A few days after publishing our last article, Earthkeepers or Landfillers? we received a response from Timberland. In addition to offering to replace the boot, they wrote us a long detailed email about their social and environmental sustainability efforts. Please see the below excerpt. We leave it to you to make your own judgement.

We would like to assure you that Timberland is committed to making products that are of high quality and dependability. We pride ourselves in our continuous innovation to constantly improving performance and sustainability, making products that are outdoor-proven and long-lasting; at the same time practical and fashionable.

With sustainability at the core of Timberland’s culture, we are dedicated to developing products and materials that have reduced environmental impact. Our Earthkeepers^™ collection is an example of a product line that best represents these values in action.

Earthkeepers™ footwear uses materials like recycled PET linings, 42% recycled rubber soles, and organic cotton, thus reducing the climate impact, chemical use and resource consumption. Many green innovations first introduced in the Earthkeepers™ line like Green Rubber, are now found in other Timberland’s products.

In 2007, we also established The Green Index®rating system, which measures the specific environmental impact of our products, and uses it to score our footwear against aspects of their climate, chemical, and resource impacts.

Our dedication to making quality outdoor-proven gear is matched by our commitment to “doing well, and doing good”. From volunteer programme that gives our employees 40 paid service hours a year to make a difference in their communities, to our industry-leading eco labelling initiative and the way we source the materials we use; we are focused upon reducing our environmental impact and improving the places where we live and work.