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I 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 "red

I 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 ago
Wanting not to be lied to is not false outrage.
ianburrell 4y ago
I 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 ago
I’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 ago
  Dow 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…
- mirkules 4y ago
  The goal of environmental initiatives is to try to ensure the environment stays habitable to humans for longer. The goal of companies is to be profitable. The ultimate goal, then, is to find an intersection between those two concepts that makes sense for both the environment and profitability. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" is the order in which this is achieved, from least to most expensive. Recycling has become incredibly expensive [1] and it's hardly making financial sense anymore. "Reducing" is the least expensive because it doesn't require any energy, but we (consumers) like to buy stuff, so once a product is in a person's hands, "reduce" is out of the equation. That leaves us with "reuse," which not only helps reduce new products from being made, but also has the potential to make money for companies. This is actually a win-win scenario, and should be encouraged rather than frowned on. The issue is that "green marketing" has been in vogue since the mid 2000s, and companies (apparently shockingly!) lie in their messaging to sell their products. But Dow, in this case, is actually doing their part in being environmentally conscious. You can even call this a white lie or something like that. Nobody would buy new shoes or donate old ones if the marketing said "In order to reduce waste, we are going to resell your used shoes in Indonesian flea markets". (There is one "reduce" idea, ha!) As for companies not caring, I point to the whole purpose of a company's existence - to make money. Everything else is irrelevant. If environmental impacts are an issue, and legislation is forcing their hand, then they must find a way to remain profitable or simply go out of business. The linked Planet Money podcast highlights this predicament. It's important to remember that not everything is black and white as it's made to be in articles like this. [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-should-we-recycle https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I didn't get a "black and white" worldview from this article. In my reading, it supported much of what you've said: that companies are fundamentally profit-driven, and will employ whatever fabrications are necessary to maintain consumer appetite. Dow lying about its recycling is just a tiny niche, one that Reuters chose presumably because it was easy to fact-check. > Nobody would buy new shoes or donate old ones if the marketing said "In order to reduce waste, we are going to resell your used shoes in Indonesian flea markets". (There is one "reduce" idea, ha!) This is the entire business model of Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. These companies and non-profits take donations of old clothes, try and sell them locally, and then cycle them through other markets if they can't sell them locally. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that the tees I give to Goodwill end up in an Indonesian flea market, and that knowledge would have no purchasing effect on me. Even beyond that: plenty of high-end/luxury brands have old/vintage resale processes. Patagonia is somewhat famous for theirs[1]. [1]: https://wornwear.patagonia.com/ https://wornwear.patagonia.com/
- oblib 4y ago
  I'm not really seeing how giving preowned shoes to folks is not "recycling" them. When I was young we'd take glass soda bottles back to the store to be cleaned and refilled and we'd get a little money back. That was "recycling".
  - nextaccountic 4y ago
    The article says > 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.
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      So they did even better than that because that plan didn’t make sense. I’m glad for it, and I’m angry at the hall monitor type attitude that would want to punish them for doing the objectively better thing.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        But how many other plans that don't make sense are they lying about? How confident can we be that all of them have happy endings too? It's not hall monitor to call out big lies. It's not like there is a clear motive that would help the real program, either. The lie implies that they are being careless, and being careless with waste usually has bad consequences.
    - jimnotgym 4y ago
      ... and I think that is really important, because it gives the impression to the public that their plastic waste doesn't matter, because dow can recycle it into a running track. Now we don't even know if they can do that, this is good journalism. The important point is what if they were beyond reuse? What would they have done then? I suspect an Indonesian landfill is the answer.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    In the taxonomy of consumer/industrial waste, that's "reuse" instead of "recycling." But that's not really the issue at stake (reuse is good!). The issue is that Dow is lying, at the bare minimum, about their ability to enact a particular recycling program.
- aeternum 4y ago
  Why isn't this caring more? It is a much better outcome than grinding up the shoes and trying to use them as playground fill or something.
  - beedeebeedee 4y ago
    Most of the shoes that are exported cannot be resold and turn into trash. That is a much worse outcome than all of the shoes being recycled (plus it is illegal according to Indonesian import law).
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    "Caring more" requires us to believe that Dow knows and intended for this to happen, rather than it being a beneficial outcome of local economic pressures. That seems unlikely; why go to the effort of publicizing a specific recycling program (one that's worse!) when you're secretly going to do a better thing? The much more likely explanation is that Dow doesn't care, and expressed that lack of care by paying someone even less scrupulous to "care" for them. That party in turn doesn't care (because they can see Dow doesn't), and simply did whatever made them the most money.
    - dawatchusay 4y ago
      Innocent until proven guilty
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        This is an Internet forum, not a court of law.
        Dalewyn 4y ago
        Innocent until proven guilty is a standard that should be applied anywhere accusations are laid. Many nasty things will occur if this is violated.
    - lazide 4y ago
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  Can’t take governments at their words either. How many times have governments lied about the environment. Can’t take anyone at their word. Trust but verify.
- pmorici 4y ago
  Seems like the article wants you to accept a very narrow definition of recycling. reusing perfectly good shoes fits the definition of recycling in my book.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    The phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle" because it's intended to be an ordered taxonomy: reduction comes first, following by reusing existing materials, followed by recycling them into new materials. Reusing perfectly good shoes is a good outcome, and nobody in this thread has suggested otherwise. But it isn't recycling in the way that Dow stated, either literally (since they claimed a polar opposite use) or definitionally (since the shoes aren't turned into new shoes).
    - moronicQ 4y ago
      [dead]
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        Again: literally everyone in this thread agrees that it's preferable, and nobody is mad. The error here is in "they": Dow doesn't get credit for doing the preferable thing, because there's no evidence that it's what they intended to do. All available evidence suggests that Dow intended to do a worse thing, and someone saw a business opportunity within Dow's apathy.
        SilasX 4y ago
        No, not literally everyone. Don’t exaggerate. In addition to the litany of people hand-wringing about the harms of lying (which you will probably not count), there’s comments like this one, complaining that the clothing influx “hurts” the economy (which I don’t agree with but is another counterexample). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34938256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34938256 And that’s without making a serious effort to find any! Please don’t act like everyone on your side of this is making reasonable arguments just because you are. That’s sanewashing and tunnel-visioned.
- bobleeswagger 4y ago
  > the purpose was to show that companies like Dow can’t be taken at their word when it comes to environmental initiatives Did we really need this example to show it? Shoes? Nestle is trying to buy all the water, maybe that would be a better place to focus.
- mewse 4y ago
  I mean, the journalists put a giant hunk of metal and a battery in the shoes. There’s zero chance those shoes would ever have been allowed anywhere near the big expensive industrial textile shredders. If it’s a modern operation they’d be automatically and individually plucked out of the ingress path, or if it’s an older one they’d invalidate all the shoes in their bin at some earlier “bulk metal detection” step. And either way, those shoes would have to be disposed of in some other manner. I get the “big company bad” crowd, but I mean.. what alternate option did Dow have in this case? (From the article Dow appears to be throwing contractors under the bus — plausibly, in my opinion, based upon the article. But let’s assume that the ‘malfeasance’ here was done directly by Dow — what’s the “right thing” they should have done when receiving donated intentionally-tampered-with shoes that would have damaged their machinery?)
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Is there some evidence indicating that Dow was aware of the tampering, and diverted these specific shoes? That strikes me as a less plausible explanation than the one I’ve suggested.
    - mewse 4y ago
      As I said in my original reply, I think it’s most likely that Dow never received the sneakers at all; it seems entirely plausible to me that the resaleable-looking shoes were being diverted and exported by the contractors who had been hired to collect the sneakers from the donation bins. (and I’m not 100% certain that I have a problem with that, for “reuse is better than recycling” reasons also discussed elsewhere in these comments, but I can see how Dow might be displeased with it if it was a contractual violation) But that doesn’t change the fact that stuff which is going to be shredded always goes through a screening process first and those specific shoes-with-trackers-in-them were never going to reach the grinders and were never going to end up in paths/pavings, even if they did get to Dow. Because I mean, obviously.
  - postingawayonhn 4y ago
    They sought comment from Dow and visited the company collecting the shoes. Neither suggested that a process like you describe took place.
danielfoster 4y ago
I find the extent to which Dow lied to be outrageous. It did not say the shoes would be recycled, but specifically said they would be used to make playground padding. Why shouldn’t honesty be expected? After all, this is a country where people still get caned. Reusing the shoes as was the case is of course better.
- nerdbert 4y ago
  What is the connection between caning and dishonesty?
- Tozen 4y ago
  Actually, I think there is a case for fraud, somewhere in this mess and if authorities care to pursue it. Lying to the public, to encourage the donation of shoes, then various "middle men" making profits selling them, and where it was known that no recycling was taking place.
deathanatos 4y ago
> A torrent of cheap, unregulated second-hand clothing flowing into Indonesia also adds to the country’s mounting garbage problem, said Dharmesh Shah, a policy advisor to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a nonprofit working on waste pollution. He said much of that merchandise is in such poor condition that vendors can’t resell it. > “They sort through it and a very small percentage is actually reusable,” Shah told Reuters. “It just gets burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills.”
- notpushkin 4y ago
  Why don't they put non-reusable shoes back to recycle though?
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    Because neither Dow nor the Singaporean government are interested in recycling them once they have been able to dump them in Indonesia? This appears to be just a greenwashing scheme which coincidentally reuses a small fraction of the garbage stream.
  - sp332 4y ago
    That would take actual resources.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  Yeah I don't think anyone would be too upset if they plucked out the 10% of shoes that are in good-enough condition to actually resell in Indonesia, before grinding the rest up to make sports tracks. The issue is that it seems like all the shoes were sent to Indonesia, regardless of reusability, and they turned a blind eye to what happened to them after that.
  - smugma 4y ago
    “They said it’s not uncommon to throw out half the shoes they receive because the footwear is not good enough to sell.” Apparently it may be closer to half than 10%. And protectionism in Indonesia makes it illegal to import used shoes because of “hygiene”. I’m not absolving Dow, but there was a lot to get angry about in the article.
honkycat 4y ago
I understand your point, but at the end of the day they were not doing what they said they were. People were expecting their shoes to be processed and turned into something new, something that would theoretically help with the development of the recycling tech. Shipping shoes over the ocean is not the most eco-friendly thing. Additionally: do we know the shops in Indonesia are going to recycle them? Or is it more likely they will sit in a store for years and are then thrown out?
deleted 4y ago
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rippercushions 4y ago
The traders quoted in the article note that it's common for the shoes to get repeatedly shipped around, half of what they buy is not good enough for resale, and I'm sure a large portion of the shoes don't sell and get junked anyway. So the carbon footprint is much larger than local recycling in Singapore.
serf 4y ago
>However, the mantra is "reduce reuse recycle". corporations will never take a more costly and less profitable approach towards productions unless regulations and watchdogs keep them to their word -- this outrage is a necessary function to a degree , if you care to hold corporate groups to the same mantra.
billsmithaustin 4y ago
I agree that if the shoes were perfectly good, it would have been better to keep them. Are you asserting the author recycled perfectly good shoes, or are you just describing a hypothetical? If the former, what in the article suggests the shoes were still perfectly good?
bee_rider 4y ago
Reusing the shoes doesn’t make them vanish. If they are being reused that’s fine, actually better than fine, that’s great. But how will Dow track the shows through various secondhand markets to make sure they ultimately fulfill their promise to recycle them in the end? I think that will be basically impossible.
- melagonster 4y ago
  these shoes were donated to Dow. they had changed the company which treat shoes.
RC_ITR 4y ago
>I'm a liberal in general but this kind of false outrage makes us look foolish. You're not looking deep enough. The outrage should be that companies imply playground padding (maybe what? 100 tons/year at most) is somehow a reasonable approach to solving any waste problem. THEN they have the gall to not even do that. The valid outrage is how easy it is for companies to manipulate people.
deleted 4y ago
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pipeline_peak 4y ago
> Clearly it is better in the save the planet sense that perfectly good shoes were reused rather than destroyed for playground padding. You mean, only to be thrown away again but this time in a landfill?
geoelectric 4y ago
The problem is they're illegal in Indonesia as used clothing imports, so they're being confiscated. They may or may not end up being anywhere but a trash bin after all.
jrochkind1 4y ago
I would actually suspect some high proportion of those shoes will just end up in landfills, or perhaps incinerators, without ever being "re-used". From the OP: > A torrent of cheap, unregulated second-hand clothing flowing into Indonesia also adds to the country’s mounting garbage problem, said Dharmesh Shah, a policy advisor to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a nonprofit working on waste pollution. He said much of that merchandise is in such poor condition that vendors can’t resell it. > “They sort through it and a very small percentage is actually reusable,” Shah told Reuters. “It just gets burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills.” > Two market vendors in Batam, who asked not to be named, told Reuters they buy sacks of shoes of differing grades from used-clothing traders such as Yok Impex, but don’t know exactly what they’re getting until they open them up. They said it’s not uncommon to throw out half the shoes they receive because the footwear is not good enough to sell. It is true that for a lot of plastics, you can find someone happy to be paid, less than it would cost to recycle, to bury it, or incinerate it, or toss it in a river or lake. And indeed that is the destination of a lot of plastics that on the front-end are claimed to be headed for recycling. So why recycle at all, right? Apparently the invisible hand says that the best and highest use for this trash is to be buried and burnt -- as long as you can find someone in enough need of the money you're willing to pay them to burn or bury it. We could imagine, for the purpose of making it more conceivable, keeping all waste within national borders. We could imagine that within the USA, wealthier areas wouldn't really want to bury your trash next to their homes and businesses -- at least not for the amount of money someone is willing to pay, especially when they can find a poorer more desperate area that will take much less to bury or burn your trash next to an elementary school or what have you. So, why recycle at all? I mean, indeed most plastic isn't really that recyclable, so this isn't a totally rhetorical question. But then we should probably produce a lot less of it, and the way the industry gets out of people thinking that is by convincing you that it'll be recycled. Which is really the motivation for this recycle-fraud. Industry wanting you to believe that it'll be recycled, to avoid pressure to reduce production. (the first `r`). Which is exactly why Dow can't let on that it knows the stuff will never be recycled. PS: I fully expected to find the HN comments section full of people saying that exporting used tennis shoes to poor countries is a better use than recycling them, and it's somehow "privileged" to want to recycle them, instead of supporting the landfill and incineration business of some third world country which can really use the funds. I was not disapointed.
kleiba 4y ago
The thing is, however, these second-hand shoes might sit in that store for a while and then, after they haven't been bought by anyone for some time, be thrown in a landfill after all. That's quite different from giving people an incentive to donate their used shoes (rather than selling them on themselves, mind you) because they think they're going to be used to build playgrounds for children.
Tozen 4y ago
But, here's the thing about reuse, what happens after the next person is done using the shoes? Looks more like kicking the can down the road. Not only is there a hygiene problem involved with this type of reuse, but then the 2nd hand shoes still end up being part of the massive plastic pollution problem. Dow seems to just have "exported" the problem to another country, lied about it, their people or associates are kind of making money under the table, and the environment continues suffering. At some point, governments are going to have to hold companies accountable for the plastic waste problem.
supermatt 4y ago
What percentage of those “reused” shoes end up in landfill?
DamonHD 4y ago
If not one sample pair of shoes was processed in the way advertised, then I think it is indeed outrageous. I'd agree that reuse might be better, but then the programme should be clear that that is one possible outcome.
- hattmall 4y ago
  Well they lost track of 3 pair, which could mean they were indeed shredded and recycled. 0
- uberman 4y ago
  Here is the thing though. If all the perfectly good pairs of shoes were destroyed, the reported might have wrote an equally aggrieved piece about the shameful way these perfectly good shoes were not reused. Seems like they set up a strawman ready to be outraged no matter what Dow did.
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    Shipping western clothing to poor countries tends to destroy local industry. I prefer to be able to make my own choices, not have people lie to be and then do whatever they feel is cheaper. They have to pay to properly recycle, but can just sell the old shoes. This is fraud, pure and simple. They asked for the donations of shoes under false pretenses. (There's a chance it was whatever firm they paid - but then they're just willfully incompetent.)
    - nradov 4y ago
      It's never going to be economically viable for most poor countries to develop local clothing industries. Even without imports of used clothing the economies of scale in that industry are just brutal. Poor countries that want to protect local industry can impose import tariffs, but in most cases they would be better off with unrestricted free trade.
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
driggs 4y ago
I came here to post the exact same sentiment and the ordered phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Yes, it's bad that this was advertised as a specific recycling program and involved parties knowingly or unknowingly diverged from that stated plan. But from a global resource consumption perspective, it's far preferable to re-use good shoes (which also reduces the production of new shoes) than to recycle them for recovered material (which is lossy in terms of energy and materials). The same argument about shoes may not apply to the specifics of say e-waste - where harmful materials, rare materials, or electrical efficiency come into play - but in the case of this article, we should be happy that usable shoes are being put on feet rather than shredded and chemically decomposed.
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  > But from a global resource consumption perspective, it's far preferable to re-use good shoes But they were not good shoes. They had tracking devices put into them. Full stop. Imagine putting tracking devices into children's shoes and then having them "reused" like this. Yes, reuse is great. And if that's what they said they were going to do, awesome. But that's not what happened here, and exposes a very real problem.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    You can put a tracking device in anything and give it to a goodwill right now. This feels like a very strange angle to take. Especially when these shoes traveled accross countries.
- contingo 4y ago
  From the article: >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.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
baron816 4y ago
I guess it was plastics companies like Dow that convince us that recycling was just as good. I have frequently encountered the attitude of "these single use plastics are ok to use since we can just recycle them". Even under ideal circumstances, recycling uses a lot of energy.
- gruez 4y ago
  >I guess it was plastics companies like Dow that convince us that recycling was just as good. I have frequently encountered the attitude of "these single use plastics are ok to use since we can just recycle them". That's funny because I've never heard anyone saying this, yet every time there's a discussion about recycling comments like this inevitably show up.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Dow does in fact claim to be able to recycle 'hard-to-recycle plastics' [0]. A lot of single use plastics are of that variety, for sure. Sure, they do kinda avoid the word 'recycle' and replace it with 'convert' so perhaps they are being honest enough. [0] https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/science-and-sustainability/plastic-waste/environment.html https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/science-and-sustainability/p...
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I wonder if they hid the fact that good enough shoes would be reused because some people don't want that to happen.
- brookst 4y ago
  My guess is that messaging simplicity won out over precision. “Recycle your clothing” is a much clearer message than “give us your clothing and we will evaluate whether it’s condition and materials better suggest reuse elsewhere, or partial or full recycling”.
mirekrusin 4y ago
"reduce resell? recycle"
anigbrowl 4y ago
I have no problem with the shoes being reused, neither does anyone else apparently. I have a big problem with corporations lying, which lies are not mitigated by a beneficial outcome. This is the problem with utilitarianism; it has no red lines. You can try to be utilitarian and think you're only concerned with outcomes, but the reality is that foresight and perception are highly limited. In practice people assume the shoes were being recycled until they hear different, then appraise the actual outcome in some utilitarian calculus; the ends are actually OK, so that validates (or at least excuses) the deceptive means. After all, one can rationalize, without the promise of recycling the shoes might never have become available for reuse and would have ended up in landfill or rotting away in someone's basement. But this is vulnerable to all sorts of abuses. Being completely results oriented is only as good as your ability to accurately appraise the results. And if it turns out the outcomes are awful, utilitarians often retreat into 'we'll do better next time'. As a result, the utilitarian ethos tends to turn a blind eye to reports of problems until the outcomes are known, which opens the doors wide to fraudsters and scammers, from the petty to the political. Utilitarians reason that people are bad at making decisions and need to be incentivized into the creation of good outcomes; and utilitarians are themselves incentivized by this idea of a rosy meta-outcome to not question the premises or means of any given proposal.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> the ends are actually OK, so that validates (or at least excuses) the deceptive means The end does not justify the means. In this case perhaps the end is environmentally similar, but then the deception serves no purpose and only discredits them so we ignore everything they say afterwards. There are side effects to deceptive means that are often worse than the topic at hand.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Yes, that's the point and why I describe equanimity with bad means as a problem.

LightDub 4y ago

Wanting not to be lied to is not false outrage.

ianburrell 4y ago

I 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 ago

I’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 ago
Dow 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…
mirkules 4y ago
The goal of environmental initiatives is to try to ensure the environment stays habitable to humans for longer. The goal of companies is to be profitable. The ultimate goal, then, is to find an intersection between those two concepts that makes sense for both the environment and profitability. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" is the order in which this is achieved, from least to most expensive. Recycling has become incredibly expensive [1] and it's hardly making financial sense anymore. "Reducing" is the least expensive because it doesn't require any energy, but we (consumers) like to buy stuff, so once a product is in a person's hands, "reduce" is out of the equation. That leaves us with "reuse," which not only helps reduce new products from being made, but also has the potential to make money for companies. This is actually a win-win scenario, and should be encouraged rather than frowned on. The issue is that "green marketing" has been in vogue since the mid 2000s, and companies (apparently shockingly!) lie in their messaging to sell their products. But Dow, in this case, is actually doing their part in being environmentally conscious. You can even call this a white lie or something like that. Nobody would buy new shoes or donate old ones if the marketing said "In order to reduce waste, we are going to resell your used shoes in Indonesian flea markets". (There is one "reduce" idea, ha!) As for companies not caring, I point to the whole purpose of a company's existence - to make money. Everything else is irrelevant. If environmental impacts are an issue, and legislation is forcing their hand, then they must find a way to remain profitable or simply go out of business. The linked Planet Money podcast highlights this predicament. It's important to remember that not everything is black and white as it's made to be in articles like this. [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-should-we-recycle https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I didn't get a "black and white" worldview from this article. In my reading, it supported much of what you've said: that companies are fundamentally profit-driven, and will employ whatever fabrications are necessary to maintain consumer appetite. Dow lying about its recycling is just a tiny niche, one that Reuters chose presumably because it was easy to fact-check. > Nobody would buy new shoes or donate old ones if the marketing said "In order to reduce waste, we are going to resell your used shoes in Indonesian flea markets". (There is one "reduce" idea, ha!) This is the entire business model of Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. These companies and non-profits take donations of old clothes, try and sell them locally, and then cycle them through other markets if they can't sell them locally. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that the tees I give to Goodwill end up in an Indonesian flea market, and that knowledge would have no purchasing effect on me. Even beyond that: plenty of high-end/luxury brands have old/vintage resale processes. Patagonia is somewhat famous for theirs[1]. [1]: https://wornwear.patagonia.com/ https://wornwear.patagonia.com/
oblib 4y ago
I'm not really seeing how giving preowned shoes to folks is not "recycling" them. When I was young we'd take glass soda bottles back to the store to be cleaned and refilled and we'd get a little money back. That was "recycling".
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  The article says > 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.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    So they did even better than that because that plan didn’t make sense. I’m glad for it, and I’m angry at the hall monitor type attitude that would want to punish them for doing the objectively better thing.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      But how many other plans that don't make sense are they lying about? How confident can we be that all of them have happy endings too? It's not hall monitor to call out big lies. It's not like there is a clear motive that would help the real program, either. The lie implies that they are being careless, and being careless with waste usually has bad consequences.
  - jimnotgym 4y ago
    ... and I think that is really important, because it gives the impression to the public that their plastic waste doesn't matter, because dow can recycle it into a running track. Now we don't even know if they can do that, this is good journalism. The important point is what if they were beyond reuse? What would they have done then? I suspect an Indonesian landfill is the answer.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  In the taxonomy of consumer/industrial waste, that's "reuse" instead of "recycling." But that's not really the issue at stake (reuse is good!). The issue is that Dow is lying, at the bare minimum, about their ability to enact a particular recycling program.
aeternum 4y ago
Why isn't this caring more? It is a much better outcome than grinding up the shoes and trying to use them as playground fill or something.
- beedeebeedee 4y ago
  Most of the shoes that are exported cannot be resold and turn into trash. That is a much worse outcome than all of the shoes being recycled (plus it is illegal according to Indonesian import law).
- woodruffw 4y ago
  "Caring more" requires us to believe that Dow knows and intended for this to happen, rather than it being a beneficial outcome of local economic pressures. That seems unlikely; why go to the effort of publicizing a specific recycling program (one that's worse!) when you're secretly going to do a better thing? The much more likely explanation is that Dow doesn't care, and expressed that lack of care by paying someone even less scrupulous to "care" for them. That party in turn doesn't care (because they can see Dow doesn't), and simply did whatever made them the most money.
  - dawatchusay 4y ago
    Innocent until proven guilty
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      This is an Internet forum, not a court of law.
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        Innocent until proven guilty is a standard that should be applied anywhere accusations are laid. Many nasty things will occur if this is violated.
  - lazide 4y ago
throwaway1777 4y ago
Can’t take governments at their words either. How many times have governments lied about the environment. Can’t take anyone at their word. Trust but verify.
pmorici 4y ago
Seems like the article wants you to accept a very narrow definition of recycling. reusing perfectly good shoes fits the definition of recycling in my book.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  The phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle" because it's intended to be an ordered taxonomy: reduction comes first, following by reusing existing materials, followed by recycling them into new materials. Reusing perfectly good shoes is a good outcome, and nobody in this thread has suggested otherwise. But it isn't recycling in the way that Dow stated, either literally (since they claimed a polar opposite use) or definitionally (since the shoes aren't turned into new shoes).
  - moronicQ 4y ago
    [dead]
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Again: literally everyone in this thread agrees that it's preferable, and nobody is mad. The error here is in "they": Dow doesn't get credit for doing the preferable thing, because there's no evidence that it's what they intended to do. All available evidence suggests that Dow intended to do a worse thing, and someone saw a business opportunity within Dow's apathy.
      - SilasX 4y ago
        No, not literally everyone. Don’t exaggerate. In addition to the litany of people hand-wringing about the harms of lying (which you will probably not count), there’s comments like this one, complaining that the clothing influx “hurts” the economy (which I don’t agree with but is another counterexample). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34938256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34938256 And that’s without making a serious effort to find any! Please don’t act like everyone on your side of this is making reasonable arguments just because you are. That’s sanewashing and tunnel-visioned.
bobleeswagger 4y ago
> the purpose was to show that companies like Dow can’t be taken at their word when it comes to environmental initiatives Did we really need this example to show it? Shoes? Nestle is trying to buy all the water, maybe that would be a better place to focus.
mewse 4y ago
I mean, the journalists put a giant hunk of metal and a battery in the shoes. There’s zero chance those shoes would ever have been allowed anywhere near the big expensive industrial textile shredders. If it’s a modern operation they’d be automatically and individually plucked out of the ingress path, or if it’s an older one they’d invalidate all the shoes in their bin at some earlier “bulk metal detection” step. And either way, those shoes would have to be disposed of in some other manner. I get the “big company bad” crowd, but I mean.. what alternate option did Dow have in this case? (From the article Dow appears to be throwing contractors under the bus — plausibly, in my opinion, based upon the article. But let’s assume that the ‘malfeasance’ here was done directly by Dow — what’s the “right thing” they should have done when receiving donated intentionally-tampered-with shoes that would have damaged their machinery?)
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Is there some evidence indicating that Dow was aware of the tampering, and diverted these specific shoes? That strikes me as a less plausible explanation than the one I’ve suggested.
  - mewse 4y ago
    As I said in my original reply, I think it’s most likely that Dow never received the sneakers at all; it seems entirely plausible to me that the resaleable-looking shoes were being diverted and exported by the contractors who had been hired to collect the sneakers from the donation bins. (and I’m not 100% certain that I have a problem with that, for “reuse is better than recycling” reasons also discussed elsewhere in these comments, but I can see how Dow might be displeased with it if it was a contractual violation) But that doesn’t change the fact that stuff which is going to be shredded always goes through a screening process first and those specific shoes-with-trackers-in-them were never going to reach the grinders and were never going to end up in paths/pavings, even if they did get to Dow. Because I mean, obviously.
- postingawayonhn 4y ago
  They sought comment from Dow and visited the company collecting the shoes. Neither suggested that a process like you describe took place.

danielfoster 4y ago

I find the extent to which Dow lied to be outrageous. It did not say the shoes would be recycled, but specifically said they would be used to make playground padding. Why shouldn’t honesty be expected? After all, this is a country where people still get caned. Reusing the shoes as was the case is of course better.

nerdbert 4y ago
What is the connection between caning and dishonesty?
Tozen 4y ago
Actually, I think there is a case for fraud, somewhere in this mess and if authorities care to pursue it. Lying to the public, to encourage the donation of shoes, then various "middle men" making profits selling them, and where it was known that no recycling was taking place.

deathanatos 4y ago

> A torrent of cheap, unregulated second-hand clothing flowing into Indonesia also adds to the country’s mounting garbage problem, said Dharmesh Shah, a policy advisor to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a nonprofit working on waste pollution. He said much of that merchandise is in such poor condition that vendors can’t resell it. > “They sort through it and a very small percentage is actually reusable,” Shah told Reuters. “It just gets burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills.”

notpushkin 4y ago
Why don't they put non-reusable shoes back to recycle though?
- mannykannot 4y ago
  Because neither Dow nor the Singaporean government are interested in recycling them once they have been able to dump them in Indonesia? This appears to be just a greenwashing scheme which coincidentally reuses a small fraction of the garbage stream.
- sp332 4y ago
  That would take actual resources.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
Yeah I don't think anyone would be too upset if they plucked out the 10% of shoes that are in good-enough condition to actually resell in Indonesia, before grinding the rest up to make sports tracks. The issue is that it seems like all the shoes were sent to Indonesia, regardless of reusability, and they turned a blind eye to what happened to them after that.
- smugma 4y ago
  “They said it’s not uncommon to throw out half the shoes they receive because the footwear is not good enough to sell.” Apparently it may be closer to half than 10%. And protectionism in Indonesia makes it illegal to import used shoes because of “hygiene”. I’m not absolving Dow, but there was a lot to get angry about in the article.

honkycat 4y ago

I understand your point, but at the end of the day they were not doing what they said they were. People were expecting their shoes to be processed and turned into something new, something that would theoretically help with the development of the recycling tech. Shipping shoes over the ocean is not the most eco-friendly thing. Additionally: do we know the shops in Indonesia are going to recycle them? Or is it more likely they will sit in a store for years and are then thrown out?

deleted 4y ago

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rippercushions 4y ago

The traders quoted in the article note that it's common for the shoes to get repeatedly shipped around, half of what they buy is not good enough for resale, and I'm sure a large portion of the shoes don't sell and get junked anyway. So the carbon footprint is much larger than local recycling in Singapore.

serf 4y ago

>However, the mantra is "reduce reuse recycle". corporations will never take a more costly and less profitable approach towards productions unless regulations and watchdogs keep them to their word -- this outrage is a necessary function to a degree , if you care to hold corporate groups to the same mantra.

billsmithaustin 4y ago

I agree that if the shoes were perfectly good, it would have been better to keep them. Are you asserting the author recycled perfectly good shoes, or are you just describing a hypothetical? If the former, what in the article suggests the shoes were still perfectly good?

bee_rider 4y ago

Reusing the shoes doesn’t make them vanish. If they are being reused that’s fine, actually better than fine, that’s great. But how will Dow track the shows through various secondhand markets to make sure they ultimately fulfill their promise to recycle them in the end? I think that will be basically impossible.

melagonster 4y ago
these shoes were donated to Dow. they had changed the company which treat shoes.

RC_ITR 4y ago

>I'm a liberal in general but this kind of false outrage makes us look foolish. You're not looking deep enough. The outrage should be that companies imply playground padding (maybe what? 100 tons/year at most) is somehow a reasonable approach to solving any waste problem. THEN they have the gall to not even do that. The valid outrage is how easy it is for companies to manipulate people.

deleted 4y ago

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pipeline_peak 4y ago

> Clearly it is better in the save the planet sense that perfectly good shoes were reused rather than destroyed for playground padding. You mean, only to be thrown away again but this time in a landfill?

geoelectric 4y ago

The problem is they're illegal in Indonesia as used clothing imports, so they're being confiscated. They may or may not end up being anywhere but a trash bin after all.

jrochkind1 4y ago

I would actually suspect some high proportion of those shoes will just end up in landfills, or perhaps incinerators, without ever being "re-used". From the OP: > A torrent of cheap, unregulated second-hand clothing flowing into Indonesia also adds to the country’s mounting garbage problem, said Dharmesh Shah, a policy advisor to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a nonprofit working on waste pollution. He said much of that merchandise is in such poor condition that vendors can’t resell it. > “They sort through it and a very small percentage is actually reusable,” Shah told Reuters. “It just gets burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills.” > Two market vendors in Batam, who asked not to be named, told Reuters they buy sacks of shoes of differing grades from used-clothing traders such as Yok Impex, but don’t know exactly what they’re getting until they open them up. They said it’s not uncommon to throw out half the shoes they receive because the footwear is not good enough to sell. It is true that for a lot of plastics, you can find someone happy to be paid, less than it would cost to recycle, to bury it, or incinerate it, or toss it in a river or lake. And indeed that is the destination of a lot of plastics that on the front-end are claimed to be headed for recycling. So why recycle at all, right? Apparently the invisible hand says that the best and highest use for this trash is to be buried and burnt -- as long as you can find someone in enough need of the money you're willing to pay them to burn or bury it. We could imagine, for the purpose of making it more conceivable, keeping all waste within national borders. We could imagine that within the USA, wealthier areas wouldn't really want to bury your trash next to their homes and businesses -- at least not for the amount of money someone is willing to pay, especially when they can find a poorer more desperate area that will take much less to bury or burn your trash next to an elementary school or what have you. So, why recycle at all? I mean, indeed most plastic isn't really that recyclable, so this isn't a totally rhetorical question. But then we should probably produce a lot less of it, and the way the industry gets out of people thinking that is by convincing you that it'll be recycled. Which is really the motivation for this recycle-fraud. Industry wanting you to believe that it'll be recycled, to avoid pressure to reduce production. (the first `r`). Which is exactly why Dow can't let on that it knows the stuff will never be recycled. PS: I fully expected to find the HN comments section full of people saying that exporting used tennis shoes to poor countries is a better use than recycling them, and it's somehow "privileged" to want to recycle them, instead of supporting the landfill and incineration business of some third world country which can really use the funds. I was not disapointed.

kleiba 4y ago

The thing is, however, these second-hand shoes might sit in that store for a while and then, after they haven't been bought by anyone for some time, be thrown in a landfill after all. That's quite different from giving people an incentive to donate their used shoes (rather than selling them on themselves, mind you) because they think they're going to be used to build playgrounds for children.

Tozen 4y ago

But, here's the thing about reuse, what happens after the next person is done using the shoes? Looks more like kicking the can down the road. Not only is there a hygiene problem involved with this type of reuse, but then the 2nd hand shoes still end up being part of the massive plastic pollution problem. Dow seems to just have "exported" the problem to another country, lied about it, their people or associates are kind of making money under the table, and the environment continues suffering. At some point, governments are going to have to hold companies accountable for the plastic waste problem.

supermatt 4y ago

What percentage of those “reused” shoes end up in landfill?

DamonHD 4y ago

If not one sample pair of shoes was processed in the way advertised, then I think it is indeed outrageous. I'd agree that reuse might be better, but then the programme should be clear that that is one possible outcome.

hattmall 4y ago
Well they lost track of 3 pair, which could mean they were indeed shredded and recycled. 0
uberman 4y ago
Here is the thing though. If all the perfectly good pairs of shoes were destroyed, the reported might have wrote an equally aggrieved piece about the shameful way these perfectly good shoes were not reused. Seems like they set up a strawman ready to be outraged no matter what Dow did.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  Shipping western clothing to poor countries tends to destroy local industry. I prefer to be able to make my own choices, not have people lie to be and then do whatever they feel is cheaper. They have to pay to properly recycle, but can just sell the old shoes. This is fraud, pure and simple. They asked for the donations of shoes under false pretenses. (There's a chance it was whatever firm they paid - but then they're just willfully incompetent.)
  - nradov 4y ago
    It's never going to be economically viable for most poor countries to develop local clothing industries. Even without imports of used clothing the economies of scale in that industry are just brutal. Poor countries that want to protect local industry can impose import tariffs, but in most cases they would be better off with unrestricted free trade.
    - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago

driggs 4y ago

I came here to post the exact same sentiment and the ordered phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Yes, it's bad that this was advertised as a specific recycling program and involved parties knowingly or unknowingly diverged from that stated plan. But from a global resource consumption perspective, it's far preferable to re-use good shoes (which also reduces the production of new shoes) than to recycle them for recovered material (which is lossy in terms of energy and materials). The same argument about shoes may not apply to the specifics of say e-waste - where harmful materials, rare materials, or electrical efficiency come into play - but in the case of this article, we should be happy that usable shoes are being put on feet rather than shredded and chemically decomposed.

jasonlotito 4y ago
> But from a global resource consumption perspective, it's far preferable to re-use good shoes But they were not good shoes. They had tracking devices put into them. Full stop. Imagine putting tracking devices into children's shoes and then having them "reused" like this. Yes, reuse is great. And if that's what they said they were going to do, awesome. But that's not what happened here, and exposes a very real problem.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  You can put a tracking device in anything and give it to a goodwill right now. This feels like a very strange angle to take. Especially when these shoes traveled accross countries.
contingo 4y ago
From the article: >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.
- hgsgm 4y ago

baron816 4y ago

I guess it was plastics companies like Dow that convince us that recycling was just as good. I have frequently encountered the attitude of "these single use plastics are ok to use since we can just recycle them". Even under ideal circumstances, recycling uses a lot of energy.

gruez 4y ago
>I guess it was plastics companies like Dow that convince us that recycling was just as good. I have frequently encountered the attitude of "these single use plastics are ok to use since we can just recycle them". That's funny because I've never heard anyone saying this, yet every time there's a discussion about recycling comments like this inevitably show up.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Dow does in fact claim to be able to recycle 'hard-to-recycle plastics' [0]. A lot of single use plastics are of that variety, for sure. Sure, they do kinda avoid the word 'recycle' and replace it with 'convert' so perhaps they are being honest enough. [0] https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/science-and-sustainability/plastic-waste/environment.html https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/science-and-sustainability/p...

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

I wonder if they hid the fact that good enough shoes would be reused because some people don't want that to happen.

brookst 4y ago
My guess is that messaging simplicity won out over precision. “Recycle your clothing” is a much clearer message than “give us your clothing and we will evaluate whether it’s condition and materials better suggest reuse elsewhere, or partial or full recycling”.

mirekrusin 4y ago

"reduce resell? recycle"

anigbrowl 4y ago

I have no problem with the shoes being reused, neither does anyone else apparently. I have a big problem with corporations lying, which lies are not mitigated by a beneficial outcome. This is the problem with utilitarianism; it has no red lines. You can try to be utilitarian and think you're only concerned with outcomes, but the reality is that foresight and perception are highly limited. In practice people assume the shoes were being recycled until they hear different, then appraise the actual outcome in some utilitarian calculus; the ends are actually OK, so that validates (or at least excuses) the deceptive means. After all, one can rationalize, without the promise of recycling the shoes might never have become available for reuse and would have ended up in landfill or rotting away in someone's basement. But this is vulnerable to all sorts of abuses. Being completely results oriented is only as good as your ability to accurately appraise the results. And if it turns out the outcomes are awful, utilitarians often retreat into 'we'll do better next time'. As a result, the utilitarian ethos tends to turn a blind eye to reports of problems until the outcomes are known, which opens the doors wide to fraudsters and scammers, from the petty to the political. Utilitarians reason that people are bad at making decisions and need to be incentivized into the creation of good outcomes; and utilitarians are themselves incentivized by this idea of a rosy meta-outcome to not question the premises or means of any given proposal.

phkahler 4y ago
>> the ends are actually OK, so that validates (or at least excuses) the deceptive means The end does not justify the means. In this case perhaps the end is environmentally similar, but then the deception serves no purpose and only discredits them so we ignore everything they say afterwards. There are side effects to deceptive means that are often worse than the topic at hand.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Yes, that's the point and why I describe equanimity with bad means as a problem.