Nike Grind
Encyclopedia
Nike Grind is part of Nike
Nike, Inc.
Nike, Inc. is a major publicly traded sportswear and equipment supplier based in the United States. The company is headquartered near Beaverton, Oregon, which is part of the Portland metropolitan area...

's Reuse-A-Shoe program that was started in 1993. The purpose of the program is to eliminate waste and close the loop on Nike's product lifecycle by collecting post-consumer, non-metal-containing athletic shoes of any brand, including Nike shoes that are returned due to material or workmanship defects.

Once collected, the sneakers are ground up and separated into three distinct types of material: rubber
Rubber
Natural rubber, also called India rubber or caoutchouc, is an elastomer that was originally derived from latex, a milky colloid produced by some plants. The plants would be ‘tapped’, that is, an incision made into the bark of the tree and the sticky, milk colored latex sap collected and refined...

 from the outsole, foam from the midsole and fabric from the shoe's upper. Nike and its partners (Atlas Track & Tennis, Playtop, Training Ground, Everlast and Rebound Ace
Rebound Ace
Rebound Ace is a cushioned tennis hardcourt composed of polyurethane rubber, fiberglass, and other materials on top of an asphalt or reinforced concrete base...

) take the granulated rubber and create soccer, football
American football
American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

, baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...

 fields, weight room flooring and running tracks. The first synthetic turf soccer field installed with Nike Grind rubber was Douglas Park in Chicago. That surface was donated by Nike and the U.S. Soccer Foundation.
Nike uses the granulated foam from the shoes for synthetic basketball
Basketball
Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules...

 courts, tennis
Tennis
Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...

 courts and playground surfacing tiles. The granulated fabric from the shoe uppers becomes the padding under hardwood basketball floors.

These programs are located in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, and United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

Processing

There are two Nike Grind processing plants, one located in the United States and the other in Belgium. The American facility uses a "slice and grind" technique, where each shoe is cut into three slices that contain the main materials. These slices are fed through grinders and purified to become the different types of material. The Belgian facility grinds the shoes whole, and passes the resulting material through a series of separators for the same three groups of material.

External links

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