Sportswear giant Nike received over 600 applications from 58 countries for its Circular Innovation Challenge, which challenged designers, engineers and scientists to close the loop in footwear waste. Submissions had been invited to send ideas on what can be made from footwear material waste and how the footwear recycling process can be improved to ensure that higher quality, more versatile resources are created from footwear-related waste.
Selected as finalists have been invited to create either new products using Nike Grind, a palette of premium materials (rubber, foam, fibre, leather and textile blends) recovered in the footwear manufacturing and recycling process, or to improve upon the Grind recycling process itself. Among the winning entries are Yogo, pictured, a unique line of yoga accessories developed with an assortment of Nike footwear waste by Jessica Thompson from San Francisco.
Other winners included Brian Riise and John Gysbers who 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 are said to have the potential to improve the purity of the material outputs that come from the Nike Grind process.
Solutions from both the Design with Grind and the Material Recovery Challenges are being considered for further development in partnership with Nike, Inc.
