Eco-friendly Footwear: Winter Edition

With cold weather approaching, I began to look for winter clothes and shoes. For about the last year I have been trying to support local businesses and buy my clothes at boutiques, and buy organic materials whenever possible. I'm not an all out tree hugging hippie yet, but I'm still brand new on this journey so maybe someday I will be. With shoes in mind, I set out to do some shopping. After several frustrating days of not finding my size, and not being able to fit my son's stroller through aisles and doors (yes, that's true, I left one store because his stroller could not fit between the front door and a huge display table that was right in front of the door), I decided to shop online.

I came home, opened up Ecoholic by Adria Vasil, which I highly recommend for anyone looking for simple ideas to green anything, and started to read. I learned that shoes are bad for the environment. Everything from the glue used to the ways certain materials are farmed and manufactured...is bad for the earth and double bad for the health of the people who work in shoe factories.

Not wanting to do without shoes, and not wanting to feel guilty about buying shoes, I looked up Simple Shoes, which is a company that makes shoes from recycled and organic materials. They have everything from sandals to boots, and if you can get over the fact that they don't quite look like typical footwear, many items are really cute.

There is a happy ending to my frustrating search for winter shoes: once upon a time, I was up late at night with my credit card, and I bought a pair of Simple Shoes online. They arrived quickly in a box made from 100 % post consumer waste, fit perfectly, and lived happily ever after on my shoe shelf (when they're not on my feet, of course).

This is me showing off my new boots. These particular ones are made from hemp, the lining is organic cotton, the foot forms are 100% post consumer paper, the heel is bamboo, the glue used is water based, and the sole is a recycled car tire.