Flip Flop Pollution
I Love meet and greet, the UK’s favourite airport parking brand, is continuing its environmental campaigning by supporting the recycling of discarded flip flops into art. Based in Kenya, an ambitious social enterprise called Ocean Sole is creating amazing works of art from flip flops collected from African beaches.
“Having given away almost 10,000 re-usable stainless-steel straws to customers as part of our highly successful ParkthePlastic campaign, we are now focussed on raising awareness of the problems of flip flop pollution.” Explains Sarah Anglim, founder and MD of I Love meet and greet, “As the world’s most popular shoe contains harmful chemicals, disposing of flip flops is a major issue and the United Nations has identified that flip flops form a persistent part of plastic marine pollution. We want to highlight this issue and for the months of August and September we are focussing our social media, email campaigns and homepage on raising awareness of flip flop pollution. We are also running a competition to win some of the highly regarded Ocean Sole art.”
Julie Church, a marine biologist, launched Ocean Sole in 2005 to sell products that raise awareness of the environmental issues surrounding flip flops and has since partnered multiple times with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on a variety of projects.
I Love meet and greet is supporting their latest campaign Flip the Flop by buying products for a competition and highlighting the issue amongst its customer base.
Sarah adds: “Once again we felt that when we are engaging with our customers, they are in ‘holiday mode’ – a time when they most want to enjoy pristine beaches but also when they, themselves, are likely to wearing, buying and maybe replacing their own flip flops – and we can use that moment to raise the awareness of this issue.”