[uberman]

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.

[woodruffw]

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.

[aeternum]

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.

[woodruffw]

"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.

[lazide]

So you're judging them by their perceived level of caring and knowledge, even though you have no evidence of it, and the outcome was better than expected.

Sounds like hell?

[dahdum]

> So you're judging them by their perceived level of caring and knowledge, even though you have no evidence of it, and the outcome was better than expected.

They solicited donations under false pretenses for PR points and then gave (or worse, sold) them to an exporter. If they want to be seen as trustworthy or given the benefit of the doubt...well they've had 126 years and consistently shown ethical behavior is not a company mantra.

[fsckboy]

>They solicited donations under false pretenses for PR points and then gave (or worse, sold) them to an exporter.

you don't know any of this, you're making it all up to please you misplaced sense of priorities. Perhaps they solicited the donations knowing that they would sell them to a recycler, and the recycler knew they could recover costs or even profit from selling much of this stream to flea markets, and recycle the rest. No false pretenses, not "or worse sold", just an "it's Uber Eats for old shoes" elevator pitch.

[woodruffw]

I’m operating based on all available evidence in the article. I welcome any evidence to the contrary.

If “hell” means “telling the truth” or “acting with basic diligence,” well.

[lazide]

From the article - a subcontractor of a subcontractor exported them instead of shredding them. It's at least 3 levels removed from Dow, and likely the Singapore Gov't that did it, as these are Singaporean companies. And they picked them up from the bins, they weren't delivered them by someone else.

What level of diligence should Dow be doing here, especially since the outcome doesn't seem to be a bad one - if anything, a better one?

"None of the 11 pairs of footwear donated by Reuters were turned into exercise paths or kids’ parks in Singapore.

Instead, nearly all the tagged shoes ended up in the hands of Yok Impex Pte Ltd, a Singaporean second-hand goods exporter, according to the trackers and that exporter’s logistics manager. The manager said his firm had been hired by a waste management company involved in the recycling program to retrieve shoes from the donation bins for delivery to that company’s local warehouse."

[nerdbert]

Dow's reaction to being confronted about this was to say they had stopped working with the company that managed to arrange for the shoes to be reused instead of chopped up. That seems fairly clear.

[dawatchusay]

Innocent until proven guilty

[woodruffw]

This is an Internet forum, not a court of law.

[Dalewyn]

Innocent until proven guilty is a standard that should be applied anywhere accusations are laid.

Many nasty things will occur if this is violated.

[beedeebeedee]

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).

[janalsncm]

That was my initial thought, but importing them to Indonesia is also illegal. And if Dow really believes that reusing shoes is better, why not just say so?

[madeofpalk]

Why do they say one thing, but do another?

[mirkules]

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-shou...

[kennywinker]

> 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.

[Clubber]

>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 wish more people understood this. Plastic recycling is mostly a lie and has been for decades. If you use plastic, it's not getting recycled. All your plastic packaging, water bottles, everything ends up in a landfill if responsibly disposed of, or in the ocean if not.

https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/bog...

We should really stop using plastics for the vast majority of packaging. Return to wax paper and cardboard, glass bottles, etc. An easy way to regulate this would be to include the cost of recycling, so selling plastic becomes more expensive than traditional methods of packaging. Another is to limit the amount of stuff you can put in a single plastic container by volume, say nothing smaller than a gallon / 4 liters can go into a plastic container. That would be a start.

It's not going to happen because our politicians' election campaigns are funded by corporations. They can't get elected without taking money from corporations. The person who can get the most donations from corporations wins. The exceptions aren't numerous enough to change any congressional votes. This recycling lie, that's been going on since at least the 80s, was conjured up to prevent pressure of regulation. Nothing to see here, it's recycled. Problem solved.

[concordDance]

I still don't understand what people have against putting plastic in landfill.

In developed countries they are well sealed, so you're not getting groundwater contamination, and they're eventually topping off and can be used for pasture or a park.

[kennywinker]

Specifically for PLA, there's the issue of methane I linked in my reply to your other comment. For other plastics, the problem I see with landfilling is mostly that you spent a lot of energy creating this material, and now you're throwing it away and spending that energy again to create more. On top of just being wasteful, and emitting a bunch of carbon, all that material production is also funding an industry that is hellbent on destroying the planet.

[leipert]

You can recycle PLA scraps yourself. The only problem is that devices for this are so expensive that it isn’t worthwhile economically and you likely do not have enough scraps.

you also need to separate your prints properly so that other plastics are not contaminating the scraps.

You also need to buy pellets in order to get a good color.

And also the recycled PLA will probably end up being inferior to the stuff you will buy.

See also: https://www.cnckitchen.com/blog/recycling-old-3d-prints-into...

[kennywinker]

I've seen those - they look like fun projects, but they aren't really a viable solution to 3d printing plastic since not everyone wants to build and learn how to use and maintain one of those, especially since as you say most people won't create enough scrap in the lifetime of their printer to make enough reels to offset the cost+time. What there needs to be is somewhere local that I can take my filament scrap to. But then there's the trust issue: they can't know for sure that my box of scrap contains ONLY PLA, and the consequence of me slipping up and giving them some PETG are pretty high. If PLA recycling were commercially viable to do, I expect it would have been done by now...

Which means PLA is not actually a functionally recyclable or compostable material. Technically, yes. Functionally, no. Which means anything I do on my 3d printer is destined for the landfill, the ocean, the groundwater. Which is why I'm going to avoid 3d printing in the future except when it's absolutely the right tool for the job.

[concordDance]

Just use landfill.

A modern Western landfill is quite safe.

[kennywinker]

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/12/13/the-truth-about...

> As a result, bioplastics often end up in landfills where, deprived of oxygen, they may release methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

[concordDance]

Methane is also quite short lived in the atmosphere, right?

[woodruffw]

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/

[nerdbert]

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.

[derefr]

> "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.

From a commercial perspective, "reducing" isn't about "reducing" the purchase of marketed goods, but rather reducing the waste/pollution/etc. that goes into manufacturing those goods. Like reducing plastic wrapping on boxes, etc.

[pnt12]

> we (consumers) like to buy stuff

This is naive. We are marketed to buy stuff. And then, the stuff we buy doesn't last and is built in the least environment friendly way possible, as long as it saves a dollar.

Let's start pointing some fingers to the big guys who keep fucking up the planet to make their graphs go up and their shareholders happy,and the politicians who side with them.

If corporations aren't supposed to be ethical, let's be ruthless in our criticism to them, because they already spend billions in marketing and PR to look good and blame us.

[grugagag]

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…

[oblib]

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".

[woodruffw]

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.

[nextaccountic]

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.

[jimnotgym]

... 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.

[Robotbeat]

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]

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.

[Gordonjcp]

When I was young a man used to come round with crates of bottles on the back of a Ford Transit pickup, sell bottles and collect empties.

I miss Bon Accord Red Cola.

[mewse]

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]

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]

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]

They sought comment from Dow and visited the company collecting the shoes. Neither suggested that a process like you describe took place.

[janalsncm]

The fact that the shoes with trackers were sitting in a giant pile of other used shoes in violation of Indonesian used clothing import laws tells me that it wasn’t just because of a tracker.

[throwawaysleep]

Wouldn’t Dow go with that first?

“Metal was detected in the shoes, so they couldn’t be recycled” is a pretty good defence.

[pmorici]

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]

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).

[qiqitori]

There is no outcome yet.

- The shoes having found their way to a market does not mean that they will be bought and reused.

- If they aren't bought, what will the store owner do with them?

- If they are bought, what will the buyer do with them after they are no longer usable?

(Of course, in this case the reporters presumably bought them. How will they dispose of them now though?)

Maybe the reporters should have sent in shoes that are obviously broken and can't possibly be reused as shoes.

[faeriechangling]

It's not considered recycling because reuse is explicitly better than recycling. You aren't supposed to equate the two because it would imply recycling was a viable alternative to reuse.

[throwaway1777]

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.

[bobleeswagger]

> 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.

[deathanatos]

> 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.”

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

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]

“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.

[jessaustin]

Why believe the shoe seller? Perhaps half of the shoes appear usable and are sold as such, but most of those quickly disintegrate when worn. After all there are plenty of people in Singapore who will happily buy used and usable shoes. Anything that falls through this sieve to be exported is probably trash, which the Indonesians well know. It is reasonable for them to reject imports of which 1% are unusable, let alone 50%.

[notpushkin]

Why don't they put non-reusable shoes back to recycle though?

[mannykannot]

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]

That would take actual resources.

[driggs]

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.

[contingo]

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]

Those are mostly nonsense reasons.

> who said such cast-offs pose a public health risk

Obviously phony.

> undercut its local textile industry

Free stuff is better than having a local industry. The government can tax shoe wearers to pay the local industry to make more stuff or just relax.

> often pile more waste into its already bulging landfills.

That one is legit.

[peyton]

I think lying about the fate of these shoes is pretty bad and destroys trust. I’d think twice about recycling. “Here’s why that’s a good thing!” doesn’t cut it for me.

[brookst]

Are you saying you’d be more likely to throw things away than recycle them because it’s possible that rather than being recycled they will be reused?

[cjrp]

Or is it more like “well if they lied about that, what else are they lying about”.

[natch]

I mean, it is Dow Chemical…

[cjbgkagh]

That what I was thinking, at least it’s a step up from dumping it in the ocean. It seems people are having to relearn that we can’t trust these companies to actually do the right thing all over again, as if history didn’t exist.

[brookst]

So, better to throw decent shoes in the garbage than take a chance of being lied to.

[PeterisP]

But they aren't being "shredded and chemically decomposed" - they're being sent as "second-hand stuff" where the good items are reused, but the others are dumped or burned, and nothing is actually recycled. And of course, the reused ones are also dumped or burned, just later.

[jasonlotito]

> 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]

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.

[DamonHD]

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.

[uberman]

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]

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.)

[Freak_NL]

That's also exactly what the article mentions. The Indonesian government banned imports of second hand clothing to protect the local textile industry.

While the exporter isn't doing anything illegal in Indonesia, the Indonesian importer certainly is (according to the explanation in the article). Abetting criminal activities in a neighbouring friendly country is rarely desirable.

[7speter]

Huh? Western clothing is normally what poor country industry is made of, or at least a significant part is.

[joshuaissac]

> Western clothing is normally what poor country industry is made of, or at least a significant part is.

While the used clothing sector provides employment to hundreds of thousands of people in less developed countries, it also damages their local textile manufacturing industry. Prices for locally produced clothes have to include both manufacturing and logistics costs, whereas the imported used clothes from Western countries are donated and can be profitably sold at much lower prices, covering only logistics.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-44951670

[maximus-decimus]

But if they literally have free clothing, doesn't it make that local industry useless? Literally provides no value at that point. This only seems like a problem to me if people literally can't provide value in any other way. To which the solution would seem to create a new type of industry, not create an artificial need by creating a clothes penury on purpose.

[7speter]

I’m not talking about used clothes, I’m talking about all the new clothes we can buy, especially the disposable stuff from the likes of h and m.

[faeriechangling]

In the same sense that secondhand book stores hurt authors? Sounds like a bunch of BS to me, somebody still has to make the shoes to begin with.

[nradov]

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]

They already had local clothing industries - people in poor countries weren't walking around naked until the mid 80s when container-shipping meant offshoring trash became cheap.

If this issue was isolated to shoes, and those were technically unavailable for local manufacture, then you'd probably be right. But these practices destroy all industry, leaving the people without any manufacturing base or value creation outside of cultural artifacts, and tends to keep the poor countries poor.

[nradov]

Most of those countries had craft clothing production, hardly anything that could be legitimately called an industry.

You haven't proposed a viable alternative. Should developed countries voluntarily stop exporting used clothing? Would that actually make people in poor countries better off?

[hattmall]

Well they lost track of 3 pair, which could mean they were indeed shredded and recycled. 0

[baron816]

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]

>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]

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/p...

[danielfoster]

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.

[Tozen]

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.

[nerdbert]

What is the connection between caning and dishonesty?

[RC_ITR]

>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.

[rippercushions]

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.

[bee_rider]

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]

these shoes were donated to Dow. they had changed the company which treat shoes.

[LightDub]

Wanting not to be lied to is not false outrage.

[anigbrowl]

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]

>> 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]

Yes, that's the point and why I describe equanimity with bad means as a problem.

[billsmithaustin]

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?

[Tozen]

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.

[honkycat]

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?

[kleiba]

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.

[ianburrell]

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.

[Cthulhu_]

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

[brookst]

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”.

[serf]

>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.

[pipeline_peak]

> 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]

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.

[supermatt]

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

[mirekrusin]

"reduce resell? recycle"

[jrochkind1]

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.