Reuse-A-Shoe It's All in the Family

High Schooler helps out New Orleans from the Garden State.

When he’s not hitting the books, Alex Bozich, a senior from Cranbury, New Jersey is collecting shoes to help re-build New Orleans. Bozich is the nephew of Laurie Beja Miller, VP of US Retail and that’s how he heard about our Reuse-A-Shoe program.

We sent him some collection boxes and materials, he did the rest. He’s collected more than 1,000 pairs and counting. Inspired by his own love for sport, Alex wanted to ensure that kids in devastated regions of New Orleans would be guaranteed the opportunity to improve their own lives through sport. 

“When I heard about how the focus of the project was on New Orleans I really connected with it,” said Alex. “I love playing sports and the project was important to me in order to bring back sports to New Orleans. Reuse-A-Shoe helps everyone in the community and I was drawn to the idea of helping people continue their passion.”

We created the Nike Reuse-a-Shoe program in 1993. Since then, we’ve recycled more than 20 million pairs of athletic shoes and contributed to more than 250 sport surfaces to provide access to places to play for kids as part of Let Me Play, Nike’s global community investment program.

Reuse-A-Shoe collects worn-out athletic shoes of any brand from a variety of sources, including end of life shoes collected through a variety of recycling programs, special events and at Nike or other stores, shoes that are returned to us from retailers due to a material flaw and even counterfeit shoes.

We also recycle much of our scrap material left over from the manufacturing of Nike footwear and together the shoes and shoe materials are ground up and purified to become a material we affectionately call Nike Grind – Nike Grind Rubber, Nike Grind Foam and Nike Grind Upper.

To find out more about Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe program and Nike Grind click here.