Lady Autumn Speaks

Innovations~ Reuse a Shoe
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Your old shoes may not run, but they can be run on!

OK, so you spent most of the year outside doing great things for the environment, right?! Well I bet your work shoes are looking more than a little tired by now. Matter of fact, they are probably in dire need of replacement. But what do you do with those tired old shoes? They are probably entirely too nasty from clean-ups through ignored parks, walking the Crop Walk, & helping FOCAS with all of their other events, to donate them to charity. You hate to toss them in the trash because you know they will never biodegrade in your lifetime, so what do you do with them?

Nike & their Nike Grind Partners have developed a solution to the growing problem of discarded shoes, they turn them into something else! Nike now accepts athletic shoes of all brands and grinds them up for use in athletic surfaces. Here is what they do, they accept shoes at various locations and send them to a recycling center to be divided into three components: the rubber outsole, the foam midsoles, and the fabric & leather uppers. Then they grind up the separate components and use them to create surfaces for various athletic fields. The granulated rubber outsoles & factory scrap are made into football, soccer, baseball and weight room flooring. The granulated foam from the shoe midsoles is used to manufacture surfacing tiles for synthetic basketball courts, tennis courts and playgrounds. The granulated fabric and leather is transformed into the padding needed for under hardwood basketball flooring.

According to Nike it takes an average of 3,000 athletic shoes to make one basketball court and 100,000 shoes to make a reuse-a-shoe running track. That is more than twice the number of shoes that run in the NY City Marathon each year! OK, now work the numbers for just a second here, for every 100,000 shoes recycled, it makes approximately 1 - running track, 33 - synthetic basketball, tennis or playground surfaces and the padding for 33 hardwood floored basketball courts! Take about Reduce-Reuse-Recycle! And to top it all off, Nike donated about 100 sports surfaces last year to communities that needed it!

So get together with others and collect up all of your old athletic shoes and take them to a non-profit recycling center to send them to the Nike Grind Program! There are already several donation centers set up in Tennessee: Germantown & Memphis! Just go to http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikebiz.jhtml?page=27&cat=reuseashoe to find the closest location to you! If there is not a collection partner in your area, you can send any number of shoes to us at: Nike Recycling Center, c/o Reuse-A-Shoe, 26755 SW 95th Ave., Wilsonville, OR 97070. (Nike will not accept shoes delivered with postage due)

There are also several donation centers set up in Michigan: Okemos, Lansing, Webberville, Charlotte, Grand Ledge and Bath! Just go to http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikebiz.jhtml?page=27&cat=reuseashoe to find the closest location to you!

This article is original and was researched at the Nike.com website.

© 2003 & 2004~ All Rights Reserved by Lady Autumn