Recycling : From slope to feedstock: Ski equipment recycling is becoming serious business

The ski season ends every spring with a familiar ritual: boots are stowed in cellar storage, skis lean against garage walls, and helmets gather dust on shelves. Some equipment will be sold on or passed along. Most will eventually be discarded — and when it is, it almost certainly ends up as bulky waste or in landfill. For an industry whose product is built from high-performance polymers, composites and metals, that represents a significant and largely unnecessary loss of secondary raw materials. Across Europe, an estimated nine million kilograms of plastic waste from ski boots alone enters the waste stream each year.

That picture is beginning to shift — and the waste management sector has a meaningful role to play in what comes next.

The numbers are striking once you look at them. Worldwide, 3.5 million pairs of ski boots are produced annually from entirely virgin materials and discarded after just three to five years. In Austria alone, over the past five years, around 1.8 million pairs of skis and ski boots, 2.3 million pairs of ski poles and 1.4 million helmets have been sold — and currently treated as bulky waste at the end of their life, thermally recovered rather than recycled.

The materials involved are far from low-grade. Skis combine carbon fibre composites, fibreglass, wood cores, adhesives and metal edges. A ski boot is made of some 120 components, including polypropylene shells, thermoplastic polyurethane liners, aluminium buckles and foam padding — all of which, in principle, can be separated and returned to productive use. The challenge has always been the cost and complexity of doing so.

"The more Austrians separately dispose of their old ski equipment, the greater the volumes will be — and the more attractive recycling becomes," says Gabriele Jüly, President of the VOEB, the Association of Austrian Waste Management Companies. It is the classic circular economy dynamic: scale unlocks viability, but scale depends on infrastructure that does not yet fully exist.

Two recent projects have done much to demonstrate that the technical barriers, while real, are not insurmountable.

The Tecnica Group's Recycle Your Boots scheme, operating across collection points in Austria and twelve other countries, accepts used ski boots of any brand at the point of purchase of new ones. Once dismantled, metals are turned into new buckles and screws, plastics are divided into polypropylene and thermoplastic polyurethane and processed back into pellets, and liner foams are used to create padding for ski slope protection mats. To date, the initiative has collected and recycled around 24,000 pairs of ski boots, saving an estimated 350 tonnes of CO₂ emissions.

The EU-funded LIFE RESKIBOOT project, coordinated by Bulgarian company Grifone, pushed the technical boundaries further still. Over its four-year run, the team collected almost 2,000 used pairs of rental ski boots — double its original target — and recovered around 70% of each boot's plastic for reuse, achieving 99% material purity through a new sorting process developed with technology specialists Plastic Sort. The project diverted 61,500 kg of waste from landfill and avoided an estimated 200 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions. It is projected that 27,000 pairs of recycled ski boots will be commercialised within three years of the project's completion. The work has since inspired a successor initiative, LIFE re_WINTER, which aims to expand the same approach to skis and other equipment.

Encouraging as these results are, boots represent only one part of the challenge. Austria's WINTRUST project — led by ecoplus Kunststoff-Cluster and bringing together manufacturers including Atomic, HEAD, Fischer, Blizzard-Tecnica and LEKI alongside recycling companies and research institutions — is working on recycling solutions for the full spectrum of ski hardware. Equipment is categorised into four use cases — skis and bindings, ski boots, helmets and poles — with collection running in the pilot regions of Pinzgau and Pongau.

The project's most technically demanding work concerns skis themselves, where there is little prior experience to draw on. Many materials in skis and bindings are bonded with robust adhesives to form durable composites that cannot be separated mechanically by shredding and require chemical dissolution — a significant challenge, particularly for epoxy adhesives where conventional methods such as heating or acid treatment may either fail or damage the remaining materials. Three departments at the Montanuniversität Leoben are contributing polymer processing and composite expertise, while a life cycle assessment runs continuously throughout the project rather than retrospectively — enabling real-time evaluation of both ecological and economic feasibility.

Werner Kruschitz, Head of the VOEB Plastics Focus Group, is measured but confident: "Recycling ski equipment is no longer a distant ambition — the first promising results from the project give us real confidence. The critical next step is for the ski industry to actively adopt these recyclates and integrate them into new products."

For operators in the waste and resource management sector, the emerging picture is one of gradual but real progress towards a new material stream. The feedstock volumes are significant, the material quality is recoverable, and the research pipeline is advancing. What is still missing is the systematic collection infrastructure that would allow this material to be channelled efficiently rather than lost to residual waste or thermal recovery.

The VOEB is directing consumers towards existing civic amenity sites and materials collection centres as the first step — ensuring that at least the volumes begin to accumulate. Some sports retailers are also establishing their own take-back points. But as the Recycle Your Boots and LIFE RESKIBOOT projects illustrate, the most effective models combine dedicated collection with clear downstream processing routes and end-market commitments from manufacturers.

As Werner Kruschitz also notes, the most resource-efficient option remains using equipment for as long as possible. Reuse, resale and donation schemes — already well established in Austria through online marketplaces and club swap meets — should sit at the top of the hierarchy. But for the equipment that reaches genuine end of life, the groundwork for a functioning circularity loop is now being laid. The waste management sector would do well to be ready when it arrives.