Rethinking the box

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Drive down any Portland neighborhood street on a weekday and you can’t miss the bright blue, green and yellow recycling containers that decorate the curbside. For consumers, strategically sorting leftover plastic, cardboard and glass containers into the appropriate bold-colored bin fulfills their part in the recycling system. But as a regional or global business with multiple product offerings, our role in the recycling process extends far beyond what goes into the box. It starts with the box itself.

For Nike, over half of the company’s waste footprint comes from retail packaging while the remainder comes from materials and manufacturing. As an athletic shoe company, it’s no surprise that together, the shoe box and its shipping carton account for more than two thirds of all its retail packaging. In fact, corrugated cardboard — the main component in the vintage box design — is Nike’s single largest material purchase. We needed to take a fresh look at the shoe box to continue a commitment to create a better, more sustainable world and reduce its footprint.

But how do you reduce waste and input costs and lessen your environmental impact while still improving business? You innovate. You make it stronger and better while using less resources. For Nike, this meant devising a list of criteria and impact metrics to measure the sustainability value of material choices. Ultimately, the new shoe box design had to protect the product, stand up at retail, and be premium while using less energy, water and chemicals and producing less physical waste.

Nike’s Considered Design Team used these metrics to design over 100 alternatives to the traditional shoe box, some of which not only reduced the impacts of production, but also reduced material weight and shipping costs. But this wasn’t enough to guarantee the adoption of a new design. In taking a closer look, most of these alternatives had a negative overall footprint, since many of the materials used in the alternative designs were not easily recyclable. Without a universal means of recycling, these designs simply added to the net production of waste, rather than reduced it. Consumers across the globe could recycle the corrugated shoe boxes in most markets, and this was the deciding factor.

So the team went back to the drawing board with the box’s full lifecycle in perspective.

In collaboration with the Oregon-based company Creative Packaging Solutions, the packaging and procurement arm of OAI Global Logistics, they focused their new efforts on weight and box layout.

Drawing upon an “eliminate what’s not critical” approach, they developed a shoe box that is designed with less overlays, overlaps and reinforcement walls. It is estimated to use 30 percent less materials than the 1995 box — Nike’s first 100 percent recycled content shoe box. Set to launch in 2011, the new lightweight boxes, also 100 percent recycled, will be shipped in cartons redesigned with 20 percent less materials than their predecessors. All together, this translates into an annual savings of nearly 12,000 metric tons of cardboard or the equivalent of 200,000 trees annually.

This is simply the continuation of a design process that began over 15 years ago. With next year’s box ready for production, Nike has already started exploring other sustainable solutions from changing shoe box sizes to better fit the shoes to reducing wrapping tissue and polybags.

For consumers, this equates to one substantially lighter weight piece of packaging material they have to sort into their recycling bins. For local and global businesses, it is another step closer to a fully sustainable product lifecycle. Together, with innovation and collaboration, we can create a sustainable, closed-loop system. We just have to think outside—and inside—of the box.

Pam Greene is senior design innovator for Nike's Sustainable Business and Innovation Group.