[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."

[skolsuper]

Indonesia bans the import of 2nd-hand clothing and footwear, specifically because a large proportion of it ends up in landfill or incinerators. That definitely would be a worse environmental outcome than being recycled into running track. I suspect the reason the shoes from the article did not go to landfill was probably because they were in unusually good condition.

[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?

[tremon]

...and then decomposes into CO2 anyway. So you get a short-lived (10 years) very potent greenhouse gas, and then the long-term effect of CO2 on top of that. So whichever way you slice it, releasing methane is strictly worse than releasing CO2.

[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.