New life for old footwear in Christchurch
You’ll find a lot of Nike trainers at Rolleston School (Te Ahi Kaikōmako), particularly on the basketball court.
Designed by Christchurch landscape architects Morgan + Pollard, the colourful court’s multi-sport surface is made of more than 8,000 recycled shoes known as Playtop with Nike Grind.
The process utilises sports shoe manufacturing scrap and end-of-life footwear. The initiative began in 1992 when Nike was looking for ways to repurpose shoes which would otherwise have gone to landfills. Using a special “slice and grind” technique, rubber, foam, fibre, leather and textile blends are separated and ground into granules to create products. Since 1992 nearly 59 million kilograms of Nike Grind have been recycled into everything from sports surfaces to furniture to phone cases.
The multi sport surface is the first time Morgan + Pollard has used Nike Grind. All photography by Clinton Lloyd.
Morgan + Pollard engaged Playtop NZ, the only New Zealand supplier with Nike Grind licensee, to bring to life the bold landscape design consisting of coloured, curved patterns that weave across Rolleston school’s multi-sport surface. “We spent quite a lot of time coordinating the colours and the patterns of the surface,” Braydon Narbey of Morgan + Pollard says. “It felt quite pedantic at the time, going back and forth with the supplier just to get the ratios of the colours right. The really rewarding part was seeing the design come to life once the resurfacing had been completed and actually how well it complements the existing structures around the school.”
The court sits at a crossroads between the different age groups of the school, and the design brief was to ensure the new space - which is laid over top of the original concrete court - catered to all ages and facilitated traditional ball sports but in a striking, innovative way. The design includes a custom-designed Sports Wall that acts as, a permanent volleyball/tennis net structure - without the net.
This wall can be used for a multitude of sports, including volleyball, tennis and soccer.
“They wanted it to be a permanent volleyball set up so that the children could play even when no teachers were around to set up a net,” says Narbey. “The school needed a bespoke solution that accommodated multiple games – not just volleyball – and allowed students to interact through the large opening. And the fact that there’s targets on the wall encourages new kinds of ball sports for the students to invent.”
The space was completed in December and Narbey says it’s been a hit with kids both during and outside of school hours. “I think it’s a really cool project and we’d like to do more using this recycled surface. It’s been a catalyst for Morgan + Pollard to encourage using more recycled materials.”