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Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
- hermitcrab 4y agoThis is a great piece of investigative journalism. We need for of this holding big companies to account. BTW Trainers being re-used is good. But big companies lying to us to is not good.
- y-c-o-m-b 4y agoI agree. This is really top notch journalism; something we don't see often anymore. I would give this piece an award honestly. It seems the real scandal is that they've caught Dow giving lip service about its recycling program. I think I'm fine with where the shoes ended up though. I'd rather see them get used.
- nonethewiser 4y agoBut where is the lie? Dow says they are making tracks and playgrounds out of shoes. The article grants this is true. But for some reason the article tries to spin the fact that they are also recycling them whole as some scandal. > U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc and the Singapore government said they were transforming old sneakers into playgrounds and running tracks. Reuters put that promise to the test by planting hidden trackers inside 11 pairs of donated shoes. Most got exported instead. The journalist spent lots of time and energy tracking these shoes. It appears they went in looking for controversy and are trying to squeeze some out of their benign findings.
- hermitcrab 4y ago"In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated shoes, then grind down the material for use in building new playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore."
- officialjunk 4y agoso let's imagine what this journalist expected to happen to the shoes really did happen, and mulched up pieces of metal and batteries from the trackers really ended up in playgrounds intended to provide a soft and safe surface to play on. maybe the journalism is good, but it poses danger to kids getting cut and being exposed to battery chemicals. also if i ran a playground surface mulching service i would have a metal detectors for safety reasons and not allow these shoes to be mulched, which could be what actually happened.
- RobLach 4y agoSo actually they're doing something better than recycling?
- jasonlotito 4y agoYeah, selling people shoes with trackers in them. That's good. That's what you are okay with.
- renewiltord 4y agoWell, they didn't know they had trackers in them. I reckon I wouldn't be mad at Goodwill if I bought shoes there and they had trackers in them. The trackers are only there because Reuters was running a sting.
- RobLach 4y agoYou misinterpreted the article. Journalists are putting trackers in shoes, not Dow.
- taylorius 4y agoThe shoes getting sold second-hand, and used again seems a perfectly legitimate form of recycling tbh.
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoWhat’s the scandal here? Perfectly good shoes were sent to a country that seems to have a need and market for reasonably priced shoes. The people on the ground there aren’t going to care about some bourgeois project like recycling them into a walking path so more wealthy people’s feet are comfortable on leisure walks through a park. The people working on these projects have their own opinions on it and acted accordingly! If DOW took their clients seriously, they would have known this and processed the shoes down into much smaller pieces using a cutting machine immediately after collection, and the staff at the offshore recycling facility will have nothing else to do with them.
- booi 4y agoIt is reduce, reuse and recycle in that order. If anything seems like they did a great job here.
- gowings97 4y agoInteresting how that phrase has largely disappeared from the current green message carried by major media. Especially the reduce component.
- capableweb 4y agoReduce would mean you buy less. Reuse would mean you buy less or buy from other people. Only recycle means you buy the same amount as before. Guess which one companies prefer you do?
- drak0n1c 4y agoThere's a form of broken window fallacy going on in green policy circles. Particularly the Cash for Clunkers program, and California's recent banning of trucks made before 2010. It is an attempt to drive demand and raw resource extraction to produce new equipment, by destroying existing supply of refined goods and driving up prices. Used cars are scarce now. Opposite of reduce/reuse.
- 4y ago
- nmilo 4y ago> The donated shoes that ended up in Indonesia have added to a flood of illegal second-hand clothing pouring into that developing country, according to a senior government official there, who said such cast-offs pose a public health risk, undercut its local textile industry and often pile more waste into its already bulging landfills. Do they even understand the words coming out on the page? I'm sorry but if people can't afford to clothe themselves then fuck the "local textile industry," aka forcing people to spend money on clothes they probably cannot afford. Wearing shoes should be a human right (God knows there's probably enough shoes for everyone on Earth) and saying we should stop sending second-hand clothes to places for the purposes of job creation is just breaking windows to make jobs for window repairmen.
- morelisp 4y ago[flagged]
- civilized 4y agoCould it be that someone who has a perspective different from yours has equal or greater context? On what basis do you assume that you have more context, that a person who has the context you have would automatically be convinced of what you believe? If you get X for cheap, that frees you up to make Y's. In a poor country, there's no shortage of Y's that people need or want.
- jessaustin 4y ago"Someone" might know something, but you in particular have no idea what you're talking about. You think you know better than Indonesians what their laws should be, but you don't.
- civilized 4y agoI guess people can decide that for themselves. Just one question: did "Americans" decide to make becoming a licensed hairstylist require hundreds of hours of training and thousands of dollars in course fees? Or was it special interest groups?
- code_duck 4y agoIt's much more efficient to use shoes as shoes vs. chop them up and make them into pavement.
- pfdietz 4y agoThis surprises me. I'd expect the shoes to instead be recycled into fuel for cement kilns, which is what a lot of "recycled" plastic turns into anyway. Anyway, the problem isn't that the shoes aren't recycled. It's that shoes are made from materials derived from fossil fuels.
- htrp 4y agoLooks like they used an apple airtag, but couldn't specifically call it that for some reason.... >One shoe of each pair was implanted with a thin, round Bluetooth tracking device. > a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile.
- kailanb 4y agoIt’s called out later in the article.
- patrick451 4y agoEhh, so what? Should they have unstitched the shoes, sold the components to a shoemaker who then restitched them and sold the result in an Indonesian flea market? If the input and output to the pipe is shoes made of existing materials, why should I care about the intermediate steps? This outrage is so tedious.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fergie 4y agoGood. Actual reuse of perfectly good shoes is the best outcome for all concerned (and the environment).
- Tozen 4y agoSo then what happens to the unhygienic used shoes after the next person has got them (and hopefully not some odd foot infection) and then uses them up to the point where they are no longer wearable? And what happened to the not so good to unwearable used shoes that the useable ones were picked from? If the answer is just dump them somewhere, then we are right back to where we started, in the mist of a plastic pollution catastrophe. Except, we moved the problem to poorer countries, that have even less resources and technology to deal with it.
- drno123 4y agoBut this is better to reuse them first, right? Instead of consuming energy to convert them into other materials.
- nonethewiser 4y agoThat’s recycling. In its purest form even.
- junglistguy 4y agoMost organisations that collect clothes for charity are usually scams.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jrmg 4y agoThis might be too optimistically naive, but I wonder if they’re treating the shoes as a commodity. Like, for every 1000 shoes in Dow collection bins, they’re using 1000 shoes in the recycling-to-sports-surfaces projects, but they’re not the same shoes. Hopefully they’re the more worn-out shoes, and thats why the nicer shoes ‘donated’ for this article were not used.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoWhat disease can be spread via old shoes, if you, for example, steam them at high temperature?
- SergeAx 4y agoWow, that's an exemplary investigative journalism! World will be so much better now. Maybe these guys better spend their energy and funds on tracking Russian oil, which is exported in troves bypassing sanctions?
- jessaustin 4y agoOnly a small number of nations are actually sanctioning Russian oil, so there's no need to "bypass" anything.
- fortran77 4y agoIsn't reselling them recycling them? I'd only be outraged if they ended up in a landfill. Perhaps they should have tried shoes that weren't in wearable condition to see if those got recycled.
- phyzome 4y agoI would like to know whether they put trackers into any shoes that were in bad condition. I think that would be a much more damning result if those were sent to the wrong place.
- userbinator 4y agoIt's recycling, even if the cycle is a little shorter than you thought it would be.
- naet 4y agoThe shoes were in near brand new condition so they resold them... that is a good thing. If the intention of this article is to expose them for not recycling I think they've missed their mark. Maybe if the shoes were damaged or unusable they would have gone somewhere else, but it's more wasteful to not consider reuse before trying to extract a small amount of rubber from a perfectly good shoe.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoSeems to me like the probability for scamming is nearly 100% in a program like this because there's a long chain of no-name contractors involved. One contractor hires another and says "Get rid of this stuff" and eventually one of them finds somebody who actually wants to illegally buy the usable part of the waste and then he just dumps the rest in a ditch somewhere. The next-to-last contractor in the chain didn't ask any questions about why the final contractor offered to cart it away for free, but they should have. When the scam is eventually discovered, the publicly-visible company at the front of the chain has plausible deniability and blames it on the contractors. This general pattern is what caused a decent fraction of EPA superfund disasters in the US. Plus it's waste, so nobody is very motivated to actually keep track of where it ends up. Until bluetooth trackers came along and made that easy, anyway.
- MarkusWandel 4y agoSo? These shoes all look great, even by North American thrift store standards. It would be a total waste to shred them when they can be put to lots of additional use. Maybe they should have tracked some truly worn-out ones.
- Ekaros 4y agoAm I only one who questions this recycling plan in the first place? Aren't we quite worried about microplastics at this point? And isn't making fields of this which stay in sun and weather just eventually going to spread it around? Not that I have been on a track in long time, but already then I noted the wearing of tiny bits off. Where will all of it end?
- faeriechangling 4y agoSo Dow actually made better and more efficient use of the shoes than they claimed to? What a scandal? This all seems like hair splitting to me, it's not clear if reuse of used shoes is better or worse for the environment than just pulverising them. Recycling has far lower value than most people tend to think it does so reusing shoes for six months to a year is very arguably more impactful.
- wwfzyn 4y agoI see a lot of reuse is good so it's all good. Do we know if the buyers of these reused shoes will recycle then when done or are these ending in a landfill? Because that's the ultimate issue here. Dow promised their end was not landfill.
- josephcsible 4y agoImagine that you collect soda bottles and promise you'll recycle them. When you get them, you turn them into sweaters that you sell. If someone who buys a sweater throws it in the landfill after it wears out, does that mean you broke your promise?
- ltbarcly3 4y agoSounds like they were made into shoes with almost no material or energy inputs. Literally perfect recycling.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoIt looks like most people didn't make it to this part of the article: >In 2015, Indonesia’s Ministry of Trade introduced the Prohibition of the Import of Used Clothing regulation. The measure banned the import of used clothes and footwear over concerns about hygiene and the potential of these items to spread disease, as well as the need to protect the local textile industry. Part of the problem here is that, yes, reuse is better than recycle, but these shoes were illegally sent into the second hand market of a country that DOW cannot be prosecuted in. These shoes were guaranteed not first disinfected, they were just put in a bag, illegally shipped into India, unbagged, and then put on a shelf. "Reduce, reuse, resell, recycle", but not if the step you decided to go with requires actively breaking the law and compromising the health and already health compromised billion-plus population country. Then you get articles like this, which quite rightly call out DOW over what they did.
- acyou 4y agoYep, next up in the global effort to stave off deflation and maximize consumption: second hand goods are unsafe and need to be disinfected before resale, or better yet thrown out. Need your state certificate of resale legality and certification of disinfection or be subject to prosecution. We ridicule it at the start, this is how this stuff eventually gets memed into existence. It's not fiction, it's already reality! What diseases are spread through textiles, that need to be stopped at the cost of people not being able to afford to wear shoes on their feet? Not everyone can afford new shoes...
- TheRealPomax 4y agoIndeed - if only DOW had worked with the Indian government to make this happen, given that they're a multi-billion-dollar company and could have easily done so. But no, instead they just decided to crime their way to getting rid of mostly fine used shoes.
- concordDance 4y agoA lot of consumer regulation is for the benefit of the middle class, who can afford things costing slightly more but are much more safety conscious. The poor generally get screwed by it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago[dead]
- rldjbpin 4y agothis is not fair in the sense of the word, but it is still better than dumping waste in another country in the name of recycling. playing devil's advocate, nobody would send their shoes if dow would come clean and say that they will sell it elsewhere to make money. most people would irrationally ask for a cut even tho there's logistics involved in getting it to the other country.
- uberman 4y agoI kind of see where the "outrage" might come from in the lead as apparently they promised that the shoes were going to be recycled. However, the mantra is "reduce reuse recycle". Clearly it is better in the save the planet sense that perfectly good shoes were reused rather than destroyed for playground padding. I'm a liberal in general but this kind of false outrage makes us look foolish.
- LightDub 4y agoWanting not to be lied to is not false outrage.
- ianburrell 4y agoI read article a while ago that can’t find about how people’s emotional connection to stuff influences getting rid of things. People want to have things disposed of properly. This is especially true for things with close connection like clothes, shoes, or furniture. Their shoes meant something and should be treated with dignity and as described. But to recipient, they are used shoes.
- woodruffw 4y agoI’m not outraged that the shoes were reused instead of recycled; I agree with you about that probably being a better outcome. I don’t think that was the article’s purpose, however: the purpose was to show that companies like Dow can’t be taken at their word when it comes to environmental initiatives. The outcome in this case was preferential, but all evidence points to that outcome being the product of Dow simply not caring.
- grugagag 4y agoDow is doing anything to increase their positive perception and appear as green as it gets considering they’re still producing enormous amounts of plastic which is clearly disastous for the environment. But their effort ends after the campaign, quickly getting rid of the problem in any way possible, maybe even turn a little profit if possible. Large pollutors always play these perception games while shoving garbage under the carpet so to speak…
- seltzered_ 4y agoSee also https://www.ban.org/ https://www.ban.org/ which does similar tracking projects for e-waste.
- rr808 4y agoGenuinely expected the answer to be Indonesian rubbish dump.
- davidhyde 4y agoFrom memory, and this may have changed in the last 10 years, Indonesia doesn’t really do “rubbish dumps”. They sweep everything in the street, including rubbish from peoples homes into small piles and burn it there and then. Might be different in Jakarta but this is what I saw everywhere else. The smoke and smell of burnt plastic was everywhere. I only spent a month there but I got around a lot and on more then one occasion witnessed Malaysian tourists asking Indonesian locals why there was rubbish everywhere. No bins hey. The national parks were (still are?) especially bad. Anyway, Indonesia is probably not the best final destination for any sort of waste. IMO, Indonesia is not the problem, its really the farce of plastic recycling.
- analog31 4y agoOr the sea.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoWell they don't say what happens to the shoes that are in bad condition, I think for completeness' sake they should do the same with tatty and worn out shoes. The trackers would likely get shredded then though. I think this is only half the story. Why would they shred up perfectly serviceable shoes when they can make money off of selling them?
- vishnugupta 4y agoI'm super curious to know the Bluetooth tracker device they used. I have a strong feeling it's Apple AirTag.
- tamade 4y agoThe journalists went out of their way to not call them AirTags
- tylershuster 4y agoLook at the screenshots. They say they used the "Find My" app.
- throw_away1525 4y agoMy city has a waste to energy plant. Anything I put in the waste bin gets burned, and the energy is used to generate power or heat for the city. I have a hell of a time convincing my wife that we ought to just chuck all plastics into the waste rather than stick them in the recycling bin, since only God knows where the plastics in the recycling bin end up. Maybe they get recycled, maybe they get dumped onto a smoldering trash mountain in Turkey or maybe they end up floating down the Yangtze. Even if they do get recycled into a fleece sweater or whatever, given what we know about microplastic shedding, do we really want that? Just burn the shit and recover the energy, I say.
- prepend 4y ago> since only God knows where the plastics in the recycling bin end up. They likely end up in the same place as your waste.
- mclightning 4y agois burning plastic actually an exothermic reaction?
- Scoundreller 4y agoyes, it's basically gas/oil
- concordDance 4y agoLandfill is better because it doesn't release CO2.
- settrans 4y agoIndeed this is HWFO's core thesis: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-straws https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-...
- kzrdude 4y agoLandfilling still seems very inefficient. As Sweden has done for a long time: what ever you put in "regular waste" goes to incineration. The heat is used for district heating. Remains from incineration can be landfilled. Exhaust gases are monitored and cleaned. Regular landfills have thus been abolished, which is a success. It's a small step, but IMO a very notable achievement. And it has outraged some that plastic "recycling" goes into the same system in many parts of the country. I don't mind in principle - it is their (local government's) system, they are tasked with being professional and disposing of collected plastic in the best way possible. If that's going to be burning with retention of heat, then that's acceptable.
- jefftk 4y agoI wonder what they would have seen if they'd put the trackers into shoes that were unusable, instead of ones that someone might want to wear?
- Tao3300 4y agoI'm wondering if someone didn't say "hey these ones have something weird in the sole, we probably shouldn't grind them up" and they were rejected as unsuitable for recycling.