All shoe boxes are produced from recycled cardboard. All users’ instructions are printed on recycled paper. To retain the intended shape of the shoes during transport to the shops, the shoes are not filled with the traditional plugs of (bleached) stuffing paper, but with a single curved recycled cardboard shaper.

In the Dutch factory all waste paper is seperated from other waste and is picked up by an external processing company. It then is recycled by them.

For its outer boxes (the largeboxes in which individual shoe boxes are grouped for transport from factory to shop), Van Bommel has decided against the widely-used ‘American folding carton’ in favour of the less popular ‘harmonica carton’. The harmonica carton is less practical than the American folded carton in a number of respects. Assembling the box takes more work, the outer box itself is less solid, is more expensive (being made up of two parts) and is more difficult to stack on pallets (because the dimensions are less uniform). The major advantage is however that in a harmonica carton less ‘air’ (empty space) is transported. As a result, environmental burdens (and costs) from transport are kept to a minimum.