PONTE VEDRA — There’s an elephant in an office park off Palm Valley Road, a colorful creature, more than 5 feet high, which began life as thousands of dirty, tossed-away flip-flops gathered from the beaches and roadways of Kenya.

The elephant is joined by hundreds of other equally colorful flip-flop animals of varying sizes, from lions to moose, in the new headquarters of Ocean Sole Africa.

It’s a business run by Erin Smith, who left the corporate world in London and Nairobi to embark on a passion project, one that combines social welfare, environmental conservation and art.

It all comes together in the handmade rubber sculptures — one of which sold for $25,000 — created by Kenyan artists and made from that humble and pesky thing, the flip-flop.

First, the problem with flip-flops.

For some 3.5 billion people, Smith said, cheap flip-flops are the only footwear they can afford, especially in hot, coastal areas. They last a few weeks or months and then are thrown out. The trouble is, broken flip-flops are just about indestructible.

Some go to dump sites, others are just tossed to the side of the road. They land in waterways; some block sources of drinking water, some block sewage. Others get swept into the ocean, where they can travel hundreds of miles, washing up on distant shores.

Some flip-flops in Kenya, Smith said, can be traced to India or even more distant parts of Asia.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing of cheap flip-flops is often “an ugly business,” Smith said, using child labor and creating huge amounts of waste.

Ocean Sole, Smith’s company, is trying to tackle that problem, providing jobs in Kenya and turning at least some of that trash into art.

“We work up and down coast of of Kenya, and we’re starting to expand. We pay 90 percent women; they collect flip-flops off the beach, roadways, we pay by weight, we collect, clean, disinfect, make art.”

The rubber left over from the art is shredded and made into mattresses for refugees, working with the Red Cross and World Vision.

Smith, who just turned 55, grew up in a military family.

After her parents moved to Ponte Vedra in 1992 she made the Beaches her home away from home as she worked in London and Kenya.

Smith worked in tech and became a management consultant in private equity and financial services, including a high position with British Telecom in London. She eventually went to Nairobi, Kenya, with another international company from which she retired more than four years ago.

She’s kept a home in Kenya, on the beach. She likes it there, the people, the scenery, the life.

For the next phase in her life she knew she wanted combine art, social welfare and protecting the oceans.

That led her to Ocean Soles, which was then a small, troubled project; she got involved in it in 2015 and took it over.

It’s a nonprofit, with some money going back to conservation, some to improving the lives of Kenyans through business education.

Though the art and materials will still come from Kenya, it was impractical to ship from there.

That led Smith back to Jacksonville, where she’s shipped two containers of the art. Some — including a 14-foot giraffe — is in a warehouse on Philips Highway. The rest is in a suite in the Ponte Vedra Business Park.

It’s from there that she plans to sell the art, online, around the world. She’s had a soft launch of her website for online sales — oceansoleafrica.com — but so far most of her sales have been word-of-mouth or through emails.

Don’t think of the art as just trinkets.

Some smaller creations in the Ponte Vedra location do go for $20, but the elephant is on sale for $10,000.

For a mall in Canada, Ocean Sole made a $25,000 killer whale, a bear and a beaver. Huge pieces are in a hospital in the Netherlands.

A botanical garden in Vero Beach bought pieces to scatter through its property.

At a raffle, she said, bidding on one piece went up to $50,000. Smith figures other large pieces would fit in business lobbies and airports.

They’ve also made custom orders — such as two yellow Labrador Retrievers — with the artists in Kenya working from photos.

Smith is effusive in her praise for the 112 artists on the payroll. They previously worked with wood, but those skills have transferred easily to flip-flops.

They work with washed and sterilized flip-flops, which are sorted by color, then stacked and glued, with non-toxic glue, into blocks.

Using knives, they begin to carve the flip-flops into animals. A rotating sander also helps shape the creatures.

Turtles, manatee, dolphins, penguins, hammerhead sharks.

Lions, elephants, giraffes, hippos, zebras, rhinos, warthogs, camels.

Dinosaurs, moose, bees, penguins.

The larger ones are made with flip-flops layered over polyurethane donated by refrigeration companies that use the port in Kenya. Instead of going into a dump, that material is shaped into a mold for the animal.

Smith said the artists, who were city people, had not seen many of the African animals until she took them on safari.

They work a lot from photos, and she’s watched numerous Sir David Attenborough nature documentaries with them.

Smith laughs: “You’re talking about Africans, sitting in Keya, making a moose.”

David Smith, her brother, works in banking, and has been helping out at Ocean Sole. He said he thinks his sister lost a bit of her passion, eventually, in the corporate world. This project is a natural for her.

“My sister has been a trailblazer as long as I’ve known her. People are going left, she goes right,” he said. “Always passionate about things.”

Erin Smith has big plans still for Ocean Sole, including expansion to Honduras and Haiti, then perhaps beyond — working on the same business model and using the same troublesome material to create art.

Flip-flops.

“We’re kind of a full-circle solution to this,” she said. “It’s better than doing private equity mergers and acquisitions. The pay was much better, but it’s so much more interesting now.”

— Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082