[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.