Carnival Cruise Line Has a New Plan for Guests’ Forgotten Shoes

Carnival Cruise Line is making another push towards its sustainability goals with a new recycling initiative. In an effort to reduce waste left behind by guests, the cruise line is partnering with the Miami-based company Sneaker Impact.

Sneaker Impact focuses on keeping unwanted footwear out of landfills through reuse and recycling. This mission will now expand across Carnival’s U.S. fleet in Sneaker Impact’s first-ever partnership with a cruise line.

Carnival will collect unclaimed shoes left behind by guests, as well as any donated by guests or crew, and send them to Sneaker Impact’s Miami facility. Once in the hands of the company, the shoes will be evaluated to determine their best and most sustainable path.

For shoes that are no longer fit for wear, Sneaker Impact breaks them down into their raw materials. That material is then reused in the manufacturing of other products, such as athletic surfaces, yoga mats, and even new shoes.

Not all shoes are recycled in this way, however. Shoes in good condition are sold by the company at a discounted rate to small businesses in developing regions. This generates income while providing affordable shoes in areas where access may be limited.

“We’re always looking for new ways to reduce waste and strengthen our sustainability efforts,” said Benton Lobo, Carnival’s VP of compliance and environmental operations.

“In July, with just five of our ships offloading shoes, we kept more than 500 pairs out of landfills in a single month.”

Carnival has high hopes for this initiative once scaled across its entire fleet.  The cruise line estimates the initiative has the potential to give a second life to around 50,000 pairs of shoes.

Cruise Guests Leave A Lot Behind

In the midst of the fun and excitement of a cruise, guests tend to leave a lot of items behind. The scale of Carnival’s lost-and-found operation highlights the need for such a partnership.

Cruise Hive covered an October 2025 post by Carnival Brand Ambassador John Heald that offered a behind-the-scenes look at the scale of the problem. The video shared by Heald shows the crew of the 2,980-guest Carnival Conquest processing boxes full of items left behind on a single cruise.

In a previous post from October 2024, Heald showed the full scale of the cruise line’s lost-and-found operation in a four-minute video. In both videos, shoes were among commonly abandoned items shown.

Heald estimates that the cruise line processes around 1,000 lost or forgotten items every week. While Carnival makes every effort to return these lost belongings, many go unclaimed. The new partnership gives the cruise line an alternative to disposing of some of those items.

Carnival Continues Sustainability Push

The partnership with Sneaker Impact is the latest move by Carnival towards a sustainable future. Carnival Cruise Line’s parent company, Carnival Corporation & plc, aims to achieve carbon-neutral operations by 2050.

The cruise line has recently made other pushes to reduce its carbon footprint. In 2021, the 180,800 gross-ton Mardi Gras became the first Carnival Cruise Line ship to utilize LNG power. 12 ships in Carnival Corporation’s fleet are currently LNG-equipped, with plans to expand to seven additional ships by 2033.

As Cruise Hive recently reported, the cruise line has also begun testing Jotun’s HullSkater aboard Carnival Pride. The hull-cleaning robot aims to improve fuel efficiency by preventing marine growth from accumulating on the ship’s hull.

Compared to other considerations such as fuel consumption, forgotten shoes are a relatively small piece of Carnival’s environmental footprint. However, the partnership with Sneaker Impact shows how Carnival’s sustainability efforts are extending to smaller sources of waste across its operations.