Nike has debuted eleven products that integrate sustainability principles with performance innovations. Dubbed Considered Design, the products include shoes, a tee-shirt line, and two jackets. Among the launches: a new and improved Pegasus, a Nike icon and the company's top-selling running shoe.

 

This is an evolutionary, not revolutionary, initiative for Nike. The company has been integrating environmental considerations into its products for going on two decades. It was all the way back in 1990, for instance, that the company introduced its Reuse-a-Shoe program, which recycles shoes into material used for sports surfaces like running tracks. The company has been delivering Considered products since 2005, when it introduced the Considered Boot, which used a single shoe lace woven between the leather parts of the upper, minimizing adhesives and allowing for disassembly.

Considered products have three eco-design elements:

• Less toxics: wherever possible, eliminate toxic substances such as PVC and solvents.
• Less waste: reduce, reuse and recycle. Reduce the amount of materials used to make a shoe, reuse waste back into product and recycle the footwear once it's come to the end of its life.
• More sustainable: increase the use of sustainable products, such as organic cotton, recycled polyester and environmentally-preferred rubber.

Under the Considered Design initiative, these design specifications will be featured in all of Nike's key categories: basketball, running, football (soccer), women's training, men's training and sportwear, as well as in tennis and ACG (All Condition Gear). Nike designers are now expected to make smart, sustainable design choices at the start of the creative process.

Nike has set public targets for its Considered goals. The company aims to have 100% of Nike footwear meet baseline Considered standards by 2011, all apparel by 2015, and all equipment by 2020. Achievement of these goals would cause waste in Nike's supply chain to be reduced by 17%, and the use of environmentally preferred materials to be increased by 20%.

The long-term vision for Considered is a fully closed loop: products that are manufactured using as little material as possible, with those materials then either recycled or safely returned to nature at the end of the product's life. It's an ambitious goal, and to help achieve it Nike is working with The Natural Step, a Swedish non-profit with a rigorous definition of sustainability and an elegant approach to achieving it.

When it comes to its public image, Nike has an unfortunate legacy due to its sweatshop labor practices, which earned the company considerable notoriety in the 1990s (and which have long since been abandoned). Once a brand gets thus branded, it stays that way forever, apparently. Meanwhile, with a whole lot less publicity, Nike has taken a leadership position with regard to technical sustainability. For instance, it is the second largest purchaser of organic cotton in the world, and it has set targets to achieve climate neutrality by 2011 for Nike brand facilities and by 2015 for all Nike, Inc. facilities.

Nike's promotional materials for its Considered Design initiative mostly dodge a very important question: can a consumer products company ever be sustainable? After all, if a company's business model is premised on people buying lots of stuff, how can that possibly be squared with a global community that lives within its limits? Even if Nike reduces waste by 17%, isn't that a dollop of good news mixed in with a mountain of bad?

Nike is actually grappling with this question, albeit communicating about it in a murky, global-corporation sort of way. Remember that the company's long-term commitment is to be 100% closed-loop. If it were to achieve this, it would be a truly sustainable company, assuming it was socially sustainable, too. Nike merits big kudos for this intention. Beneath the fanfare accompanying its Considered Design announcement, it is thinking accurately and honestly about what sustainability actually requires and how to go about getting there.

It's quite a long slog, though, and meanwhile the icecaps are melting. Ideally, Nike would accelerate its commitment to sustainability. I'm not counting on this happening, though.  With the help of its Considered Design shoes, Nike is running as fast as it can.