It began with a simple brief. “What does sustainability mean to nike, what are we currently doing and how do we evolve how we company to focus more on this space?”

We focused on three key areas for Purpose to solve at a strategy level, communities, the planet and providing a level playing field as we had a strong belief that purpose should underpin everything we do as a company. From there we then focused on the planet. What we found was two fold:

Nike have been doing tremendous work in this space for years having made football jerseys from recycled bottles for years as a single example, but when we began that program the consumer almost wasn’t ready for it. So number 1 was to continue with simple on going story telling around our efforts.

The second was to celebrate the most sustainable innovations we have with Grind, Flyknit, Air and the apparel we produce from recycled plastic bottles.

Then the third and likely most important shift was to make it tangible to our own employees. Quite often sustainability can feel like such a huge issue to tackle and so we focused on an area that everyone could understand. Single Use coffee cups. With each nike campus having multiple coffee shops and most people enjoying coffee we did some basic maths. If each employee where to have one coffee a day each employee would create 23lbs of waste each. Multiply that by 75,000 employees and you have 862 tonnes of waste from nike on coffee cups alone. We then worked with food services to switch the offering to reusable cups which also helped ensure everyone was lazer focused on the first changes they could make. That then allows each employee to understand how the smallest changes could impact the world at a macro scale given the size of our business.

Since we had that initial taskforce in 2018, we have seen multiple impacts across the company, from the elimination of single use cups to the launch of the circular design guide and our impact reports each year.