Transcript for:
Nike's Sustainability and Innovation Journey

Hey guys! Welcome to the Nike YouTube channel. My name is Brinkley and I am a Nike Eken and today we are going to talk to a lot of cool guests about sustainability and innovation.

Stay tuned for more! Hey guys, what is up? My name is Brinkley and I'm here at the Nike New York headquarters and we have Shawna Hanna here, who is the VP of Sustainable Innovation at Nike.

And oh my gosh, we're thrilled to have you. Thank you. Can you...

Can you tell us about Nike's commitment to sustainable innovation and really what that means? Our goal is always to make athletes better and to make the world better for athletes. Nike's a big company and we have a big responsibility to be combating climate change at every chance that we have.

And for innovation, that means us thinking about all the decisions that we make early in the process all the way through to the end of the life of the product. Awesome. So when we were chit-chatting a little bit earlier, you mentioned circularity design. Can you go into that a little bit more? It really means thinking about the product end-to-end and all the lives that the product can have.

At the very beginning of the process, the designers are really thinking about what materials are we choosing. And let's choose recycled materials as often as we can. So that makes a little circular loop right there. Then as we also think about think about design and we're trying to design out waste at every chance that we can so that means at the very beginning can we use less material or can we pattern our product in such a way that we eliminate the waste and then we also want to think about when an athlete is finished with their product we want them to give it back to us through reuse a shoe because we will grind those shoes up yeah and we'll turn it into a basketball court see on the metal stand jacket and pant even the swooshes have grind in them no way yeah so we're trying to use our product and give them multiple lives. How cool is that?

At Nike, we have this thing that's called Move to Zero. Can you kind of explain this program and what it means to the brand? If we think about climate change and how we're actually going to combat it, we have to prioritize what we do and the decisions that we make.

So we're prioritizing carbon and waste. We want to get to zero carbon. Carbon is the lead contributor to climate change.

And we need to be thinking about our carbon footprint in everything we do. The biggest part of our carbon footprint and materials. So we always want to be using recycled materials as often as we can. We'd love to use zero carbon materials.

And that's where, when you see Space Hippie, you can see a lot of materials. Stay tuned for a video later. That have already been used and we're using them again.

You have a very important job, Shawna. Wow. I have a very fun job.

How do we take sustainable innovation to scale? One of the best things that Nike does is take innovation to scale. Yeah.

So a couple of examples are in this. VaporMax 2020 shoe. The first is air.

We create the air soles in a facility that runs on 100% renewable energy and when we form the air soles any scrap that's left over we take that scrap and we put it right back into a new material. Wow. So every time you see an air sole you have at least 50% recycled content in it. Yeah. And the way we've created the VaporMax 2020 it has 70% recycled content in it.

And then on the upper is Flyknit. Flyknit is also a big platform for us and that is made with 100% recycled polyester. And you know through knit when we knit the upper we aren't piecing things together, we're not sewing things together.

We knit it all at once and engineer all the performance into it, but it results in very little waste. The VaporMax 2020 is the perfect embodiment of performance and sustainability all in one. So how does the work that you do impact our athletes directly?

We know that climate change is affecting our athletes every day. It's affecting how, when, and where they train. So they really have to be thinking about the extreme heat. If the air quality is not good, they have to think about, hey, when can I be going outside at a different time when it's better? They're feeling it and they're telling us that it's affecting what they're able to do.

So we want to... Be able to combat climate change in every way we can because when we make the right decisions, we bring the innovations to scale, then we have this big impact on athletes and the world. I love that. Thank you so much for being here.

We really, really appreciate it. And if you viewers love this video just as much as I do, please like and subscribe to the Nike YouTube channel and we look forward to seeing you guys again soon. Thanks guys.