Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe Program Turns Shoes Into Playgrounds

By Carol Johnson

When people outgrow their athletic shoes, they often donate them to charity or thrift stores for someone else to get some wear out of. But when shoes are too worn out or ratty to be any good to anyone, what can you do with them other than use them as dog chew toys? Unfortunately, most old shoes end up on trash heaps or in landfills.

Over a decade ago, Nike began to look for a way to make something useful out of old athletic shoes instead of just throwing them away. The company’s long-term commitment to help increase the physical activity of young people played a big part in helping them figure out innovative alternatives to the dump. They came up with a terrific idea, and Nike's Reuse-A-Shoe program was born.

Nike realized that one of the achievable ways to close the loop on a product’s lifecycle is to reuse it to make a new product. In the case of athletic shoes, all of the components used to make the shoes can be reused to make sports and play surfaces to help kids get active and improve their lives. So the company developed a way to take old, tired, worn-out footwear and convert them to basketball courts, tennis courts, athletic fields, and running tracks.

In 1993, Nike began collecting shoes—both Nike shoes returned due to a material or workmanship flaw, as well as post-consumer, non-metal-containing athletic shoes of any brand. They took the footwear and tore it up to separate the materials into three categories—upper fabric, midsole foam, and outsole rubber. Each category of material was ground up and processed into what they company calls Nike Grind material. There are three distinct types of this material, each of which is used in a different way to make new sports surfaces, like soccer and football fields, running tracks, basketball and tennis courts, and playground surfacing.

Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe program also employs recycled materials from recycling centers in contract factories located in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Their Reuse-A-Shoe program is being expanded around the world, with programs already established in the U.K., Australia, and Japan. Collection efforts will continue to grow, gathering up millions of shoes that will ultimately be converted into places where kids can play and get fit.

Reuse-A-Shoe is an integral part of Nike GO, Nike’s long-term commitment to promote healthier lifestyles for kids through increasing their physical activity. Since the Reuse-A-Shoe program began over 13 years ago, Nike has helped to construct more than 170 sport and activity surfaces to communities around the world. The surfaces have been donated in places where kids wouldn’t otherwise have access to high-performance sports surfaces—so not only does the environment win by fewer shoes being thrown away, children around the world win even bigger by having places to play, exercise, and stay healthy.