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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 articl

• 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/
    • nerdbert 4y ago
      Yeah, the problem isn't that some of the donations end up in Indonesian flea markets. That's great. The problem is that 90% of what gets sent to Indonesia, is deemed unsuitable for resale, and then ends up tossed in a landfill.
  • kennywinker 4y ago
    > Recycling has become incredibly expensive [1] and it's hardly making financial sense anymore Small quibble with your wording there - recycling hasn't BECOME more expensive: for the most part it was never real. China was taking our "recyclables" that were never actually recyclable, telling us they were recycling it, and instead dumping almost all of it in landfills. I recently got into 3d printing, and was sucked in by the promise of everything being PLA bioplastic. I've diligently saved up my misprints and plastic scrap, and now that I have a decent amount collected, I'd like to dispose of it responsibly. As far as I've been able to find, my options are: landfill, or shipping it at my expense (and the planet's) across the continent to the one place that claims they recycle filament. I can't even compost it anywhere local. Disgusting.
• 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.