Etnies has teamed up with the Maleku tribe and La Reserva foundation in Costa Rica as part of the action sports brand's new Buy a Shoe, Plant a Tree project. For every pair of Jameson 2 Eco shoes sold, Etnies will plant one tree in what will become the new rainforest.
Etnies, which is celebrating its 25 year anniversary, is on track to
plant at least 35,000 trees on the Maleku reserve in northern Costa Rica
this year. The Maleku are an indigenous tribe with a way of life that
revolves around the forest, and they are rightfully known as the
guardians of the forest. For more than 150 years, the Maleku have had to
fight for their trees that were depleted due to cattle farming and a
horrible rubber-tree war, which led to a massacre, and nearly wiped out
their tribe, according to a statement from Etnies. The United Nations has sanctioned their land as a
biological corridor to be restored and the international organization
has officially marked 2011 as the “Year of the Forest” globally.
This will also help Costa Rica in reaching its goal of becoming the
first carbon neutral country by 2021, a pledge paralleled by Etnies owner and founder
Pierre-Andre Senizergues who set the goal several years ago for etnies
to be carbon neutral by 2020.
Bike tires and used rubber gloves are recycled to create the Jameson 2
Eco shoe's outsole and plastic bottles are used in the making of their
PET shoe laces.
Etnies' statement noted that rainforests help curb global climate change by providing more than a
quarter of the oxygen to the world, and are home to thousands of species
of animals. By planting at least 35,000 trees in the etnies Rainforest,
approximately 6,930 tons of CO2 will be absorbed from the Earth's
atmosphere throughout the trees' lifetime. This represents 465,051,360
etnies shoe boxes worth of CO2, placed end-to-end and wrapped around the
Earth more than three-and-a-half times.
