Nike has certainly had a major impact on the planet. The manufacturer of the world’s most popular trainer shoes has often come under criticism for labour conditions where the shoes are made, for SF6 (a mega-potent greenhouse gas called sulphur hexafluoride - 23,000 times more warming than carbon dioxide) that used to be in their Nike Air shoes and the overall environmental impact of all those disposable shoes on the landfills. Business Week reported at the peak of SF6 production in 1997, Nike Air footwear carried a greenhouse effect equivalent to an astonishing 7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide - about as much as the tailpipes of 1 million cars.
However Nike, like most companies that boast billions of dollars in revenue, has been turning over a green leaf. Their innovative Nike Grind Program is reclaiming old shoes and turning them into basketball courts, track surfaces, interlocking gym flooring tiles, playground surfacing, volleyball courts, equestrian surfaces, outdoor tennis courts and fustal fields (...whatever the hell they are). Since 1993 they have collected more than 21 million pairs of shoes for their Nike Grind Program.
Here’s how it works: Nike asks that you bring your worn-out athletic shoes to a Reuse-A-Shoe collection center so that the athletic shoes (not cleated shoes or dress shoes) can be reconfigured into various sports surfaces. In a nutshell, the collected shoes are sent to Oregon (USA) and Meerhout (Belgium) where they are then sliced into three pieces - rubber outsole, foam midsole and fabric upper. These slices are fed through grinders to become three types of Nike Grind athletic surfaces. Most of the surfaces contain between 10-40% of the Nike Grind product.
The following lists which part of the shoes, and an estimate of how many pairs of shoes, go into the various types of athletic surfaces:
Outdoor basketball court (midsole foam): 2,500 pairs
Outdoor tennis court (midsole foam): 2,500 pairs
Full field or soccer pitch (outsole rubber): 50,000 - 75,000 pairs
Mini soccer field (outsole rubber): 10,000-20,000 pairs
Running track (outsole rubber): 75,000 pairs
Playground (outsole rubber): 2,500 pairs
Indoor wood basketball court (upper fabric): 2,500 pairs
Indoor synthetic basketball court (midsole foam): 2,500 pairs
If you don’t live near a Reuse-A-Shoe center, you can still mail your shoes to the centers - however Nike doesn’t pay for that. Perhaps Nike could include a ‘shipping/recycling’ fee in the sticker price so that people can just mail their used trainers back to Nike, or back to a Nike outlet for recycling - that would be a green and responsible Nike corporate policy and something the consumer would agree to.
To find a Reuse-A-Shoe center near you: http://www.nikereuseashoe.com/
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written by wang , March 05, 2011