Nine teams taking part in this summer’s World Cup will be wearing Nike shirts made from recycled plastic bottles.

Nike last week unveiled the kit for the United States. The other sides wearing the environmentally-friendly strips are Brazil, Portugal, The Netherlands, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Serbia and Slovenia.

The shirts are made from recycled polyester sourced from bottles destined from landfill sites in Japan and Taiwan. Each shirt is made from up to eight bottles and Nike rescued nearly 13 million plastic bottles, totalling nearly 254 tonnes of polyester waste, from going to landfill.

If the bottles used to make the jerseys were laid end-to-end, they would cover more than 3,000 kilometres – more than the entire coastline of South Africa.

By using the bottles, Nike cuts its energy consumption by up to 30% compared to the process of manufacturing virgin polyester.