Babson Student Business Aims to Bring Shoes to the World
Greensole is a Babson graduate student business making a social impact by recycling discarded shoes and creating comfortable footwear for communities in need.
Greensole is founded by Babson graduate student, Shriyans Bhandari MS’16, a long distance runner that saw an issue with how many shoes he was discarding, and Ramesh Dhami. In 2016, Greensole hit their milestone of helping 10,000 people in need and have set a goal of helping 50,000 people through the end of this year with the help of their fundraising campaign.
Help Greensole make a greater impact
About Greensole
More than 350 million pairs of shoes are discarded each year and when incinerated each pair generates on average 30 lbs of emissions into the air. While these shoes are being thrown away, there are 1.5 billion people in the world that are infected by disease contracted through unprotected feet. As runners themselves, Greensole saw an opportunity to fix these problems.
Greensole refurbishes discarded shoes into comfortable footwear and provides them to people most in need. They have been recognized by President Obama, Sir Ratan Tata and have been featured in many media outlets.
Their vision is to recycle discarded shoes with an absolutely minimum carbon footprint, to give livelihood to the underprivileged sections of society and to ensure that everyone in the world will have shoes by 2023.