What Nike is making with scrap airbag material

It’s maybe almost too easy to call these Nike Airbags but the shoe giant has unveiled a fully circular shoe that is made using scrap airbag material.

The new Nike ISPA Link Axis is a fully recyclable shoe, made with interlocking parts, no glue and scrap airbag material to make the TPU plastic tooling fully recycled.

Nike’s ISPA (Improvise, Scavenge, Protect, Adapt) design philosophy focuses on experimentation and reimagination of products. The shoe is part of Nike’s vision to become more circular, which means now waste through a closed-loop system.

“For the Link Axis, the ISPA team considered the circular design principle of ‘disassembly,’ or the ability to easily take a product apart to recycle its components, one of the more challenging principles to implement in footwear design,” Nike’s announcement said.

“A good shoe is flexible and durable. Traditionally, designers use glue and other bonding elements to achieve these aims, but that makes a shoe nearly impossible to disassemble and recycle. Recycling shoes usually requires shredding, an energy-intensive process that limits how the recycled materials can be used. Creating a shoe that can be taken apart would reduce the carbon footprint of the product and open up new possibilities for its life cycle.”