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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
In isolation, yes. It is better for the locals to get clothes for free than for local resources (whether capital or labour) to be expended to produce them locally.
But having a strong textile manufacturing industry promotes the development of other adjacent industries (e.g. dyes, chemicals) that would not be able to stand on their own initially, and can output products that are useful to more than just textile manufacturing. It easier to develop a new industry if the country already has other industries that can support its growth.
In a sense, it is like a tax on clothes, paid by the consumers, funding textile-adjacent industries, but directed by private actors rather than the government. If it pays off, other things become cheaper and potentially offset the increased cost of clothes.
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.
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.
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?
I was explaining the problem and now not solving it is my fault.
> Should developed countries voluntarily stop exporting used clothing? Would that actually make people in poor countries better off?
Yeah, that's what the developing country said in this instance. They passed their own laws to prevent import.
And the charity promised to use the shoes for an experiment in recycling which would have brought knowledge benefits at least even if not producing a superior product. They clearly defrauded their donors regardless of Indonesian trade policies.