[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.