divine green: Sustainable Home, Beauty, & Lifestyle

Most sneakerheads don’t know it, but Nike’s newest $235 Michael Jordan shoe could flatter any environmentalist’s wardrobe. The shoe, named XX3 (after the sport star’s jersey number), which goes on sale nationally this month, is made with fewer toxins and produces less waste in the manufacturing process than most sneakers.

Nike’s not hyping that fact in advertising for the last–and most expensive–in its line of celebrated Jordan sneaks for fear that the message would be lost on its core buyers. But the shoe is made with a new technique that requires no chemical solvent to bond fabric to a carbon plate, a first for any basketball shoe, according to Jane Savage, chief sustainability officer at Nike.

“That shoe sends up the flare that you can have a profitable and sustainable shoe,” Savage said while speaking at CompostModern 2008, a recent design conference in San Francisco.

The XX3 is part of bigger push at Nike to make sustainability a priority in 2008. The company, for example, has formulated a sustainability index, a system for measuring the environmental effect of manufacturing any good from start to finish. And Nike has made new commitments to meet high standards in that index. This summer, Nike will launch a new site called Considereddesign.com that aims to describe the backstory of its green products–how they’re made, with what materials, etc. And the company plans to play up new environmentally made products with a green tree logo, as part of its “Considered” line of eco-friendly goods.

To be sure, the company already has a decent pro-environment status–it operates headquarters in an energy-certified (LEED) building in Portland, Ore.; runs Nike Grind, a recycling-and-reuse program for old shoes of any brand; and is the second largest purchaser of organic cotton, behind Walmart. But like most major U.S. manufacturers, it has a long way to go on issues of sustainability–chemical use, waste, energy and worker conditions. Nike, for example, produces enough post-industrial waste annually to fill a train of container cars stretching from Seattle to Portland, Savage said. And when it comes to shoe manufacturing, use of chemicals to bond materials trumps waste. They can be hazardous to workers, and later, the public if they leech into surrounding ground water. Also, Nike was criticized in the 90s for human rights issues with operating factories in China. (It has worked to reverse its those practices, see Makeresponsibility.com.)

But Nike must work on its corporate culture before it can transform into a maker of all-sustainable athletic and outdoor gear, according to Savage. She said that it can be difficult to change design practices across so many disparate product groups and a far-flung company that encompasses brands like Cole Hahn and Converse. That’s why Nike’s Considered, a product line introduced in 2005 without major success, is now a design philosophy at the company. (Considered started as a minimally designed line of goods made with earth-friendly materials sourced within a 150-mile radius of the factory, she said.)

Savage said that the sustainability index is also causing some competition among product groups to achieve “gold” or “bronze” status for their latest creations. The index uses a point system to rate a product based on things like how much waste is produced to make it or its use of chemicals. If a designer creates a shoe using no cement to bind the product, for example, it would earn 35 points in the materials category. If a T-shirt pattern was designed with particular efficiency to avoid waste, that shirt would earn 35 points, too.The idea, which was developed in partnership with other outdoor-gear makers, is to create products using less toxins, less waste and more environmental materials, Savage said. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

The designers of Jordan’s XX3 received a “gold” standard on the sustainability index for its use of reused materials, efficient pattern design and novel bonding techniques, but only because they had complete creative control to get that done, Savage said. More product groups need that creative license to meet Nike’s goals of changing footwear design to score 100 percent bronze by 2011; apparel, 100 percent bronze by 2015; and equipment, 100 percent bronze by 2020. It also aims to be a carbon-neutral outfit by 2015.

It seems like Nike could be more aggressive on its goals (a la “just do it”), but it’s a start.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 10:12 pm and is filed under design, fashion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.