Nike material innovation looks and feels just like real leather, but uses 90% less water and results in 80% lower carbon footprint.

According to these figures, sportswear giant Nike sells globally somewhere in the ballpark of 120,000,000 shoes annually. That’s a mind-boggling amount of shoes, one requiring an equally inconceivable amount of leather for manufacturing a portion of those Swoosh-emblazoned pairs of kicks. In an attempt to maximize materials and reduce waste, Nike turned to British eco-manufacturer E-Leather to co-develop a new material to manufacture shoes using a more sustainable process. Made from a combination of recycled leather scraps and synthetic fibers, the newly unveiled Nike Flyleather offers an engineered and sustainable material that might be the foundation of Nike’s future.
Nike Flyleather looks like leather, feels like leather, behaves like leather, but is actually a composite made with the discarded leather scraps gathered from the floor of tanneries (the only discernible difference in our close-up inspection is the absence of the distinguishing scent of genuine full leather).

These scraps are turned into fibers, which are then fused together into a single sheet with synthetic fibers onto a “fabric infrastructure via a hydro process”, to be finally rolled up and used just like naturally-sourced cowhide. The resulting process uses 90% less water with an 80% lower carbon footprint when compared to traditional leat...