To demonstrate its progress against key business, labor and environmental goals, Nike has released its FY10-11 Sustainable Business Performance Summary. The document also sheds the light on Nike’s new targets and sustainable strategy.

Photo: Nike FY10-11 Sustainable Business Performance Summary cover, from nikeinc.com

In a long-term, Nike aims to separate profitable growth from constrained resources and further integrate sustainability principles into its innovation processes. Basically, it means that the company intends to “make today better” and “design the future”.

Nike has also announced its new factory rating system, the Manufacturing Index, which demonstrates how a factory approaches sustainability. This Index allows elevating labor and environmental performance. Another tool, an innovative Sourcing & Manufacturing Sustainability Index (SMSI) evaluates contract factory performance on sustainability measures including measures of lean, environmental performance, health and safety, and labor management factors.

Innovation, transparency and collaboration in addressing sustainability issues are the three key points of the Nike’s Summary. It also shows the company’s achievements in the past years proving that it made significant progress against most of its sustainability goals. These include: waste reduction in footwear manufacturing, utilizing its Considered Design Index guidelines in product design and implementing Human Resource Management training programs in contracted factories.

Along with the release of the Summary, Nike has launched an interactive web experience at www.nikeinc.com, which allows users exploring Nike’s value chain and learning more about its progress as well as designing footwear and clothing with help of web tools.

Last month, Nike, together with NASA, were running the fourth gathering of the parties for the next stage of the LAUNCH forum to find the waste reduction technologies.