With less than 70 days left until the first match of the Soccer World Cup 2010, Nike has unveiled its 2010 World Cup kits. They’re made from discarded plastic bottles, harvested from landfills in Japan and Taiwan, that were melted down into yarn and then spun into fabric.
This will be the first time that all of Nike’s national teams, including Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands, will be wearing jerseys made from recycled polyester, which the sports-apparel giant is hailing as the most environmentally friendly and technologically advanced kits in football history.
Each shirt comprises up to eight recycled PET bottles, a move that reduces energy consumption by up to 30 percent compared with manufacturing virgin polyester. Besides saving raw materials, Nike also diverted nearly 13 million plastic bottles (or nearly 560,000 pounds of polyester waste) from the landfill—enough to cover more than 29 football pitches.
If the recycled bottles used to produce the jerseys were laid end to end, according to Nike, they would span more than 3,000 kilometers, a distance that exceeds the entire South African coastline.
The liveeco team
