[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.