Taking The Sustainable Route

Sustainability isn’t just a buzzword word for us, it’s where our story began. When we started building Isla, we quickly realized that every choice matters, from the materials in our frames to how they’re made and delivered.

The sunglasses industry may look stylish on the surface, but behind the scenes it creates a lot of waste and pollution. We had to decide whether to follow the usual way of doing things, or take a more thoughtful approach.

We grew up in The Netherlands but found ourself living abroad in our early 20s. Australia was an incredible place to live. We spent a lot of time on an island on the Great Barrier Reef, the rainforest in the North and the beautiful beaches of the Sunshine Coast. This was so different than the city life we were used to.

It gave us a different perspective, because on that little island we lived on we kept seeing the plastic pollution firsthand. On the Pacific Ocean side, plastic just kept washing up on the beaches. No matter how often it was cleaned, the next week it would be full of plastic bottles, lids and fishing lines.

So when we were faced with the decisions of how we are going to create our product, we knew we wanted to do our best in choosing as many sustainable options as possible.

We have written a full blog post about why we chose our frame materials, which you can read here.

We made sure that all of our cardboard packaging, manuals & thank you cards come from FSC certified forests, meaning these forests protect wildlife, respect the rights of workers and local communities, and ensure trees are replanted.

Our supplier was able to create our cleaning cloths from recycled plastic bottles which is great.

That said, there are areas where we can improve. We weren’t able to find a sustainable material for our pouches.

They are vegan leather, a synthetic, animal-friendly material made from fossil fuels that isn’t biodegradable. We hope to find an alternative soon that fits our brand and isn’t so heavily based on petroleum materials.

As we were inspired by the places we lived in, we chose to partner with The Sea Turtle Conservancy, donating 1% of our annual sales directly to their efforts in protecting sea turtles in Florida, Panama, Costa Rica & more. If you’re interested, you can read more about their efforts here.

The choices we made feel good, knowing we’re using our platform to do the right thing and help do our part in caring for the environment we all share. We still have steps to take in becoming completely sustainable, but we will get there.