Nike starts selling returned shoes

Nike will be giving a new lease of life to returned shoes: the apparel manufacturer is going to patch up returned shoes and sell them as ‘refurbished’.

Step towards circularity

Shoes that customers returned to Nike within sixty days after sale – the brand’s return policy – will be sold as refurbished shoes, which also have a return period of sixty days. The shoes will be polished when necessary and given a score: Nike distinguishes between products that are as good as new, items with slight traces of use and shoes that have a cosmetic fault, like small damages made during the manufacturing process. Initially, these refurbished shoes will be available in fifteen American stores, but the company intends to expand the range quickly.

However, there is not yet a real second-hand offer: items older than sixty days will be donated to charities if possible, or will go through Nike’s shoe shredder. The machine grinds the shoes into ‘Nike Grind’, a rubber mixture of fibres and plastics that can be used as a raw material for synthetic flooring, new shoes and sports fields. 

The initiative is part of the sustainability efforts of the label, which aims to become completely waste-free and climate-neutral. To achieve that, Nike wants to extend the life of products and make them as circular as possible.