely gets recycled in practice, because the infrastructure to actually do it is rare and expensive to access.
Hand-me-downs only delay the inevitable. Passing shoes to a younger sibling or a friend's child is a great option while it lasts, but it only adds one more child's worth of wear before the shoe is still, eventually, disposed of.
So the shoe goes in the trash. Once in a landfill, synthetic materials like PVC, EVA foam, and most rubber-plastic blends can take decades to centuries to break down. As they slowly degrade, they shed microplastics that move into soil and waterways. A shoe your child wore for six months can outlast that entire childhood, several times over.
Why this feels like an unsolvable problem
If you've felt a small pang of guilt throwing away outgrown shoes, you're not imagining it, and you're not alone. It's one of those very specific, very common pieces of modern parenting guilt. The kind that comes from doing something completely normal and necessary (buying your kid shoes that fit) while knowing, somewhere in the back of your mind, exactly where that shoe is going to end up.
The frustrating part is that there's rarely been a real alternative. The choice has always seemed to be: buy cheap, low-quality shoes that wear out fast and get replaced often, or buy expensive, well-made shoes that still end up in the same landfill, just less frequently.
What a truly biodegradable shoe changes
This is the gap I built Little Fierce to close. Instead of asking "how do we make a shoe that lasts forever", which doesn't actually solve anything when a child outgrows a shoe long before it wears out. We asked a different question: what if the shoe was built to safely return to the earth the moment it's no longer needed?
Every material in a Little Fierce shoe was chosen with that end point in mind. The canvas upper and Tencel thread, the plant-dyed organic elastic, and the plastic-free outsole and insole are all designed to break down naturally, the same way a cotton t-shirt or a piece of untreated wood eventually does. When your child outgrows their pair, you don't need to find a donation bin that will take them or hope they get recycled somewhere. You can bury them in soil, in a garden bed or even a backyard compost pile, and let the materials do what natural materials do.
It's a genuinely different end-of-life story than "recyclable" or "made from recycled materials," both of which still usually end in landfill in practice. Biodegradable means the landfill question simply doesn't apply.
Biodegradable Little Fierce kids shoe after placed in soil for 12 months to naturally break down
Thinking about the cost differently
I know $128 is a real number, and it's fair to weigh that against a $30 pair from a big-box store. Here's one way to think about it: across roughly six months of wear, that works out to a little over 70 cents a day. It's less than a coffee, but for a shoe that's handmade by skilled craftspeople in Portugal, free of the toxic materials covered in our guide to what's hiding in conventional kids' shoes, and that won't sit in a landfill for the next several decades after your child has moved on to the next size.
That's not a number I'm asking you to take on faith. It's the actual maths of cost divided by wear, set against an environmental cost that's much harder to put a price on but is just as real.
What to do with the shoes you already have
If you've got a bag of outgrown shoes sitting in a closet right now, you don't need to feel bad about it, and you don't need a biodegradable shoe in hand to do something better than the trash. A few options that are genuinely better than landfill: local shoe donation programmes that specifically accept worn or damaged children's shoes (search for "shoe drive" plus your city, as these are often run separately from general clothing donation), shoe-specific recycling programmes like those run by some athletic brands, or simply offering them up in a local parent group or "buy nothing" community for another family to use.
None of these is a perfect solution to a structural problem. But for the next pair, there's a way to sidestep the problem at the source.
The bottom line
Your child outgrowing their shoes isn't something to feel guilty about. It's just what childhood looks like. But where those shoes go afterwards doesn't have to default to landfill. A shoe built to biodegrade changes the ending of the story, from "sits in the ground for centuries" to "becomes part of the ground." That's the entire idea behind Little Fierce, and it's the reason I spent five years and twelve prototypes getting the materials right before selling a single pair.
Curious about the specific materials and how the biodegrading process actually works? Read our full sustainability commitment, or reach out directly. Yishu, the founder, answers every message personally at yishu@heylittlefierce.com or on Instagram.