Nike, a leading designer of athletic footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories for a wide variety of sports and fitness activities, has released its FY12-13 Sustainable Business Performance Summary, providing an update on performance against current business, labour and environmental targets as the company works toward its goal of decoupling profitable growth from constrained resources.

The report, which outlines both successes and challenges, shows the company is making progress across key impact areas of climate and energy, labour, chemistry, water, waste and community.

“Nike's success as a growth company is tied directly to our culture of innovation. Today we believe that sustainable innovation that benefits the athlete, the company and the planet will play a key role in the future of our business,” said Mark Parker, Nike President and CEO, in the report’s introduction.

Progress

Evidence of the company’s progress includes an absolute reduction of carbon emissions of close to 3% across the whole value chain from its FY11 baseline, while revenue grew 26% over the same period.

Production also grew while the company fulfilled its strategic aim to source from fewer, better-performing contract factories, with a 14%reduction – from 910 to 785 factories over the last two years.

Focusing on innovation

Some of the challenges in the industry include the rate at which environmentally preferred materials are becoming available at competitive pricing in the market and the rate at which the market adopts new green technologies.

The report outlines the company’s approach to understanding and addressing the meta-trends facing business.  In addition, Nike provides a transparent big-picture view of the impacts across its entire value chain, from growing and processing materials to a product’s end of life, and the steps of manufacturing, transport, distribution and selling in between.

Progress on current goals

“We are constantly integrating more sustainable ways of working across our business. But we recognise that many issues facing business and society are greater than one brand can solve alone,” commented  Hannah Jones, Nike Chief Sustainability Officer & Vice President, Innovation Accelerator.

“To achieve systemic change we must understand risk and embrace innovation as a way to accelerate positive impacts at scale. Collaboration and unconventional partnerships will be critical to our collective ability to design more sustainable business systems.”

The progress on current goals includes:

• Advancement on CO2-reduction target of 20% per unit from FY11 levels through FY15, by reaching 13% reduction through end of FY13.
• Surpassing targets on water-efficiency goals with contract factories that manufacture footwear. Results included factories using 23% less water per unit in FY13 compared to FY11 – against a goal of a 15% reduction through FY15.
• Focusing efforts on more sustainable materials through new innovations, through industry and government collaboration and through its own design processes.
• Pursuing greener chemistries with materials suppliers and contracted factories through an agreement with bluesign to open up its chemical formulation database, enabling access to 30,000 environmentally-better materials.
• Sourcing from contract factories that meet the standards set out in the Sourcing & Manufacturing Sustainability Index Nike released in FY12, which elevated sustainability as an equal performance measure, alongside quality, cost and delivery. Through FY13, 68% of contract factories were rated bronze or better on the index. Nike's FY20 target is to only source from contract factories reaching bronze or better.

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Download the full report