It's easy being green: can I recycle my old sneakers?

It's that time of year for me. My sneakers are spent and I need to get new ones.  About a year ago, I wrote a post about doing the Nike ReUse A Shoe Program and I'm doing it again. Last week I boxed up my over-worn sneakers (or gym shoes as we used to call them around here) and sent them to the program. They make it easy because you can either drop it off at specific locations, send it in the mail, or like some of the clothing recycling places I found, create a shoe drive for it.

Why would you want to do this? Well I just found out that according to the US EPA, Americans toss out 760,000 tons of shoes and clothes each year. Yikes!  Even though I got a lot of wear out of my old sneakers and they show it, I don't think they belong in a trash dump.  I hopped on Earth911 to see if there are any other programs besides the Nike one and found that if you have any kind of shoe, you can donate it to Soles4Soles.  Hopefully next year, when I do this all again, there will be even more options.