On a business trip last August, I took a break and went sightseeing in lower Manhattan. After walking six miles, I stopped for tea on a shady side street. Then I decided to mark time in a shoe store across the street before continuing the trek, but was surprised to discover I had stepped into a new type of shoe store environment.

Terra Plana makes sports shoes, flip flops, boots, and high heels equipped with a built-in and eco-friendly gel pad for comfort. The lightweight shoes for men, women and children are made with 21st century technology, and come with sustainable guarantees. They are well-made from good quality eco-friendly materials, in Chinese factories monitored by NGOs. In 2009 they won Treehugger’s Best in Green award. The British company even offers a takeback program for worn shoes. The old shoes are either repaired or recycled to make new shoes, and the owner receives a discount for a new pair.

So far the New York store is the only one in the U.S. I bought a pair of attractive walking shoes that are so comfortable I wore them to complete my tour of NoHo.

Evo ll, Terra Plana minimalist , water-resistant vegan running shoe for men and women.

Mamie, Terra Plana lace-up bootie with a wooden stacked heel. Mixture of eco materials and vegetable tanned leather.

And, I learned, there are other young footwear brands with social awareness.

Splaff

In 1997, Cliff Drill took a surfing trip to Baja, Mexico. He had always been interested in Mexican sandals made from recycled materials combined with leather. As he was driving home, he visited a factory where they were made and, fascinated, he stayed as an apprentice for two weeks. Returning to the U.S., he figured out how to improve the design and founded Splaff.

The company’s long-lasting sandals are made from auto racetrack tires (they use 1,000 per year) and used bicycle inner tubes and are lined with hemp bought from companies in the U.S. Splaff also offers handmade belts, bags, wallets and belts from inner tubes and hemp. The company is committed to recycling: leftover pieces of rubber are fashioned into hang tags. They also take back worn shoes to make into new products and provide the customer with a discount for the next pair.

Original Splaff flip flop sandal made wtih a recycled race car tire sole.

Splaff's recycled bike tube belt lined with black hemp fabric to keep it from stretching.

TOMS Shoes

TOMS started in May 2006 when founder Blake Mycoskie visited Argentina. There he learned that children in poorer villages who had no shoes were susceptible to diseases, which kept them from going to school. He had been wearing the local shoes made of cotton or canvas, the alpargata style worn by Argentina farmers for 100 years, and these were the inspiration for his first collection: The sole is made of rubber. He returned to the U.S. and sold his online driver education company to self-finance the shoe company. Today, TOMS Shoes are sold at more than 500 stores nationwide and internationally. The company also donates a pair of shoes to children in need, up to 18 years old, for every pair sold. More than 600,000 pairs of the canvas shoes have been given to children in the U.S., Argentina, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Haiti and South Africa. In 2010 FastCompany named TOMS No. 6 on the list of Top Ten Most Innovative Retail Companies. Visit the TOMS website for more information.

TOMS red canvas classic shoes for women and men.

TOMS new wedge shoe available in many colors.

If the shoe fits, keep it. But what happens when your comfy solemates get scruffy, or boring, or so out of style you don’t want to be seen in public with them? Before donating them to a thrift, consider giving them the Cinderella treatment. You don’t even need a magic wand to change the color, and from there, recycling techniques range from very to moderately easy to do. Then you have new shoes you can enjoy without having to break them in.

Shoe Bling

Dress up plain pumps as people have done for centuries, by making or buying accessories that clasp on to the shoe’s toe or behind the heel or to sandal straps. Alligator clips attached to bows or faux flowers, old clip-on earrings, or decorative buckles found in thrift shops or scrounged from other repurposed clothing items are all good candidates for clip-on bling.

Golden Slippers

To extend the life of comfortable but grungy leather shoes, Neville Medhora, a personal finance blogger, bought a can of gold spray paint and gave the pair a total paint job, top and bottom. He likes the results which cost him all of $2.99. To be as eco-friendly as possible, look for a low VOC spray paint.

Neville Medhora gilded his old pair of Aldo shoes with spray paint after "shoe touch-up paint" no longer made them look any better.

Urban Batik

Threadbanger gives old Chuck Taylors new life by spray-painting the soles and tagging the sides with a bleach pen. Safety pins attach additional bling to the canvas uppers. (Safety pins attach additional bling to the uppers) (See how it’s done in the quick tutorial below.)

Sole-deep Makeover

Marty Stevens-Heebner’s book, Altered Shoes, provides 20 step-by-step guides to transforming stilettos, boots, flats, pumps, loafers, espadrilles, flip-flops, sneakers and sandals into anything but dull incarnations of their former selves. Makeovers range from the super-easy Flower Power Pumps — beads (as many as you like) attached with a glue gun — to easy but more time-consuming projects involving stamping, gilding and iron-on transfers. $17.24 at the Eco-Artware bookstore

Marty Stevens-Heebner spray painted her nondescript black leather granny boots and then attached fabric, lace and a transferred image to them with rubber cement and a hot glue gun. She also embellished the shoelaces with metallic paint.