Asics to outfit Japanese athletes with kit made from recycled clothes at Tokyo 2020 Olympics

On Friday, Asics, the official supplier of the Japanese Olympic and Paralympic teams at the Tokyo 2020 games, announced that the kits and uniforms for athletes and officials will be made using recycled fibres.

The Japanese sport brand’s initiative is part of Tokyo’s broader project of making the 2020 Games ecological and sustainable. For example, the medals awarded will be made of gold, silver and bronze derived from scrapped electronic products.

Between now and May, Asics aims to collect about 30,000 items of used sport apparel across Japan, in order to source polyester fibres from them, and then transform the fibres into resin to produce new equipment.

According to an Asics spokesperson, the group also plans to use recycled PET bottles and other recycled materials to produce the athletes’ kits.

In the long term, Asics hopes to be able to use recycled materials only to source the polyester needed to produce its sporting clothes and shoes.

On the eve of Asics’s announcement, Uniqlo revealed it signed a four-year contract with the Swedish Olympic Committee, regretting the fact that it was unable to outfit athletes from its own country, Japan. “We would have of course liked to be the Japanese team’s official supplier, but we were unable to do so for a variety of reasons,” said Tadashi Yanai, founder and CEO of the Fast Retailing group, Uniqlo’s parent company, speaking at a press conference in Tokyo.