We're in a race to save ourselves. You'd be crazy not to have anxiety around climate change right now. We have this optimistic urgency that we have to get after things.
We are on a journey to make the most sustainable shoe ever. We have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to reduce our carbon footprint. We kept going back to this phrase called in situ utilization.
There's this idea in space exploration that if you're going to fly to the moon, fly to Mars and stay there and do something, you have to create things with what you find there. You can say there's no resupply mission coming to Mars. There's no resupply mission coming to Earth, either.
Noah came in, one of the great insights he had was, "Hey, what do we have laying around? " What if waste becomes our future feedstock? What if it is actually the material that we use?
And that's really where the idea of Space Hippie was born out of. We just started grabbing different things we already had and putting them together. They're looking at everything and saying, "Oh, it's super spacey, but it's also really rough.
" There was something about it that was so different than anything I'd seen us doing. It made our factory partners very nervous. Hey are you serious?
Are we gonna really be making the shoes like that? They look weird, and it's 'cause they're made of trash. We are working on what it means to create a fully closed loop economy.
Reuse of materials so that we aren't causing more damage to the planet. Sustainability at Nike, though, is not new. We divert over a billion plastic bottles a year.
So there's this duality of high performance, but low impact. If we don't start now -doing something- then we might not have that future to actually get to. Our job is also to help protect the future of sport.
Our job is to leave the world a better place.
