Eliminating Waste

Reducing waste is essential to NIKE minimizing our impact on the world’s finite natural resources. By integrating waste reduction strategies into product design, packaging, manufacturing and headquarters, we are optimizing use of materials to reduce our total waste footprint. Our teams design out waste from the beginning by using lower-waste materials, improved pattern efficiency and minimizing high-waste processes. We are exploring how to create our most popular products with the same experience consumers seek and less waste. We are reducing packaging waste in collaboration with our supply partners, leveraging new approaches and packaging innovation across our supply chain and in the customer experience.

While we work first to reduce our waste footprint through design and circular business models, there are areas where waste is still produced throughout the supply chain. We are focused on addressing this by maximizing diversion from landfill and working to achieve an 80% recycling rate. We continue to drive incredible progress, with 98% of waste from our distribution centers, headquarters and finished goods manufacturing being diverted from landfills. We succeeded in diverting 100% of waste from Tier 1 finished goods footwear manufacturing for the fourth consecutive year and 100% Tier 1 finished goods apparel manufacturing waste for the second year. Approximately 75% of this enterprise-wide diverted waste today is given new life through recycling, while the remainder is used for energy recovery.

Throughout NIKE’s ecosystem, recycling is at the forefront of our practices and actions. In collaboration with manufacturing partners, we continue to make gains in recycling manufacturing scrap back into new NIKE products to reduce pressures on virgin material supply chains and our reliance on alternative sources of recycled material like recycled plastic bottles. 

With external customers around the globe, we have recycled over 147 million pounds of Nike Grind, made from recycled scrap and footwear, since it was established in 1992, and Nike Grind has been transformed into numerous new forms like dumbbells and bumper plates, work gloves and basketball and tennis courts. In FY24, our Textile-to-Textile recycling initiative, which transforms polyester scrap and elements like laces into new material, has collected over 135 tons of high-PET (polyethylene terephthalate) content textile scraps for recycling and reincorporation.

Our goal is to extend the use of our products as long as possible—even after they’ve been used by consumers. In 1995, NIKE launched the Reuse-a-Shoe (RAS) program to offer a collection service in select stores across the United States for consumer’s end-of-life shoes. RAS was NIKE’s first step to helping consumers responsibly retire their product.   

Today, we offer consumers around the world a range of circular services that extend the life of their footwear and apparel and give them access to unique finds. The Recycling & Donation (RAD) service, an evolution of RAS, is now globally available and accepts footwear and apparel. Collected product is first inspected to determine donation eligibility before being sent to recycling channels. Re-Creation locally sources vintage and obsolete NIKE product to create new product collections that are exclusively sold to consumers in the area. Each collection is co-created by a local designer and manufactured locally. Nike Refurbished extends the life of gently worn, like-new or slightly imperfect NIKE footwear and apparel by refurbishing and re-selling the products at select NIKE Factory, Unite and Community stores. Clean and Care tutorials can be found on nike.com in service of enabling consumers to keep their gear in action as long as possible. We continue to develop ways to reuse and recycle gear, reducing waste and protecting the planet.