Outgrown School Shoes or Old Trainers in Leicester?

From school shoes that lasted barely a term to wedding heels worn for one afternoon and wellies caked from a single muddy walk, Leicester homes quietly build up a mountain of footwear that never quite makes it to a charity shop. Anglo Doorstep Collections picks it all up free, straight from your doorstep, anywhere across the city and out to Oadby, Wigston, Birstall and Syston, so those shoes carry on being useful rather than gathering dust at the back of a cupboard. It fits into a wider donating shoes, trainers and boots effort that keeps wearable footwear in circulation instead of in a bin bag.

Why footwear ends up in landfill so easily

The materials behind the problem, and why reuse beats recycling

Roughly 23.9 billion pairs of shoes were made globally in 2024, and most are built to last through wear rather than to come apart again afterwards. A typical pair is glued together from leather, rubber, foam and assorted synthetics bonded in layers that are genuinely difficult to separate once the shoe is finished. That’s a big part of why fewer than 5% of worn-out shoes worldwide are ever recycled, and why an estimated 85% of the pairs thrown away in the UK end up in landfill rather than being processed in any useful way. Given that, a pair simply being worn again by somebody else is by far the better outcome whenever there’s life left in it — recycling genuinely isn’t a realistic fallback for most footwear.

Children in particular grow out of shoes long before they wear them out, so a pair that’s barely scuffed can still give another child months of further use. Across a city the size of Leicester, with a population of around 355,000, that adds up: one household’s outgrown school shoes or barely-worn trainers can be exactly what another family needs, and multiplying that across thousands of doorsteps in Leicester, Oadby, Wigston, Birstall and Syston turns everyday donations into something with real reach, far beyond what any single bag could manage alone.

Getting a pair ready to go

Simple preparation that helps your donation move on smoothly

What we can take, and what happens next

Condition matters more than brand or size

Trainers, heels, sandals, slippers, boots and wellies are all welcome regardless of brand — high-street trainers sit alongside designer heels worn twice, walking boots, and football boots a child has outgrown. Size genuinely doesn’t matter either, from toddler wellies to adult boots; what matters is condition. If a pair is clean, dry and still wearable, it’s worth donating rather than binning, whatever its age or style. Anything that’s falling apart, soaked through or genuinely beyond wear isn’t something we can pass on usefully, and the better route for those is your household waste collection — Leicester City Council’s guidance covers this if you’re ever unsure where a pair belongs.

Once collected, wearable shoes are sorted and given a second life with someone who’ll actually use them, while raising funds for good causes along the way — a more satisfying outcome than a pair sitting unworn in a cupboard, and considerably better for the planet than them ending up in landfill or being replaced before their time, given the materials, energy and roughly 14 kg of CO2 that go into manufacturing each new pair.

If you’re in the middle of a house move, a footwear clear-out is one of the easiest wins — boots and trainers rarely survive the packing-unpacking cycle intact anyway, and donating what you won’t be taking with you is far simpler than finding space for it in a van. It’s also worth checking the loft, the shed, under the stairs and the back of wardrobes while you’re at it, since odd shoes have a habit of turning up in places people forget about entirely, long after everything else has supposedly been sorted.

More to donate from the same visit

One booking can cover far more than footwear

A footwear clear-out often turns up other things worth donating at the same time. We also collect clothes, linen and towels, books, toys, household items and kitchenware across Leicester, all on the same visit, with no need to book separately for each category. You can check the full list of places we cover on our collections near you page, or see everything we collect across Leicestershire.