Nike Gone Green

Everyone knows Nike and what this company has been able to accomplish over the years. From Bill Bowerman creating the first running shoe with his waffle maker, to a shoe that simulates walking barefoot, to a shoe that plays music through your ipod according to your pace. Nike has thought of it all. Even yet they think of more.

For the "sneaker- heads" out there, Nike has come out with another shoe for the infamous line of the Jordan brand. The next shoe in the line is the Jordan XX3. With each new Jordan shoe, Nike pulls out something amazing from their sleeves. The Jordan XX3 perk is that it is eco- friendly. Now, all shoes are manufactured with many toxic adhesives, and it's very difficult not to. But Tinker Hatfield, designer of the Nike Air Jordan shoes, has found a way to create a shoe with almost complete recycled materials without those chemicals

Hatfield and his design team in Beaverton, Ore., prioritized designing a shoe that would cut down on toxic chemical adhesives and wasted material. They used material derived from the waste of manufacturing footwear outsoles, as well as materials from recycled used sneakers—known as "Nike Grind," a tactic the company has used since 1993. To push the design even further into green territory, they designed the Air Jordan XX3 with an outsole, midsole, and other elements that fit and hold together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, without relying solely on glues.

"We didn't completely eliminate adhesives, but came close," Hatfield says. The design team also developed a proprietary, water-based bonding process to reduce the use of chemical cements and glues. The company says it's the first time this system was used on any Nike performance footwear.

Now the question of whether Nike has crossed the line of caring more about the look of the shoe and the environment over their whole purpose of being a shoe company, the quality of a shoe, arises. People will start to ask if sacrificing those minor chemicals to create a shoe is really worth a shoe busting while playing a championship basketball game and possibly getting hurt. Well in my opinion, Nike has always been about the quality of a shoe before anything else. All the looks and environment friendly stuff is something that is added for profit after the fact of a stable shoe is made. If you can make a quality shoe and help out our failing environment even a little bit, why wouldn't you?

But, be it from concerns of tampering with a proven branded success or fears of a backlash from consumers tired of "greenwashing," executives chose to focus on the performance of the shoe. Its green factor is an added bonus. Nike does not release specific sales figures for any of its lines, but it suggests that despite the hype, green is not in and of itself enough to provide the sales figures the company requires from its product lines. "Being green isn't enough," says Hatfield, who oversaw the design of the Air Jordan XX3. "We want to be a change agent, but also profitable and [to] make good business moves."

I chose this article mainly for the reason that I plan on working for Nike in the future. Sports has been my whole life ever since I can remember, and now that football is getting harder to move on to the next level I have to think about what I am going to do after it's all over. Because sports has never left my side, why not keep it there even after I''m done playing. I want to work with athletes and be an innovator like my some of my family that works there.

It helped to pick the article, also, because Tinker Hatfield is my uncle.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2008/id20080125_828346.htm