American sportswear brand Nike has introduced its first fully circular shoe—the ISPA Link Axis. The Link Axis is the new pinnacle for disassembly and embodies the circular design principles of material choice, waste avoidance, and refurbishment.

ISPA stands for Improvise, Scavenge, Protect, Adapt, which is a Nike design philosophy that challenges creators to experiment, break moulds, and reimagine products. In the case of the Link Axis, it helps move Nike closer to its circular vision—a closed-loop system that yields no waste—to help protect the planet and the future of sport, Nike said in a press release.

Every part of the Link Axis can be recycled. The design uses interlocking components, as few materials as possible and zero glue. The Link Axis has a 100 per cent recycled polyester Flyknit upper that’s precisely engineered to fit over the outsole (compared to the traditional cut-and-sew method used for the Nike ISPA Link), and its 100 per cent recycled TPU tooling was achieved by using scrap airbag material. The shoe also has a 20 per cent recycled TPU cage. Because recycling changes some material properties, the cage is an exercise in balancing the desire to use recycled content with the need for durability and traction.

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. 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, added the release.

The Link Axis arrives in a total orange and sonic yellow colourway—a nod to the first Link Axis prototype—and is available from September 12 on SNKRS.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (NB)

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