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.