By Deirdre Robert
Posted on July 6, 2010. Listed in:
Football club Arsenal have announced they will trade in their red shirts for something a little on the greener side next season. But don’t worry, the change doesn’t signal a change to the physical colour of the famous arsenal strip – it’s more about what goes into making the shirt.
The new shirts are made from none other than recycled water bottles that are sourced from landfill sites in Japan and Taiwan. Plastic bottles in these landfills can take an astonishing 500 years to decompose.
The bottles are then melted down to produce a new yarn that is converted to fabric for the jerseys. This process saves raw materials and reduces energy consumption by up to 30 percent compared to manufacturing virgin polyester.
Nike says the this process has saved almost 13 million plastic bottles from going to landfill sites – that’s 245, 000 kg of polyester waste. Or, put in soccer terms, that’s enough bottles to cover over 29 football fields.
But Arsenal aren’t the first team to receive the recycled bottle treatment. At this year’s World Cup shirts worn by Brazil, Portugal, The Netherlands, USA and Australia were also made from recycled materials. Replica fan shirts are also made from the recycled materials.
So what’s behind Nike’s conscious football attire? It’s all part of their ‘Considered Design’ programme, quoted by Nike as “ [their] ongoing commitment to design without compromise – either to performance or the planet.”
The programme covers the categories of waste reduction, environmentally friendly materials, solvent use, and sustainable innovation. The ins and outs of the programme can be read here.
In January this year Nike, along with 10 other organisations (Best Buy, Creative Commons, IDEO, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Nike, nGenera, Outdoor Industry Association, salesforce.com, 2degrees, and Yahoo!) announced the launch of the GreenXchange (GX), a Web-based marketplace where companies can collaborate and share intellectual property (IP) which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.
With GreenXChange, organisations are encouraged to share their IP in order to fast-track the development of innovative solutions to sustainability challenges.
Don Tapscott, co-author of “Wikinomics” and chairman of nGenera Insight, helped incubate GreenXChange and says it makes sense for companies to share some of their intellectual property.
“The GreenXchange is the new commons and by applying open innovation to sustainability it will contribute not just to the heath and well being of our planet but also to the cost control and competitiveness of its member companies,” says Tapscott.
One example used to illustrate how the IP system could work is with Nike’s rubber. Used in Nike footwear the rubber contains 96 percent fewer toxins than the original formulation. By licensing the technology on GreenXChnage it could be used in another company’s footwear, or it could hypothetically be used by Mountain Equipment Co-op for bicycle inner tubes. In this way Mountain Equipment Co-op could bring a greener product to market more quickly and cheaply than it could on its own.
To read (and watch) more about GreenXChange click here.
