Brand New Shoes: Your Nike Shoes May Be "Reincarnation" Of Plastic Bottles.

Sports brand Nike recently launched a variety of new products, including the Space Hippie series made of environmentally friendly materials. The Nike design team said that the Space Hippie series was built from "production waste". From material selection to production to packaging, every detail will consider the impact of products on the environment and reduce carbon emissions to a very low level.

The Space Hippie series has 4 shoes, each shoe has at least 85% of the upper rPoly fabric. This material is made from recycled plastic bottles and waste T-shirts and residual yarn. The production technology is derived from Nike Flyknit technology. The fabric is light and elastic, and can be attached to the feet like socks.

Rubber soles are made of 15% Nike Grind material, which is recycled from Nike's existing products and raw materials through color matching, processing and other procedures. It is reported that about 71% of Nike's footwear and clothing products are used in Nike Grind materials.

Nike official website screenshot

Nowadays, waste has become an important raw material for Nike sports shoes. The Nike impact report released by Nike shows that 99.9% of Nike's footwear products have been reused in the manufacturing process.

In addition, in 2019, Nike will convert more than 1 billion plastic bottles into renewable materials, making footwear and clothing. Since 2010, Nike has transformed over 7 billion 500 million plastic bottles recovered from landfills and other places. Nike sports shoes are more common Flyknit fabrics, and polyester fibers from raw yarns come from recycled plastic bottles. Some jerseys will also use recycled polyester fibers, Nike for NBA's 2017-2018 season jerseys, each using 20 plastic bottles.

The reason why such environmental protection is so important is not only the responsibility of enterprises, but also the significance of Nike. In recent years, the fashion industry has prospered and become one of the most polluted industries, after oil industry. From raw material acquisition, dyeing and production to logistics and transportation, old clothes treatment, the fashion industry has generated a lot of waste water, carbon emissions and waste of resources. This has led many fashion brands to be on the cusp of public opinion and have to launch corresponding environmental initiatives. Therefore, sustainable fashion has become one of the most important trends in the fashion industry.

The introduction of fully recyclable sports shoes, Adidas wants to terminate the concept of "waste".

The brand of sports shoes has great advantages in the innovation of environmental protection materials, especially the recycling of plastics. In addition to Nike, Adidas announced in 2018 that it plans to use recycled plastics instead of new plastics by 2024. The plan takes several years to transition, because the cost of recycled plastics is 10%-20% higher than that of new plastics. However, as technology matures, the cost will be less and less. In 2018, 50% of the single products sold by Adidas used recycled plastics, of which polyester fibers were used for the production of sports T-shirts and sports shoes because of their light weight and quick drying characteristics.

In Adidas products, the more common environmental protection material is Parley Ocean Plastic, which is recycled from plastic waste from beaches, remote islands and coastal communities. Adidas Parley series is used in this product. In 2016, Adidas launched the first shoe made of the fabric, and later used it to make a uniform for Real Madrid and Bayern Munich team. In addition, the adidas by Stella McCartney product line is also widely used in sustainability.

In 2019, Adidas also launched a fully recyclable sports shoe, Futurecraft Loop. Adidas says the sneakers are "remade and made", and consumers only need to give it back to Adidas to decompose and rebuild, so that they can get a pair of new sneakers. Under normal circumstances, sports shoes contain complex materials and adhesives, resulting in it can not be completely recycled. Adidas said that each component of Futurecraft Loop is made of reused TPU material, and the raw material is spun into yarn, braided, fixed and welded on a shoe by a glue free technology, so that the shoe can be completely decomposed.

Fully recyclable products seem to be the long-term environmental goals of Adidas. Eric Liedtke, executive director of Adidas, the global brand, said: "in the future, our mission will be to terminate the concept of" waste "and improve the environment on which we live. We have such a dream in mind that you can wear the same shoes repeatedly. "

In fact, not only are Nike and Adidas two brands, but other sports brands are also very positive in terms of sustainability. Puma has recently launched a series of sustainable products with First Mile, a recycling organization supporting the poor community. It has used a lot of waste plastic bottles as raw materials. Converse has launched Renew Denim series to recycle jeans as shoe upper materials; Reebok has launched sports shoes made from plants, and uses eucalyptus and algae foam rubber as raw materials. And Allbirds, Rothy 's' and other emerging shoe brands, and sustainable fashion as the brand concept of product design and innovation.

According to the report released by the global fashion search platform Lyst, in early 2020, the search volume of consumer related sustainable fashion increased by 75% over the same period. The search volume for sustainable and recycled sports shoes is also growing. The search volume of some environmental protection yarns has doubled over the same period last year. Lyst predicts that the concept of sustainable fashion will continue to heat up in 2020.

At the same time, sports brand will face more pressure from environmental protection. Now the brand solution is largely based on recyclable materials, and dyeing water, material processing, logistics and transportation, product packaging and other links will still lead to problems that can not be ignored. The road of sustainability in the future is still a long way to go.