Over 1 billion people around the world will be participating in Earth Day activities today, making it the largest civic observance in the world.
Earth Day is a time to reflect on how we have been living and interacting with our planet. It’s also an opportunity to consider how we want to make positive change to the world we live in!
We want to encourage all of you to take some time to reconnect with nature. Not just on Earth Day but whenever you get the opportunity. Nature will quiet your mind, and make you more aware of the beautiful planet we live in. You’ll feel the living connection with life all around you, giving you the capacity to open up to something that's much bigger than yourself.
For this reason we are constantly looking at how we can be more sustainable and help make positive change in the shoe industry as part of our mission to be 90% sustainable by 2020.
We are on a constant quest to develop and invest in new, cleaner and greener materials for our barely-there shoes. These are our biggest developments to date.
The Ultra Bloom and Ultra Kids amphibious shoes – now made from plant-based Bloom Foam.
These shoes take algae at risk of harmful algal bloom out of fresh waterways, often caused by chemical run-off, and return 57 gallons of clean water per pair of adults’ shoes as well as reducing 40 balloons worth of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
We use PET bottles in our Primus range. PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, as it’s properly called, might be durable, cheap and malleable, but when it’s made into plastic bottles, it rarely gets recycled, takes over 400 years to decompose, and, as we know all too well, most of it winds up polluting our oceans or in landfill. Considering a truckload of this stuff is dumped into our oceans every minute, finding a new use for PET is a step to reducing our nasty plastic habit – turning it into durable, healthy shoes for healthy feet!
Earlier this year, VivoKids launched a range of Wild shoes in collaboration with The Aspinall Foundation, a British organisation that works to promote wildlife conservation through education, captive breeding programmes and, crucially, by reintroducing endangered species into the wild. Not only raising funds, the collaboration was also created to inspire kids (and their parents!) to learn more about incredible animals facing extinction. We believe that kids with knowledge, love and respect for nature, will look after it better as they grow.
We truly believe the more people make Earth Day every day, the better chance our planet has. Let’s get out there!
