[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.