Got a pair (or a pile) of old sneakers that are too gross and grotty to give to charity? Nike will recycle any brand of athletic shoe through its Reuse-a-Shoe program. Run your athletic shoes over to any Nike athletic shoes, or mail them straight to the company's recycling center -- details here. Nike processes and recycles the footwear to make athletic shoes surfaces for basketball courts, tennis courts, running tracks, and playgrounds. Right now, they're collecting athletic shoes to make athletic surfaces for New Orleans, to help get kids back out on the courts even as the city rebuilds. To date, about 20 million pairs of athletic shoes worldwide have been recycled through the program.

In the 1970s, sneakers led their own way as jogging quickly became popular and so did the necessity to have a pair of athletic shoes for the occasion. Until this time, factories had been concerned with high production, but now the companies started to market their athletic shoes as a lifestyle purpose. Soon there were shoes for football, jogging, basketball, running - every sport had its own shoe.
By the 1980s, sneakers were everywhere; Woody Allen wore them to the ballet, Led Zeppelin wore them in their 1976 documentary, and Dustin Hoffman wore them while playing reporter Carl Bernstein in the movie All the President's Men. The athletic shoes originally developed for sports became the mainstay for most people. Nike and Reebok were among the market leaders. Newer brands went in and out of fashion, and athletic shoes companies started shelling out major endorsements to players. One of, if not the largest, endorsements was to Chicago player Michael Jordan, for a contract with Nike to make his own signature line of athletic shoes and apparel.
During the 1990s, shoe companies perfected their fashion and marketing skills. Sports endorsements grew larger and marketing budgets went through the roof. athletic shoes.became a fashion statement, and definition of identity and personality rather than humble athletic aids.
 

The idea of a "sneaker" did not come along until an American inventor, Charles Goodyear, patented the process for the vulcanization of rubber.While many believe that the first athletic shoes was the famous Converse All Stars (developed in 1917), this is mistaken. This belief is easily attained simply because it was one of the highest selling athletic shoes of the early sneaker generation. The Spalding company produced athletic shoes specifically for the game of basketball as early as 1907,citation needed and an estate sale led athletic shoes experts to believe that some of the earliest shoes were produced by Colchester Rubber Company of Colchester,Connecticut, which went out of athletic shoes in 1893. Although there is no hard evidence suggesting this, the athletic shoes were found only a few miles away from the birthplace of basketball,and two years after the game was invented.