Sightings | Alumni Profile

Turning Ordinary Consumers Into Green Consumers

by Lisa M. Dellwo

'96 MEM/MBA Shelley Zimmer Helps Bring Sustainability to Athletic Footwear at Nike

Shelley Kephart Zimmer lives in two worlds. As a senior manager in Nike’s footwear sustainability group, she has one foot firmly planted in corporate America and the other in the world of environmentalism. “Environmentalists see me as the business person and business people see me as the environmentalist,” Zimmer says. “I have to act as a translator between the two groups.”

The same was true when she attended Duke in the mid-1990s, receiving master’s degrees from both the Nicholas School and the Fuqua School of Business. “There was such a difference in the students and the focus at the two schools,” Zimmer recalls.

But her double life makes her a perfect fit for the job at Nike, where Zimmer is looking for solutions that make both good business sense and good environmental sense. For example, Nike currently uses shoeboxes that are made from 100 percent post-consumer material. But the recycled fiber must be shipped from the United States to its factories in Asia, where no market exists for recycled fibers. So the benefits of using recycled paper may be offset by the energy use involved in shipping materials from the United States and back again.

Perhaps the company could instead manufacture boxes from locally grown bamboo or sugar cane. But then the environmental effects of producing these fibers would need to be investigated. Would forests be clear-cut to plant these crops? And Nike would need to communicate effectively to consumers that boxes made of local fiber are environmentally better than those made from recycled paper.

“It’s always more complicated than it sounds,” Zimmer says.

Sustainability through the Life Cycle of a Shoe
At Nike, Zimmer is part of a six-person team that guides the footwear division in its sustainability efforts. Their focus is on the entire life cycle of a shoe: using environmentally preferable materials without compromising quality, reducing toxins in the manufacturing process, cutting energy use and waste at their contract factories and in the shipping process, using environmentally friendly packaging, and determining what to do with unusable footwear.

Zimmer’s responsibilities include addressing delivery. When shipping products across the water, how can we reduce greenhouse emissions? One answer may lie in how shoes are packed, and she is applying for a patent for a method of bulk-packing footwear to allow more shoes to travel in each shipment.

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