Footwear
Oct 09, 2022
by James Roberts
Recycle Your Old Nike Kicks and Start Planting Trees
by James Roberts
Oct 09, 2022

Recycling goods and disposing of products in more sustainable ways should be easy. It shouldn’t be a hassle to find where to drop off an old pair of sneakers or where to recycle your worn-out garms. Really, it should be as easy as buying new stuff in the first place.

Nike’s Recycle-A-Shoe program is now available in the Alipay app for consumers in China. With just a few taps on your phone, you can have your used Nike kicks collected. The shoes will be taken away, dismantled and re-processed into Nike Grind, a post-industrial material that is used to make basketball courts, soccer fields, running tracks, yoga equipment and interior decoration.

When a consumer recycles their sneakers using this program, they’ll receive virtual green energy points in Alipay Ant Forest. These green energy points can be used to support real-world tree planting, ecological restoration of biodiversity conservation projects.

Recycle-A-Shoe has been around for 30 years but this brings the program to a wider audience and makes the whole process super simple. In those 30 years, Nike says that more than 30 million pairs of worn-out shoes and over 120 million pounds of footwear factory materials have been recycled and transformed.

“The innovative cooperation with Ant Group allows Nike’s Recycle-A-Shoe program to reach more consumers through digital solutions on the Alipay platform and incorporates Nike’s sustainability efforts into daily life, which is our long-term commitment,” said Stanley Chang, Vice President of Operations and Logistics of Nike Greater China.

If you’re not in China, you might be able to meet B.I.L.L. instead, a robot that cleans and repairs sneakers.