All Heart And Sole

GreenSole refurbishes discarded sports shoes into slippers for underprivileged kids, thus reducing waste as well as its carbon footprint.

- Kathakali Chanda

Ramesh Dhami, 22, had reached Mumbai from a village in Uttaranchal in 2006 as a pre-teen to become an actor. Homeless and penniless for several months, he was taken in by an NGO, where he started running as a recreational activity. Udaipur resident and marathon enthusiast Shriyans Bhandari, 23, had come to Mumbai in 2012 to complete his undergraduate studies. Every evening, he would meet Dhami at Priyadarshini Park, on Napean Sea Road, and train under a coach. Hardcore running would wear out their shoes in a few months and, every year, the duo ended up discarding three to four pairs.

Dhami, who spent much of his childhood without shoes, picked up one such torn pair that had its soles intact, and, with some rubber strips added to the sole, made a pair of slippers out of it. When Bhandari saw that, he sniffed an idea that could be scaled up. “About 35 crore pairs of shoes are discarded every year globally, adding to landfill. This is in contrast to the World Health Organization’s estimates of about 1.5 billion people, about 24 percent of the world’s population, who go shoeless and pick up soil-transmitted infections. This could be the solution,” says Bhandari.

Dhami and Bhandari started small in 2013, when they put up a box at Priyadarshini Park to collect discarded shoes. They followed up an hour of running with half an hour of brainstorming, which resulted in a bunch of refurbished shoes that they donated. “However, as a business idea, it gained traction soon. In one month, we were selected among the top 30 innovators by the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India, Ahmedabad. We won other design and sustainability competitions too [the IIT-Bombay Eureka competition and the Ridea National B-plan] from where we won a few lakhs. Now we had to spend and innovate,” says Bhandari.