Nike Grind and Awarding Creative Solutions for Footwear and Manufacturing Waste

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The new, sustainable applications — from street-safety products to rock-climbing holds — are being considered for further development in partnership with Nike, Inc.

Source: Nike Awards Six Creative Solutions for Footwear and Manufacturing Waste

When you walk into a Nike Clearance Store you will find place throughout the facility tall cans that look like trash bins with a drawing of a track on the top of them. Most people ignore them. These bins have been around for years and they have been the source of fields and tracks. The name of that program that takes shoes and recycles the rubber is Nike Grind. Nike Grind has been updated and now includes the Circular Innovation Challenge.

The Nike Circular Innovation Challenge called on designers, engineers, scientists and makers to join us in creating a more circular future. Specifically, we challenged solvers around the world to partner with us in addressing two questions:

Nike recently awarded 6 Solutions, “Five groups won the Design with Grind Challenge, and one group was awarded for its Material Recovery fix.”
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Yogo by Jessica Thompson was one of the Nike Grind awardees

The Material Recovery winners were, “Brian Riise and John Gysbers (of SuMaRec) identified two new phases that could be added to the standard Nike Grind material recovery process: an additional material separation step that divides outputs based on their weight, and an extra material-grinding step. Together, these steps have potential to improve the purity of the material outputs that come from the Nike Grind process.”

Why is this important? With recent reports that global warming issues now have finite timeline for affecting our standard of living, a company that produces so much footwear has a responsibility to offset a problem they are generating.

As much as we love footwear and admire the design, sneakers are redundant. You only need one pair of shoes at a time… at the most you need three (casual, exercise, dress). Nike’s promotion of their sustainability solutions is marketing, but it’s necessary. To learn more about what the Swoosh is doing to help offset a serious issue, click here.

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