On 1 October 2026, at the Singapore Fashion Council's fifth Be The Change Summit, Indosole and Sungai Design were named winners of the 2026 Impact Award in the project category — one of the most significant recognition events for purpose-led fashion and materials innovation in Southeast Asia.
The award was presented to the Riversole project: a collaboration between Indosole and Sungai Design that collects discarded flip flops and sandals from Indonesia's rivers and transforms them into Riverfoam, a new recycled material with a growing range of applications.
The Win: What Happened at the Be The Change Summit
The Be The Change Summit drew 48 applications from seven countries across Singapore and Southeast Asia for the 2026 Impact Award. The project category — won by Riversole — recognised an initiative demonstrating that waste materials can become the foundation of commercially viable, scalable products.
Nicole van der Elst Desai, chair of SFC's Sustainability Steering Committee, called the winners "living proof that responsible fashion is both achievable and commercially viable in Asia."
Vogue Singapore covered the announcement as part of its summit recap, alongside SFC's launch of its Sustainability Readiness Intelligence tool for ASEAN manufacturers and Singapore's entry into the global Fashion Cities Coalition. Read the full Vogue Singapore coverage here.
The Riversole Project: From River Waste to New Material
Indonesia's waterways carry an enormous volume of discarded foam sandals — lightweight, non-biodegradable, and almost impossible to collect at scale without a dedicated infrastructure. Sungai Watch built that infrastructure. Their teams go directly into rivers, retrieve the waste, and process it. Together with Sungai Design, Indosole takes that recovered foam and turns it into something new.
The result is Riverfoam — a recycled material that carries the full story of where it came from, and what it took to get there.
What Is Riverfoam — and What Gets Made From It?
Riverfoam is the material at the centre of the Riversole project. Made entirely from sandal foam recovered from Indonesian rivers by Sungai Watch's teams, it is processed and transformed by Indosole & Sungai Design into a durable, usable material.
The Riversole flip flop was the first product made from Riverfoam and is already part of the Indosole range. The Rivermat is next: Indosole's first yoga and exercise mat, built from the same river-recovered material and available in four colourways inspired by the natural world — Matahari (sun), Hutan (forest), Bumi (earth) and Bulan (moon).
Shop Riverfoam Products in Singapore
The Rivermat is available now in Singapore in all four colourways.
Learn more about the Indosole x Sungai Design collaboration.
