Your sandals have a soul of their own, shaped by every wild adventure you’ve weathered together. And when they’re well-worn and ready to retire, they’ve never had a great place to go – until now.
The original sport sandal emerged from the shores of the Grand Canyon back in 1984. Born out of necessity to prevent sandals from floating downstream, a resourceful river guide strapped two Velcro watchbands to a pair of old flip-flops. And just like that, Teva was born.
Teva, a division of Deckers Brands, outfits free-spirited adventure-seekers all over the world with versatile, modern outdoor footwear. In 2020, Teva committed to reducing the brand’s environmental impact by ensuring 100% of its iconic straps are made with recycled plastic, so future generations can continue exploring the wild world around them.
Innovation & Artisanship
Every inch of Teva footwear is conceived as a canvas. As enduring as they are timeless, Teva’s signature straps are continually reimagined in a variety of patterns, dreamt up by the brand’s designers from around the globe. Starting in 2020, all iconic straps across our entire product line will be made from traceable, verifiable recycled plastic.
Teva has partnered with industry leader TerraCycle that specialises in recycling the hard-to-recycle. Together we’ll give new life to your ready-to-retire sandals, by turning them into running tracks, playgrounds, and more.
Completing the Circle
Our vision is to create new sandals from old ones, closing the circle of production. Every pair you send in helps us get closer to our ultimate goal, and with enough research and development we’ll work to eventually close the loop.
Your old sandals will be broken down and reborn as material suitable to manufacture rubberised athletic tracks, playgrounds, and more. The uppers will be being reimagined as rug and carpet backing.
Because 300 million shoes end up in landfills each year in the US alone, and we want that cycle to stop. Globally, more than 24 billion pairs of shoes are manufactured each year, most of which end up in a landfill as well. When trash sits in a landfill, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as far as contributions to global warming go. Circularity means designing products that can be recycled and repurposed, so we can reuse what we have to make what we want.
All Teva sandals and flip flops collected through the Teva Forever recycling program will be diverted from landfills. Anything that cannot be recycled into new things will be redirected towards a “waste-to-energy” program that will convert the materials into energy to be used by the local power grid. So, while some of your sandals might not be turned into new things, like playgrounds and tracks, they will be kept out of landfills.
