Many brands have gotten quite creative with their packaging, offering innovative eco-friendly packaging instead of the classic cardboard box. A few of our favorites are from Timbuk2 and PACT. Timbuk2 has taken it to a whole new level by printing a map of the city of San Francisco on the outside of the plastic bag they ship their bags in. The map is dubbed “a waterproof San Francisco bike map”. Sweet! It’s amazingly detailed, and even has some of the companies favorite points of interest marked off on the map. We applaud this move as it gives a simple shipping bag a useful afterlife.

PACT has gone the full eco-route with their packaging. Claiming that you can toss the packaging in the dirt and it will completely decompose, label and all in less than 45 days. Cool!

We are a bit more basic here at Common Soles. Typically using the Priority Mail boxes provided to us by the US Postal Service. The boxes are made from post-consumer paperboard so they aren’t all bad! We also use the Tyvek envelopes from the USPS. Tyvek is a product of the DuPont Company, and is a brand of spun high-density polyethylene fibers, a synthetic material. So boo on us… DuPont does offer a recycling program for those of you interested in a proper afterlife of your used Tyvek envelope. More info on that here.  

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StartupNation.com A basic guide titled “9 Steps to Greening your Business” 

Fast Company Some best practices and ideas shared in an article: “50 Ways to Green Your Business”

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Rao and I are literally scouring the earth seeking eco-friendly and sustainable materials to use in constructing Common Soles footwear.  We’ve come across all sorts of incredible product as well as some down-right scary stuff.  We’re finding materials both here in Massachusetts as well as across the ocean. Building on our Oct 22nd blog post on Making Eco-Friendly Flip-Flops here is an update on some of the materials and construction techniques we hope to be working into our line moving forward. This post is also essentially Part 3 of a series I am writing on sustainable footwear here on our blog. Enjoy!

Rice Rubber Outsole: This stuff is amazing. The outsole is the very bottom of footwear, the part that connects with the ground. Most traditional outsoles are made from rubber or PU (polyurethane). Rice Rubber is a blend of several happier ingredients. It’s a base of natural latex rubber mixed with SBR or Styrene Butadiene Rubber. SBR has been used for over 60 years in all sorts of applications such as tires, shoes, and gaskets. The blend is necessary for durability and longevity (Remember – durable footwear has a longer useful life = fewer pairs need to be manufactured). Rice husks which are a byproduct of the food industry and typically discarded after harvesting are then mixed in with the rubber. The rice husks displace a good portion of the rubber needed as well as add strength to the mixture. Similar to how gravel is added to cement to form concrete. The resulting product is not only a more eco-friendly alternative to traditional rubber soles, but it looks darn cool!

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We’re working hard on designing and manufacturing our footwear to be as sustainable as possible. What is sustainable in footwear though??  Sustainable footwear considers: raw materials, product design, manufacturing processes, end-of-useful-life policy, and a whole slew of other components. So many in fact that the only way a company can truly produce a pair of sustainably made footwear is to tackle one element of the process of achieving total sustainability at a time. We at Common Soles are currently focusing our efforts on materials and manufacturing processes right now.  That is not to say we aren’t doing all we can elsewhere in the sustainability value chain – this is just our area of focus at the moment.

I wrote a bit about materials on October 22nd of this year. This post is on process. The big one we can influence as a band in the US making footwear overseas is how our factory sources materials. Sourcing is a blend of art and science and is a constant battle of quality versus cost. Being who we are (a social venture) we lean toward quality whenever we have a choice. The difficulty we run into often times is that we are quite small in the world of footwear manufacturing and thus often have little say.  Not an excuse though…

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We spotted this while in Delhi. I don’t think anything else needs to be said other than that I want one!
-Dave

Rao and I have literally scowered India for all and any eco-friendly materials to integrate in our forthcoming styles of flip-flops and footwear.  We met with dozens of vendors selling product that comes from all over India and Asia. The bummer part is they all smiled when we asked for eco-friendly materials and kindly shook there heads.  hmmm...  what to do as we were not going to give up that easily!

It turns out there are quite a few eco-friendly materials that we could easily integrate into our footwear.  They just hadn't been branded that way so nobody knew it, not even the vendors selling the goods.  Here's a sampling of what we found and plan to integrate into our next few styles.

Jute:  Jute is a vegetable fiber that grows all over India. In fact India harvests more than 2 million tons of jute every year which puts them in the lead for tonnage harvested in the world with the next country not even at half that.  Jute is better known as Burlap here in the US, so now you all know what I'm talking about.  Jute is 100% biodegradable and recyclable which makes us happy!  Look for jute in our straps and soles in the future.

Paper: Paper pulp is used to make card-stock. We use card-stock for the hang-tags and hangers for our flip-flops. Apparently almost all the paper pulp processed in India is post-consumer which is something they completely fail to mention!  It may be that post-consumer is perceived as a negative quality wise for the paper producers, but we see it as a positive!

Coconut: You all know the coconut. India harvests more than 9 million tons of it a year putting it at third in the world. The shell of coconuts can be cut and polished to produce a variety of materials which can be used in making a flip-flop. Coconut fiber is also used in several varieties of textile such as the popular Cocona material often used in sportswear.

While we were in India we took samples of the above materials and came up with a few prototypes that used as many eco-friendly materials as possible.  Here are some pictures of that prototype. It has a woven jute sole impregnated with natural rubber for durability and traction, coconut beads and hardware on the strap, and a woven jute insole on the footbed. Let us know what you think!

-Dave

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Whenever I go to Babson I get a boost of inspiration! Yesterday was the Forum on Entrepreneurship and I got the opportunity to listen to a handful of incredibly inspiring individuals from companies such as Facebook, Deckers, iRobot, and mzinga on what's on their minds as far as how we foster an environment of innovation and entrepreneurship. A hot topic of the day was social entrepreneurship and as you can imagine I was all ears at that panel discussion.  Here are a few of my takeaways from the day.

1)  Define your organizations "Dogma" (or often unspoken established belief). I heard a very compelling argument by Anand Vengurlekar on how organizations with Dogma's centered around fostering innovation often times were the winners in their markets. (duh..) But it was the concept of Dogma that got me going. What is your Dogma?

2)  Social Entrepreneurship is innovative at its core. An organization must be innovative in order to succeed at delivering not only profits but on its social mission as well. Being innovative as a social venture requires the ability to constantly inspire all those we touch. I hope we are inspiring! Thank you Mark Albion (one of the founders of Net Impact) for reminding me of this simple statement. Our organization certainly has its work cut out for us.. so far so good! Thank you all for the support!

3) Patience. Gary Vaynerchuk (hysterical guy) again beat into the audience the virtue of patience. Building an organization of sustainable value does not happen overnight. On that note we are jumping up and down with excitement over our new flip-flops which we will be introducing later this fall!

Enjoy the weekend,
-Dave