Teva, a division of Deckers Brands, announced TevaForever, a partnership with international recycling leader TerraCycle, dedicated to giving well-worn Teva sandals a new life. The recycling program reinforces Teva’s commitment to reducing its environmental impact and keeping waste out of landfills.
Well-worn Teva sandals have a soul of their own, shaped by every adventure they’ve weathered. When they are ready to be retired, there has never been a great place to go until now. Through the TevaForever Recycling Program, Teva sandals can be mailed to TerraCycle at no cost to the customer, diverting them from landfills so they can be recycled into something new. Teva’s long-term vision is to work towards solutions to one day fully close the loop by recycling old Teva sandals into new ones.
“The partnership with TerraCycle is a huge step forward in our ongoing commitment to minimize our brand’s environmental impact. The TevaForever Recycling Program gives our fans an easy way to join the cause, knowing we will give their sandals new life,” said Anders Bergstrom, Vice President and General Manager of Teva. “We can’t do this without our fans, and I’m thrilled to see the impact we will make together.”
Participating in the program is simple. Customers may visit Teva.com to sign up and download a prepaid shipping label to mail in their sandals to TerraCycle. The recycling leader will clean the sandals and separate materials to prepare for processing. The processed material will be used by manufacturers to make several new products including playgrounds, athletic fields, and track ground cover.
The partnership with TerraCycle is the latest in Teva’s commitment to reducing its environmental footprint. In addition to the brand’s 2020 sustainability initiative, in which Teva transitioned 100 percent of its iconic straps to recycled plastic using REPREVE yarn, the brand has achieved these highlights:
- Since 2020, Teva has diverted more than 40.2 million plastic bottles, equal to 755 tons of post-consumer plastic or 1,5 million pounds of plastic, from landfills.
- Teva has reduced its overall water usage and worked with its supply chain partners to improve their water conservation efforts.
- Since 2017, Teva has saved 348 million gallons of water, thanks to its packaging improvements, and reduced the total weight of packaging used by 4.1 million pounds.
- All of Teva’s leather is sourced from tanneries certified by Leather Working Group; whose mission is to promote sustainable and appropriate environmental business practices within the leather industry. Teva also supports the Better Cotton Initiative, the largest cotton sustainability program in the world.
- Since 2020, Teva reduced approximately 6.6 million pounds of Greenhouse Gas Emission (eq. Carbon Dioxide), 2.3 billion liters of water (or 622 million gallons of water), and 56 million MJ (or equivalent to 437,740 gallons of gasoline).
