[kylehotchkiss]

What’s the scandal here? Perfectly good shoes were sent to a country that seems to have a need and market for reasonably priced shoes. The people on the ground there aren’t going to care about some bourgeois project like recycling them into a walking path so more wealthy people’s feet are comfortable on leisure walks through a park. The people working on these projects have their own opinions on it and acted accordingly!

If DOW took their clients seriously, they would have known this and processed the shoes down into much smaller pieces using a cutting machine immediately after collection, and the staff at the offshore recycling facility will have nothing else to do with them.

[ender341341]

> What’s the scandal here?

If they intended to do this why not advertise it, like you said reuse is a better outcome than recycling them. But it's much more likely they found the cheapest bidder to do what they asked and didn't verify anything, so what are their other cheapest bidders doing that isn't reuse/recycling? The scandal is that they're lying about what they're doing so why would we take their word about other things.

[notatoad]

the article does a poor job of selling the problem here, but the outrage is that companies encourage overconsumption in rich western countries by telling us things are recycled, and that it's okay to buy more stuff we don't need because it's recyclable. it's just greenwashing.

most of the shoes people put in donation bins aren't going to last long for their second owners, and people in indonesia don't have the same compunctions about throwing things in the trash as people in richer countries do. so all this is doing is shipping waste overseas so an indonesian can throw it in the garbage and it goes in an indonesian landfill instead of a singaporean landfill. they're laundering the waste so rich people can pretend they aren't throwing things in the trash.

[geoelectric]

The article doesn't focus on their specific shoes with some kind of shallow outrage that they went to the wrong place. The article focuses on the vastly expanded chain of responsibility, through the unexpected routes the trackers they hid in shoes revealed to them. As it turns out, the routes are a big issue because there's very little responsibility ensured.

Used clothing import is illegal in Indonesia, and has been since 2015, according to the article. They aren't allowed to be sent there. So the shoes get confiscated when they're found or intercepted, and it's not disclosed how they're disposed of afterwards. It sounds like in other cases where the clothing imports aren't explicitly illegal, there are middlemen that aren't on the hook to recycle filtering through the shipments and discarding or destroying unsellable rejects.

With permission and some degree of oversight what you say has some merit. But this is a black market import in some places, and just being dumped into flea markets in others. This is shipping your trash to get burned overseas.

[booi]

It is reduce, reuse and recycle in that order. If anything seems like they did a great job here.

[gowings97]

Interesting how that phrase has largely disappeared from the current green message carried by major media. Especially the reduce component.

[capableweb]

Reduce would mean you buy less. Reuse would mean you buy less or buy from other people. Only recycle means you buy the same amount as before. Guess which one companies prefer you do?

[drak0n1c]

There's a form of broken window fallacy going on in green policy circles. Particularly the Cash for Clunkers program, and California's recent banning of trucks made before 2010. It is an attempt to drive demand and raw resource extraction to produce new equipment, by destroying existing supply of refined goods and driving up prices. Used cars are scarce now. Opposite of reduce/reuse.

[ender341341]

*diesel Big Rigs/Buses. (It's an important distinction, as one would ban the majority of vehicles in the US). Diesel vehicles are particularly bad for the environment, and as we've seen even worse than we thought because of the widespread cheating from manufacturers for environmental testing, and big rigs & busses have previously had massive exceptions carved out for them from environmental regs already for a long time.

[audunw]

Do you think these shoes all end up being recycled in the end?

If not, they're not doing the right thing. It's only good to do it in that order if all steps are followed. It's not "reduce, barely reuse, discard in a landfill or river in east asia".

[smileysteve]

To the contrary, the likely alternative is virgin material in Indonesia, and it's likely that the benefit from ReUse is

1) Paid for by the secondary market (also adds intrinsic value)

2) Carbon savings are likely measured in a number of days than skipping reuse and going straight to recycling

[bee_rider]

I would not be that surprised to hear that the average Indonesian is less picky than the average Westerner WRT shoes, and so I’m sure they are getting plenty of extra life out of those shoes, which is absolutely great!

But the shoes do ultimately have a finite lifespan. It isn’t obvious how Dow is planning to track the shoes through their second, apparently grey-market life, to fulfill their part of the deal. They said the things will end up recycled. If they can’t fulfill that promise they should stop lying.

[mqus]

1. I did not read it but I assume that the shoes they tried this with were in good condition (at least visibly). They did write that only a small percentage of imported second-hand clothes get actually sold, the rest is burned or put on landfills, e.g. NOT reused.

Of course, it would have been interesting to see what happens with broken shoes. Though I don't believe for a second they would have been recycled (or reused).

2. Apart from this, no one said a small word about the imho bigger issue here: Recycling shoes means that the materials are used to make new shoes. What DOW is advertising is downcycling, a worse fate. We should not allow companies to pervert the meaning of such important terms.

[notatoad]

>Recycling shoes means that the materials are used to make new shoes.

that is almost never the case. that's exactly the lie that companies like DOW want to sell people, but other than a few specific materials like aluminium and glass, almost all recycling is actually downcycling. the broken promise here wasn't that the shoes would be recycled into more shoes, it was that they'd be recycled into playground equipment. most consumer goods are made with virgin materials, and the output of a recycling process is used for industrial goods or processes.

[excalibur]

> What’s the scandal here?

The money these journalists wasted chasing sneakers all over Asia, while hypocritically complaining about others' misuse of resources.