Business case

Producing textile and leather products and processing them into apparel and accessories

Fashion and Textiles

Enacting measures that optimise material use such as 3D printing, etc.

Material efficiency

Solutions at all stages of the textiles value chain.

Zero Waste Textiles

Other

Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

Urban Opportunities

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Based on the work of [Bocken et al. (2016)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309699661_Product_design_and_business_model_strategies_for_a_circular_economy), the Four Flows Framework serves as a simple framework for managing resource flows in a circular economy by using less (Narrow), using for longer (Slow), using again (Cycle), and using clean, regenerative materials and energy (Regenerate).

These different principles of circular economy can be applied to our socioeconomic metabolism: we can design stocks like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and vehicles to be rich resource mines for the future, and design manufactured goods and consumables to be cycled and made regenerative. Furthermore, the focus must also centre on getting more value out of fewer materials. Achieving the aims of a circular economy—minimising material use, regenerating the Earth, and preventing material losses—can be done through these four key strategies mentioned above.

Source: Circle Economy. (2023). *[The circularity gap report 2023](https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023)* (p.22). Amsterdam: Circle Economy. 

Four Flows Framework

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      Knowledge Hub   Challenges   Assessment   About us   FAQ   Blog         Knowledge hub                 Terms & Conditions   Privacy & Cookies         

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Nike

Nike Flyknit technology was developed with a primary goal in mind: create a shoe that delivers peak performance for athletes while reducing manufacturing waste in the process. Thanks to a micro-level engineering process where computer-controlled "knitting" technology shapes the shoe upper by combining strands of polyester yarn.

Nike Flyknit: Material efficient shoe production

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

Reduced use and withdrawal of water and rate of recycling and reuse of water

Save Water (SDG6)

Using materials that can be easily reused or recycled after use

Reusable, recyclable materials and inputs

Using waste materials that have been processed and recycled to produce new products within other industries

Using open loop recycled materials

Designing products to resist damage and wear, and serve a long and useful life.

Design for physical durability

Make collected and sorted recyclables available for use by citizens, small businesses up to large scale industrial processes. 

Use recyclables

Impacts

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At a factory making leather for shoes, 30% of a cow’s hide–and sometimes more–can end up as scraps on the floor, in pieces too small or blemished to be used. Instead of sending the scraps to landfill, Nike is beginning to turn them into a new material.A new pair of shoes made out of the material, called Flyleather, looks and feels like it’s made from premium leather. But the material is made by turning scraps of leather into fibers and then blending those recycled fibers with synthetic ones. (Nike collaborated with the U.K.-based company E-Leather, which uses a similar process to make recycled leather for seats on airplanes and trains, to make a material that would work for its shoes). For Nike, it’s a way to cut one of the largest sources of its carbon emissions; the material, which uses at least half recycled leather, has a carbon footprint 80% lower than traditional leather and uses 90% less water. It’s also lighter than leather, and more durable.“Sustainable innovations are delivering a pipeline of sustainable products and services that unlock competitive advantage.” [Photo: Nike]“Nike believes that sustainability is the world’s greatest innovation challenge,” says Hannah Jones, Nike’s chief sustainability officer and vice president of the company’s innovation accelerator, in an email. “That’s why we’ve made the sustainability team part of our advanced innovation department.”Nike’s Flyknit shoes, for example, which use knitted fabric on upper of the shoe, have reduced more than 3.5 million pounds of waste since they were introduced in 2012. Flyleather can also be produced in a way that avoids as many scraps while cutting, since it is made in rolls rather than having the irregular shape of a hide.“Nike believes that sustainability is the world’s greatest innovation challenge.”[Photo: Nike]The first shoe to be released in Flyleather is the company’s Tennis Classic, along with limited editions of the Air Force 1 and others, as the company explores how to use it across other parts of its line. It’s also something that could presumably be useful for others in the footwear and apparel industries–particularly those who make dress shoes–though Nike doesn’t plan to open-source the technology.“Sustainable innovations are delivering a pipeline of sustainable products and services that unlock competitive advantage,” says Jones. “That means we must hold some ideas close. When a sustainable innovation is competitive, we focus on building innovation partnerships, investing in startups, emerging technologies and new science. We test and prototype solutions, and then we take them to commercial scale.”[Photo: Nike]Other companies are trying to solve the problem of leather production in other ways: Modern Meadow, for example, grows leather in a lab in a process that avoids the cruelty and pollution that come from raising animals for leather. Others are developing plant-based leathers–from pineapple waste, mushrooms, and other sources–that avoid the environmental impact of typical pleather.For Nike, one next step might be figuring out how a Flyleather shoe can be recycled at the end of its life. “Nike’s vision is that our products will be ‘closed loop’–that is, they will use the fewest possible materials and be assembled in ways that allow them to be readily recycled into new products,” says Jones. “Our long-term vision is to create a continuous loop without waste. As a company, we are innovating materials and manufacturing processes as we work towards finding a solution to this complex issue, and exploring how Flyleather can be recycled and reimagined back into new materials in the future.”

Nike's Flyleather shoes look like real leather when in fact the material is made of leather scraps and synthetics to create a less damaging and more durable shoe. Flyleather is created by collecting leftover leather scraps from previous production, processing these into fibers and mixing these recycled fibers with synthetic ones. The material is not only more durable compared to common leather but also reduces the carbon footprint and water consumption significantly. Nevertheless, due to the combination of different materials it could be an obstacle for recycling and reusing the materials for a new shoe.

Mechanical leather recycling

Impact on the ease of innovation, and facilitating uptake of innovations

Innovation

Minimise waste through diversion: Instead of sending waste to landfill, it is redirected into other industrial processes for handling, treatment, recycling, recovery, or reuse in various forms. 

Minimise waste through design: At the outset of a process of project, plan and design such that there is zero waste or minimal waste during production, use, and at end of life. 

Minimise Waste (SDG12)

Designing products to remove any barriers to recycling and enable easy recyclability

Design for recycling

Research and facilitate new technological developments to aid the transition to a circular economy.

Research and Development

 (Photo: Nike’s new Space Hippie footwear collection. Credit: Nike)
Nike started selling sneakers from its new Space Hippie collection this week. The footwear is constructed from factory and post-consumer waste that the sportswear company calls “space junk.”
Space Hippie consists of four different silhouettes: 01, 02, 03, and 04. Nike’s manufacturing process for the footwear uses around 85–90% recycled polyester yarn, recycled foam, and a blended “Crater foam.” The result is a design that has a low carbon footprint, the company said.
Engineered knits in the Space Hippie 02 uppers are created from “Space Waste Yarn” that Nike designer Noah Murphy-Reinhertz described as 100% recycled material including recycled plastic water bottles, T-shirts, and yarn scraps. Combined with other elements in that sneaker design, the upper is 90% recycled content by weight, he added.
“The tooling of all Space Hippie shoes, created with ‘Crater foam,’ is made with a blend of standard Nike foams and 15% Nike Grind rubber,” he explained on the company’s website. “The reduction in virgin material gives a lower carbon footprint.”
Cushioning for the Space Hippie footwear contains recycled ZoomX foam. Nike takes factory scraps from the production of the Vaporfly 4% running shoe and reprocesses that foam in a way that uses about half the carbon dioxide equivalent as typical Nike foams, Murphy-Reinhertz said.
“We believe the future for product will be circular,” Nike’s VP of sustainable innovation Seana Hannah said. “We must think about the entire process: how we design it, how we make it, how we use it, how we reuse it and how we cut out waste at every step. These are the fundamentals of a circular mindset that inform best practices.”
They’re not alone. Other footwear companies are pursuing lower carbon, more circular manufacturing processes. French sneaker brand Veja began shipping again in May and recently introduced a new line of running shoes called Condor that the company said is 53% bio-based and recycled. Last month Adidas and Allbirds teamed up to develop a sports-performance shoe with “the lowest carbon emissions.” 

In the past year, Nike has launched its Space Hippie collection, made from post-consumer recycled material, such as T-shirts or even plastic water bottles. Sustainable innovation is represented as fairly important for the company as they are aiming to implement more circular methods into their designs. Other firms are also following their lead to changing product designs to contribute to better circularity.

Circular shoes by Nike

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This collection has been built by a community of passionate researchers, students, and industry professionals as part of <a href="https://worldcirculartextilesday.com/" target="_blank">World Circular Textiles Day</a> (WCTD). 


World Circular Textiles Day takes place every year on 8th October. Our vision is to galvanise the collective ambitions and goals of people, organisations and businesses to reach a fully circular textiles world by 2050. Our mission is to provide a framework for circularity stakeholders to develop and deliver a collaborative, evolving roadmap and to chart circularity’s momentum annually from the 8th of October until 2050.

What does fully circular by 2050 mean?
- Shared textile resources, in the form of products and raw materials, are kept in **continual circulation**.
- Virgin resources are **replaced with circular materials**.
- Dignity, equity, and equality for the **people** involved in all parts of the circular value chain.

We need to know where we stand today to chart how to get to 100% Circularity by 2050. What circular activity is currently happening in the textiles and apparel industry, and where in the world is it happening? The WCTD Collection aims to answer this question by building the world’s largest digital library of circular textiles case studies. 

World Circular Textiles Day is proud to be supported by our 2022-23 Circular Hero Partners:
[Lenzing](https://www.lenzing.com/), [Texaid](https://retailsolutions.texaid.com/), [Bank & Vogue](https://www.bankvogue.com/), [Usha yarns limited](https://ushayarns.com/), [The Conduit](https://www.theconduit.com/), and [Asia Pacific Rayon](https://www.aprayon.com/en/)

## Want to contribute to the WCTD Collection? Sign up and add your circular textiles activities.

World Circular Textiles Day

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Impact on the availability of resources as well as their effect on living organisms, ecosystems, and components of the environment.

Ecological Impact

Impacts on the financial condition of a company, as well as the the economicconditions of its stakeholders and on economic systems at local, national, andglobal levels.

Economic Impact

Scalability

Reduced use of virgin materials and/or an increase of the use of secondary and bio-based materials

Reduce Material Consumption (SDG12)

Producing and providing business and consumer goods and services

Goods and Services

While resources are in-use, maintain, repair and upgrade them to maximise their lifetime and give them a second life through take back strategies when applicable

Stretch the lifetime

Upgrade, repair, and maintenance while in-use

Maximise lifetime of products in-use

Providing upgrade programmes or upgrade services for products or parts of products

Product upgrade

VISION:
Products and services are designed for multiple use and material value retention, with maximum positive impact.

DETAIL: 
Imagine a time when…products flow via optimal collection and distribution streams into reusable and repairable product platforms. Reuse and access models are dominant, and products are designed for multiple recirculation before biodegrading (if designed to do so), or being broken down into reusable raw materials for production. People only consume what they need. Production and consumption wastes have been fully eliminated and multifunctional, season-less and timeless fashions are the norm, yet still fulfil our human need for expression and creativity without constraint. All business models, organisations, governments and citizens play a role in maintaining a healthy, functioning circular ecosystem.

Products and Services

Slow strategies aim to keep materials in use for as long as possible, for example through design for durability and repairability. A more circular economy is also a slower one: materials, components, and products—and even buildings and infrastructure—that we lock in stocks are made to last. This will lower material demand in the long run, in essence also serving to narrow resource flows.

Slow

Archetypes

CE Materials

Materials

Nace Sectors

Topics

Whilst no two countries are the same, there are still obvious similarities between some of them, with discernible development patterns and parallels in evidence. Common problems and shared solutions help place unique country identities and individual issues in context.

Whilst this classification is far from clear-cut and exhibits some overlap, it does underline how the discourse on transitioning to a circular economy needs to account for both differences and commonalities, if we are to arrive at a more strategic and instructive analysis. It also allows to highlight a set of key themes that are likely to be central to the countries that fall under the respective profiles. 

Country profiles (Build, Grow, Shift)

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A framework to distinguish between different country profiles and their circular transition needs.

It is 2050.  Full systems change has taken place. This wouldn’t have been possible without the immediate action and radical steps taken from 2020 onwards. Many targets had to be identified in the early 2020s and achieved by 2030 to ensure that the 2050 goal happened in full. A sense of urgency, turbo stakeholder collaboration, supportive government regulation and clear, data driven targets enabled the mindsets and systems change needed to transform to a fully circular textiles ecosystem.

A circular economics model underpins what we have created. It reflects and supports a living organism made up of makers, users and restorers, interacting across vibrant and interconnected networks. Checks and balances, alongside transparency and accountability, ensure a healthy system. Financial, environmental, and social metrics have the purpose of serving communities and the planet. There is shared ownership of profit and loss – across all three metrics – throughout the value chain.

This is what we’ve achieved over the last 30 years:

WCTD Themes

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The Circular City Actions Framework provides urban changemakers with five complementary strategies they can use to start working towards a more circular system. 

The framework is action-based to provide users with concrete strategic directions and showcase the desired outcomes of each strategy. 
The framework consists of five complementary **strategies**, under which **sub-strategies** provide further detail. Finally, each sub-strategy consists of a diversity of tangible **solutions** which are framed in relation to key thematic areas. 

Note: solutions are currently focused on:
- 🍏 **Food systems**
- 🏢  **Built environment**
- 👕📱  **Consumer goods**
- ⚡ **Energy Systems**
- 🚌 **Mobility Systems**
- 💧 **Water Systems**

More thematic areas are coming soon...

'Click through each of the five strategy cards below to explore the framework and circular economy case studies in more depth!'



This framework was developed in collaboration with ICLEI, Metabolic and Ellen MacArthur Foundation with support from the MAVA Foundation. Read more about it [here]( https://circulars.iclei.org/action-framework/). 



Circular City Actions Framework

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An action-based framework for local governments working towards circular cities

City Stakeholders

Test Framework

Challenges

Based on the ongoing ISO standardisation process, a taxonomy has been defined under which to cluster indicators to measure circularity. 

ISO Taxonomy

If managed well, the transition to the circular economy will have multiple benefits for the labour market, including the opening up of job opportunities, raising job standards and reducing inequalities through a global redistribution of value. But a positive transition to circularity for work and workers must be underpinned by three pillars: upskilling the workforce, quality of work and inclusive job opportunities. Find out more and explore cases that illustrate these pillars below.

Circular Jobs Initiative Pillars

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A positive transition to circularity for work and workers must be underpinned by three core pillars.

This is a survey that dives into understanding the policy environment around specific circular solutions. 

The survey is divided into five sections, based on the five key elements of the Circular Cities Action Framework. 
Each section asks 2-3 questions to explore which policies may or may not be present within your city to support a transition towards a circular economy. 

You are not alone! Each question provides some practical examples from cities around the world that have adopted a certain policy to support their transition. This can help to compare with your city - is your city doing something similar?

The survey answers should be based on your current knowledge, and not illicit additional research - ! Please make use of the Not sure option as appropriate.


Ganbatte Cities Policy Tracker [Food]

Ganbatte Cities - Policy tracker policy instruments

Policy Tracker - TEST

StoriesImpactCompanyNewsroomStoriesImpactCompanyNewsroom

      Written by Chris Remington	    Published: 27 May 2022        BEAVERTON – Sportswear giant Nike has launched the Re-Creation programme, a new service through which it will restore vintage and deadstock pieces to promote the circular economy. To start with, the brand will clean and repair three hoodie and crew jumper silhouettes, ensuring they’re more durable before they’re resold to secondhand fashion lovers.  John Hoke, Nike’s chief design officer, said: “Nike Re-Creation highlights an exciting moment of experimentation and progression. The programme exemplifies Nike’s collaborative spirit, bringing together experts in design, retail, supply chain and sustainability to strategise and learn.”  Log in or subscribe to see this content   

 Following its Nike Grind, Nike Refurbished, and Nike Recycling & Donation initiatives, the Swoosh introduces a new Nike Re-Creation program as another step toward its circular vision.
According to Nike, the Re-Creation program “locally collects vintage and deadstock pieces, using them to create new locally designed and manufactured products.” The first release from the program will feature a series of fleece hoodies and crewnecks inspired by LA sports culture — dropping exclusively at Nike’s The Grove booth.
Each piece is unique and is restored through manual patchwork, dye patterns, screen-printed graphics, and decorative stitching. “Nike Re-Creation highlights an exciting moment of experimentation and progression,” says John Hoke, Nike’s Chief Design Officer, in a statement. “The program exemplifies Nike’s collaborative spirit, bringing together experts in design, retail, supply chain, and sustainability to strategize and learn.”
The ultimate goal of Nike Re-Creation and its other sustainable initiatives is to move towards a zero-carbon and zero-waste future, as symbolized through its “Move to Zero” pinwheel logo.
Elsewhere, © SAINT M ×××××× shares its latest SS22 offerings. 

The Nike Re-Creation program locally collects vintage and dead stock pieces, using them to create new locally designed and manufactured products.&nbsp;Through this programme, Nike is creating new solutions to advance a circular vision with the ultimate goal of a zero-carbon, zero-waste future.

Nike launching 'Re-Creation' programme to locally collect vintage and dead stock Nike pieces and turn them into new products

Direct and indirect reduction in economic costs

Cost Savings

Reduced use of fossil fuel energy sources and/or increased use of renewable energy

Reduce Energy Consumption

Work together throughout the supply chain, internally within organisations and with the public sector and communities to increase transparency and create joint value

Team up to create joint value

Industry peers to industry peer collaboration to create joint value and identify synergies

Industry collaboration

Working together with industry peers to engage in business activities or exploratory projects that advance the circular economy

Joint industry ventures, projects, pilots

VISION:
Raw materials are renewable, recyclable and safe, kept in continual circulation.

DETAIL:
Imagine a time when…the raw materials that are used to make things are sourced from existing products and regenerative agriculture, via carbon negative and climate neutral processes. Biodegradable raw materials are used for products with biodegradable end routes. Toxic chemicals have been washed out of the global materials pool, disposed of safely and replaced with beneficial alternatives. Virgin fibres made from fossil fuels have been banned, while secondary synthetic fibres, derived from what was already in the system, are kept in constant circulation as a resource. Circularity accounting methods, built on science-based metrics, help to manage a balanced system of resources, across all industries, and in line with the planet’s environmental limits.

Raw Materials and Planetary Boundaries

Nike is a company for whom performance is everything. The company employs 38,000 people globally and last year posted revenues of over $24bn. At the London Olympics, 58 gold medalists were wearing Nike branded garments; their achievements epitomised the standards to which the company aspires in all facets of its operation.This month in London, Nike launched its Making app, a digital tool that shares some of the data the company uses when considering the environmental impact of the materials used in apparel and footwear design. The app provides a mark out of 50 for the 22 materials most commonly used by its designers, using information that is drawn from the Materials Sustainability Index (MSI) that it has developed over the past seven years.Nike estimates that materials make up about 60% of the lifecycle environmental impact of a pair of trainers, whereas the manufacturing process accounts for about 25% and the remainder is split between transport, retail, office facilities, packaging, use and disposal. By targeting and monitoring its approach to land, energy and chemical use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste water discharge and solid waste, Nike aims to drive down the impact its products have before the product goes into manufacturing. The Making app shares the information that Nike has amassed and tries to use its influence to inspire an emerging generation of designers.The app itself is neat, if fleeting (the Nike materials library has about 75,000-80,000 samples in it), and allows the user to compare materials using their overall scores or the specific environmental impact areas of chemistry, energy, water and waste, as well as whether the material uses recycled or organic content. The app is intended to be used by designers as they work through the various material iterations of the garments they are creating (plans exist to update the index with scores for footwear). It acts as a very general sustainability conscience, allowing the designer to make decisions about the impact that each project they make might have. The design is simple, and the information is quickly and intuitively delivered.Making was tested in-house by Nike and through a programme with designers at London College of Fashion over a period of 18 months."Designers are the start of everything and if we can educate the designer to make better choices then they can become agents of change for the entire industry," says Hannah Jones, vice-president of sustainable business and innovation at Nike. There are now plans to integrate the app into design courses in six institutions around Europe and further expand the way in which the app functions.The Making app is a consumer/student-facing product that provides a glimpse of the wider research that Nike is undertaking to address the increasing problem of a scarcity of resources that faces the fashion industry. The MSI that underpins the Making app has been gifted by Nike to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which represents about 30% of global apparel and footwear sales. It will develop and share data with its members in order to develop greater traceability and transparency across the industry.The index can be added to by anyone who is registered and the data inputted will be peer reviewed.At a corporate level, Nike is challenging its staff to innovate using sustainability as a foundation of their design ethos. As Jones acknowledges, there was a stigma surrounding the aesthetic and suitability of sustainable or eco-friendly apparel."It was always seen as a bit 'Granola'. It would compromise on performance and maybe you'd have to pay more. So we said to our design team to create without any compromise to performance. This started to create a whole new paradigm within the design community [at Nike]. When they thought about doing things with sustainability in mind, it could actually trigger a breakthrough in performance as well."Nike is using some of its flagship products to continually challenge the preconceptions of sustainable design – for example, the new England football shirt is made of a fabric produced using recycled bottles.Although Making is limited in its scope, and only provides data on the cradle-to-gate performance of materials (rather than cradle-to-cradle, which is much tougher to quantify), it does offer some idea of the extent to which Nike is trying to influence the industry into acting conscientiously. Its implementation, however, remains hampered by the high standards of Nike products. Nike footwear designer Vivian Mong, who works for Nike Tennis, said at the launch of the app: "The main concern is performance and aesthetic. We can't compromise on that, it always comes first."Possibly the biggest challenge for the company is matching its commitment to performance with its environmental concerns – which Jones at least acknowledges will require innovation at all levels of the company. Making is a step towards sharing that aim with the entire industry.Owen Pritchard is deputy editor of Icon Magazine, a British publication dedicated to architecture, design and culture. He is based in London.This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Become GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox.

Nike has recently released MAKING - a new app that helps designers and product creators make informed decisions about the environmental impacts of the materials they choose."Innovation is in Nike's DNA, and sustainability is an integral part of Nike's design process," commented Lee Holman, Nike VP of Apparel Design. "We've created the MAKING app to empower any designer around the world to make better materials choices in the initial stages of the innovation process to ultimately create products that are better for consumers and better for the planet."MAKING is a designer-specific, easy-to-use tool that ranks materials used in apparel based on four environmental impact areas: water, chemistry, energy and waste. Through direct comparisons, designers can quickly see how material choices stack up. The app was created by Nike with insights and feedback from students at London College of Fashion's Centre for Sustainable Fashion.The app is powered by data from the Nike Materials Sustainability Index (MSI), a database built on more than seven years of materials research and analysis. This data has been made public with the goal of helping to lead industry sustainability efforts and provide designers and product creators with guidance in selecting materials with lower environmental impacts.MAKING scores materials out of a possible 50 points. Each material in the app is further ranked based on the specific environmental impact areas of chemistry, energy, water and waste, as well as whether the material uses recycled or organic content.

Some time ago, a team of employees at Nike was given a special project: Cataloging the 75,000-some items found in the company's vast materials library and giving them each a score based on their environmental impact and long-term sustainability. No one had really done anything like it before, and it ultimately took the team six years to complete. Now, you can flick through their findings on your iPhone.The fruit of all that labor was something called the Materials Sustainability Index, or MSI, a "cradle-to-gate index" of everything and anything that could conceivably go into making a windbreaker or a pair of shoes. Making, as the new app is called, wraps the apparel-related entries of that massive dataset up in a simple, finger-friendly package.This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Open it up and you're greeted with a colorful column of options. In a nice UI flourish, the whole thing wobbles gelatinously as you scroll through. Each color lets you view the materials ranked by different criteria. You can see how they stack up based on energy use, water consumption, and recyclability, to name a few. Down, silk, and cotton are score well, generally speaking. Spandex, if the app is to be trusted, should be avoided at all costs.Nike has been pushing sustainability within its own product lines for years, introducing waste-reducing technologies like Flyknit and working towards a "closed-loop" business model in which all of its offerings are made with 100 percent recyclable materials. But realizing that its own products can only have so great an impact, the company's also been exploring how it might affect change throughout the industry. Part of that comes with projects like the MSI, which Nike submitted to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, an international group of apparel and footwear companies, for industry-wide use. After bringing in an independent committee to review the Nike team's methodology and analysis, the coalition made the index available online. It offers a nice web tool for digging through the data, which you can find here.But the new app represents a slightly different approach to solving the problem--basically, trying to instill a concern for sustainability directly in the next generation of designers. As Hannah Jones, Nike's VP of Sustainable Business and Innovation points out, many environmentally oriented efforts end up concerning themselves with production and manufacturing. With Making, Jones says, "we decided to go back upstream and really try to impact the designer."The company worked with a group of students from the London College of Fashion to prototype the app, trying to figure out how to most effectively present the invaluable but admittedly granular data. "What you want to do is put tools in the hands of designers that are bespoke to their means at the moment of truth, which is the moment of design," Jones explains. "The app is really tailored to help them make real-time predictive choices around the materials they use."Of course, young designers don't have Nike's vast reserves of textiles at their fingertips, and it can be hard to see how useful it will actually be for them to know that ramie uses slightly less water than lyocell. Still, it's hard to fault the project's premise. Even if it's more useful as a reminder than an actual reference, any tool that encourages designers to think of sustainability not just as a fashionable approach or icing on a concept's cake but rather as a fundamental aspect of their job is probably a good thing.

 Nike x London College of Fashion x TSA “Mobilize Makers” project from The Sustainable Angle on Vimeo.
In June 2013, John Hoke, Nike’s Senior VP Global Design, unveiled MAKING to Nike designers.
The Sustainable Angle worked on the exciting Nike x London College of Fashion “Mobilize Makers” project which was run by the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, curating and presenting a diverse range of sustainable textiles and materials for the students and designers. The Future Fabrics Expo presentation provided new information and a sourcing opportunity for those involved in the project, and aided the development of the Nike Making app.
Nike believe that MAKING is just the beginning of a larger ecosystem where designers throughout the world can contribute ideas and build new tools that support innovative, sustainable design.
Watch the full LCF collaboration video here.
 

The London College of Fashion is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London, in London, England. It offers undergraduate, postgraduate, short courses, study abroad courses and business-training in fashion, make-up, beauty-therapy and lifestyle industries.

London College of Fashion

The Sustainable Angle is a not-for-profit organisation and founders of #FutureFabricsExpo.

The Sustainable Angle

The SAC is a global, multi-stakeholder non-profit alliance for the fashion industry.

 Sustainable Apparel Coalition

Nike’s app titled 'MAKING’, launched in 2013, is a digital tool geared toward designers and product creators to help them research and compare materials based on their environmental credentials.Powered by the Nike Materials Sustainability Index (MSI), a database built on more than seven years of materials research and analysis, MAKING provides the information to enable users to make real-time, predictive decisions. The app ranks materials out of a possible 50 points. The higher the score the smaller the environmental footprint of a given material. Each material in the app is further ranked based on the specific environmental impact areas of chemistry, energy, water and waste, as well as whether the material uses recycled or organic content.The app was created by Nike with insights and feedback from students at London College of Fashion's Centre for Sustainable Fashion over a period of 18 months.