Nike trials shoe recycling programme
Nike has launched a pilot athletic shoe-recycling programme at Laguna Beach, California. Under the Reuse-A-Shoe collection programme, the 9,800 households will be able to take bags of athletic shoes out to the curb along with aluminium cans, newspapers, and other recyclables. Commenting on the scheme, Bill Malloch, strategic director - footwear sustainability, said that the company wants to take responsibility for a product through its entire life. This includes after the consumer has finished using it by offering a recycling option, with shoes in good condition donated to charity.
For this pilot programme, recycled plastic bags were distributed to every Laguna Beach household in May. The bags are designed to hold five to seven pairs of athletic shoes, rubber-banded together, and on garbage collection days, residents simply put the shoe-filled bags out on the curb for pick-up. Once the shoes are collected, the Nike Reuse-A-Shoe programme will sort, clean, cut and grind them up to create a material called Nike Grind.
This is then used in athletic courts, tracks, fields and playground surfaces.
Each year, the Nike Reuse-A-Shoe programme collects and recycles more than two million used athletic shoes (not just Nike, but any brand) a year. Since the beginning of the programme, some 13 million pairs of athletic shoes have been recycled and Nike has donated 70 athletic surfaces to U.S. communities.
