Using recycled materials is a better route to reducing the environmental impact of Nike's products than designing for disassembly, the sportswear brand's chief designer officer Martin Lotti says in this interview.
Sitting down with Dezeen at the unveiling of Nike's footwear collection for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Lotti suggested that the priority for his designers should be focusing on sustainability measures that can be applied to the company's vast manufacturing output.
"I want to make sure that we don't just create concept cars"
"The biggest area where we can have an impact in the amount of products we create is how we choose materials," he said. "So 80 per cent of the impact that we can have on sustainability in our products is what materials we choose." For shoes in particular, design for disassembly is becoming a hot topic among advocates of a circular economy ? where waste is eliminated and materials reused.
Almost all shoes are currently impossible to separate into their constituent materials at the end of their life, meaning they cannot be recycled and instead head to landfills where they take decades to decompose.
Nike is the largest shoe manufacturer in the world, reportedly producing around 800 million pairs a year.
It has previously experimented with design for disassembly via the glueless IPSA Link and IPSA Link Axis trainers, unveiled in 2022. Since 1992 it has also operated Nike Grind, a project to repurpose waste materia...