I kind of see where the "outrage" might come from in the lead as apparently they promised that the shoes were going to be recycled.
However, the mantra is "reduce reuse recycle". Clearly it is better in the save the planet sense that perfectly good shoes were reused rather than destroyed for playground padding.
I'm a liberal in general but this kind of false outrage makes us look foolish.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
...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.
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].
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.
> "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.
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.
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…
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.
> 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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Again: literally everyone in this thread agrees that it's preferable, and nobody is mad.
The error here is in "they": Dow doesn't get credit for doing the preferable thing, because there's no evidence that it's what they intended to do. All available evidence suggests that Dow intended to do a worse thing, and someone saw a business opportunity within Dow's apathy.
No, not literally everyone. Don’t exaggerate. In addition to the litany of people hand-wringing about the harms of lying (which you will probably not count), there’s comments like this one, complaining that the clothing influx “hurts” the economy (which I don’t agree with but is another counterexample).
It has the same root comment, so that feels like the same thread to me. Either way, it means you're clinging to a technicality to be right.
So then what's your substantive point? You claimed no one is mad, no one made a particular argument in location A. Someone made it in location B. So what great misconception did you think you were refuting? It seems that all your comment does is tell people to ignore an argument that's actually being made ... on the basis that it's not being made in one specific arbitrary boundary.
It's also kind of funny -- even if you restrict it to this "thread", under your cherry-picked definition of "thread," you claimed no one in this thread is mad ... a few sentences before you expressed contempt for what Dow did.
>Dow doesn't get credit for doing the preferable thing, because there's no evidence that it's what they intended to do. All available evidence suggests that Dow intended to do a worse thing, and someone saw a business opportunity within Dow's apathy.
If you really want to dig your heels in, I'd love the lecture on the difference between contempt, derision, and anger.
(Edit: it's even worse ... your own comment is one of the ones angry over lying. [1] But right, it's in other thread, so in your mind, it doesn't count.)
May I suggest a better path: accept that the argument exists and use your deep understanding to refute it rather than to convince others it doesn't exist.
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.
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.
> A torrent of cheap, unregulated second-hand clothing flowing into Indonesia also adds to the country’s mounting garbage problem, said Dharmesh Shah, a policy advisor to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a nonprofit working on waste pollution. He said much of that merchandise is in such poor condition that vendors can’t resell it.
> “They sort through it and a very small percentage is actually reusable,” Shah told Reuters. “It just gets burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills.”
Yeah I don't think anyone would be too upset if they plucked out the 10% of shoes that are in good-enough condition to actually resell in Indonesia, before grinding the rest up to make sports tracks.
The issue is that it seems like all the shoes were sent to Indonesia, regardless of reusability, and they turned a blind eye to what happened to them after that.
Why believe the shoe seller? Perhaps half of the shoes appear usable and are sold as such, but most of those quickly disintegrate when worn. After all there are plenty of people in Singapore who will happily buy used and usable shoes. Anything that falls through this sieve to be exported is probably trash, which the Indonesians well know. It is reasonable for them to reject imports of which 1% are unusable, let alone 50%.
Because neither Dow nor the Singaporean government are interested in recycling them once they have been able to dump them in Indonesia? This appears to be just a greenwashing scheme which coincidentally reuses a small fraction of the garbage stream.
I came here to post the exact same sentiment and the ordered phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle".
Yes, it's bad that this was advertised as a specific recycling program and involved parties knowingly or unknowingly diverged from that stated plan.
But from a global resource consumption perspective, it's far preferable to re-use good shoes (which also reduces the production of new shoes) than to recycle them for recovered material (which is lossy in terms of energy and materials).
The same argument about shoes may not apply to the specifics of say e-waste - where harmful materials, rare materials, or electrical efficiency come into play - but in the case of this article, we should be happy that usable shoes are being put on feet rather than shredded and chemically decomposed.
>The donated shoes that ended up in Indonesia have added to a flood of illegal second-hand clothing pouring into that developing country, according to a senior government official there, who said such cast-offs pose a public health risk, undercut its local textile industry and often pile more waste into its already bulging landfills.
I think lying about the fate of these shoes is pretty bad and destroys trust. I’d think twice about recycling. “Here’s why that’s a good thing!” doesn’t cut it for me.
That what I was thinking, at least it’s a step up from dumping it in the ocean. It seems people are having to relearn that we can’t trust these companies to actually do the right thing all over again, as if history didn’t exist.
But they aren't being "shredded and chemically decomposed" - they're being sent as "second-hand stuff" where the good items are reused, but the others are dumped or burned, and nothing is actually recycled. And of course, the reused ones are also dumped or burned, just later.
You can put a tracking device in anything and give it to a goodwill right now. This feels like a very strange angle to take. Especially when these shoes traveled accross countries.
If not one sample pair of shoes was processed in the way advertised, then I think it is indeed outrageous. I'd agree that reuse might be better, but then the programme should be clear that that is one possible outcome.
Here is the thing though. If all the perfectly good pairs of shoes were destroyed, the reported might have wrote an equally aggrieved piece about the shameful way these perfectly good shoes were not reused. Seems like they set up a strawman ready to be outraged no matter what Dow did.
Shipping western clothing to poor countries tends to destroy local industry.
I prefer to be able to make my own choices, not have people lie to be and then do whatever they feel is cheaper. They have to pay to properly recycle, but can just sell the old shoes. This is fraud, pure and simple. They asked for the donations of shoes under false pretenses. (There's a chance it was whatever firm they paid - but then they're just willfully incompetent.)
That's also exactly what the article mentions. The Indonesian government banned imports of second hand clothing to protect the local textile industry.
While the exporter isn't doing anything illegal in Indonesia, the Indonesian importer certainly is (according to the explanation in the article). Abetting criminal activities in a neighbouring friendly country is rarely desirable.
> Western clothing is normally what poor country industry is made of, or at least a significant part is.
While the used clothing sector provides employment to hundreds of thousands of people in less developed countries, it also damages their local textile manufacturing industry. Prices for locally produced clothes have to include both manufacturing and logistics costs, whereas the imported used clothes from Western countries are donated and can be profitably sold at much lower prices, covering only logistics.
But if they literally have free clothing, doesn't it make that local industry useless? Literally provides no value at that point. This only seems like a problem to me if people literally can't provide value in any other way. To which the solution would seem to create a new type of industry, not create an artificial need by creating a clothes penury on purpose.
But my point is, why isn't the solution to create more jobs that aren't shoe-making so that they can contribute to the economy in a new way (idk, making yoyos) and now they have both yoyo's and free shoes?
That is the ultimate solution. But it’s extremely difficult to leapfrog any steps in the process of advancing an economy. It’s hard to take a shoemaker and turn them into a scientist. Usually it’s a better idea to give the shoemaker a good shot at turning their kids into scientists.
the terrible thing about economics is that it's very complex - "the parable of the broken window" is only a parable. the entire field of keynesian economics says that yes, you can break a window and then pay someone to fix it and increase net economic activity, as long as it's not crowding out actual economic activity that would otherwise have occurred. the "burying jars of money in the desert and paying people to dig them up" is precisely a broken window, economically speaking, and that's just a parable too.
in the real world domestic workers don't all go on to become farmers (oops that's dumped onto by subsidized western businesses too) or some other business... some degree of protectionism has consistently worked well to the extent it's arguably necessary*. And don't take this as me defending sweatshops either ;) but a moderate degree of protectionism and public investment has very consistently allowed countries to move beyond the absolute basic "we have sweatshots and scrap out old electronics and recycle garbage" stage of development. Neoliberalism and free trade will suck away any public investment you give it the opportunity to, and engineer around any comparative advantage you can find.
Keynes' point is that money stimulates economic activity, breaking deadlocks. Paying people to do useless work is only helpful because it is more socially acceptable than paying people to do no work. In no case is the useless production valuable.
In a practical sense this is pretty avoidable for the general population, however. Because you just choose something that would be useful, e.g. public works.
In isolation, yes. It is better for the locals to get clothes for free than for local resources (whether capital or labour) to be expended to produce them locally.
But having a strong textile manufacturing industry promotes the development of other adjacent industries (e.g. dyes, chemicals) that would not be able to stand on their own initially, and can output products that are useful to more than just textile manufacturing. It easier to develop a new industry if the country already has other industries that can support its growth.
In a sense, it is like a tax on clothes, paid by the consumers, funding textile-adjacent industries, but directed by private actors rather than the government. If it pays off, other things become cheaper and potentially offset the increased cost of clothes.
Poor countries are generally bad at collecting taxes,[1] and what little is collected is at risk of being pocketed by officials due to higher levels of corruption.[2] Subsidies may also fall afoul of WTO obligations.[3] Besides, Western countries also have anti-dumping regulations that are in practice used to shield domestic industries being damaged by cheaper imports.[4]
It's never going to be economically viable for most poor countries to develop local clothing industries. Even without imports of used clothing the economies of scale in that industry are just brutal. Poor countries that want to protect local industry can impose import tariffs, but in most cases they would be better off with unrestricted free trade.
They already had local clothing industries - people in poor countries weren't walking around naked until the mid 80s when container-shipping meant offshoring trash became cheap.
If this issue was isolated to shoes, and those were technically unavailable for local manufacture, then you'd probably be right. But these practices destroy all industry, leaving the people without any manufacturing base or value creation outside of cultural artifacts, and tends to keep the poor countries poor.
Most of those countries had craft clothing production, hardly anything that could be legitimately called an industry.
You haven't proposed a viable alternative. Should developed countries voluntarily stop exporting used clothing? Would that actually make people in poor countries better off?
I was explaining the problem and now not solving it is my fault.
> Should developed countries voluntarily stop exporting used clothing? Would that actually make people in poor countries better off?
Yeah, that's what the developing country said in this instance. They passed their own laws to prevent import.
And the charity promised to use the shoes for an experiment in recycling which would have brought knowledge benefits at least even if not producing a superior product. They clearly defrauded their donors regardless of Indonesian trade policies.
Government can't reasonably force stores to sell particular products. Most don't even have space for that. And outside of a few fashion items, used clothes have almost no value in developed countries anymore. They can barely be given away. Many are simply shredded for use as rags.
I guess it was plastics companies like Dow that convince us that recycling was just as good. I have frequently encountered the attitude of "these single use plastics are ok to use since we can just recycle them". Even under ideal circumstances, recycling uses a lot of energy.
>I guess it was plastics companies like Dow that convince us that recycling was just as good. I have frequently encountered the attitude of "these single use plastics are ok to use since we can just recycle them".
That's funny because I've never heard anyone saying this, yet every time there's a discussion about recycling comments like this inevitably show up.
Dow does in fact claim to be able to recycle 'hard-to-recycle plastics' [0]. A lot of single use plastics are of that variety, for sure. Sure, they do kinda avoid the word 'recycle' and replace it with 'convert' so perhaps they are being honest enough.
I find the extent to which Dow lied to be outrageous. It did not say the shoes would be recycled, but specifically said they would be used to make playground padding.
Why shouldn’t honesty be expected? After all, this is a country where people still get caned.
Reusing the shoes as was the case is of course better.
Actually, I think there is a case for fraud, somewhere in this mess and if authorities care to pursue it. Lying to the public, to encourage the donation of shoes, then various "middle men" making profits selling them, and where it was known that no recycling was taking place.
>I'm a liberal in general but this kind of false outrage makes us look foolish.
You're not looking deep enough. The outrage should be that companies imply playground padding (maybe what? 100 tons/year at most) is somehow a reasonable approach to solving any waste problem. THEN they have the gall to not even do that.
The valid outrage is how easy it is for companies to manipulate people.
The traders quoted in the article note that it's common for the shoes to get repeatedly shipped around, half of what they buy is not good enough for resale, and I'm sure a large portion of the shoes don't sell and get junked anyway. So the carbon footprint is much larger than local recycling in Singapore.
Reusing the shoes doesn’t make them vanish. If they are being reused that’s fine, actually better than fine, that’s great. But how will Dow track the shows through various secondhand markets to make sure they ultimately fulfill their promise to recycle them in the end? I think that will be basically impossible.
I have no problem with the shoes being reused, neither does anyone else apparently. I have a big problem with corporations lying, which lies are not mitigated by a beneficial outcome.
This is the problem with utilitarianism; it has no red lines. You can try to be utilitarian and think you're only concerned with outcomes, but the reality is that foresight and perception are highly limited. In practice people assume the shoes were being recycled until they hear different, then appraise the actual outcome in some utilitarian calculus; the ends are actually OK, so that validates (or at least excuses) the deceptive means. After all, one can rationalize, without the promise of recycling the shoes might never have become available for reuse and would have ended up in landfill or rotting away in someone's basement.
But this is vulnerable to all sorts of abuses. Being completely results oriented is only as good as your ability to accurately appraise the results. And if it turns out the outcomes are awful, utilitarians often retreat into 'we'll do better next time'. As a result, the utilitarian ethos tends to turn a blind eye to reports of problems until the outcomes are known, which opens the doors wide to fraudsters and scammers, from the petty to the political. Utilitarians reason that people are bad at making decisions and need to be incentivized into the creation of good outcomes; and utilitarians are themselves incentivized by this idea of a rosy meta-outcome to not question the premises or means of any given proposal.
>> the ends are actually OK, so that validates (or at least excuses) the deceptive means
The end does not justify the means. In this case perhaps the end is environmentally similar, but then the deception serves no purpose and only discredits them so we ignore everything they say afterwards.
There are side effects to deceptive means that are often worse than the topic at hand.
I agree that if the shoes were perfectly good, it would have been better to keep them. Are you asserting the author recycled perfectly good shoes, or are you just describing a hypothetical? If the former, what in the article suggests the shoes were still perfectly good?
But, here's the thing about reuse, what happens after the next person is done using the shoes? Looks more like kicking the can down the road. Not only is there a hygiene problem involved with this type of reuse, but then the 2nd hand shoes still end up being part of the massive plastic pollution problem.
Dow seems to just have "exported" the problem to another country, lied about it, their people or associates are kind of making money under the table, and the environment continues suffering. At some point, governments are going to have to hold companies accountable for the plastic waste problem.
I understand your point, but at the end of the day they were not doing what they said they were. People were expecting their shoes to be processed and turned into something new, something that would theoretically help with the development of the recycling tech.
Shipping shoes over the ocean is not the most eco-friendly thing.
Additionally: do we know the shops in Indonesia are going to recycle them? Or is it more likely they will sit in a store for years and are then thrown out?
The thing is, however, these second-hand shoes might sit in that store for a while and then, after they haven't been bought by anyone for some time, be thrown in a landfill after all.
That's quite different from giving people an incentive to donate their used shoes (rather than selling them on themselves, mind you) because they think they're going to be used to build playgrounds for children.
I read article a while ago that can’t find about how people’s emotional connection to stuff influences getting rid of things. People want to have things disposed of properly. This is especially true for things with close connection like clothes, shoes, or furniture. Their shoes meant something and should be treated with dignity and as described. But to recipient, they are used shoes.
My guess is that messaging simplicity won out over precision. “Recycle your clothing” is a much clearer message than “give us your clothing and we will evaluate whether it’s condition and materials better suggest reuse elsewhere, or partial or full recycling”.
corporations will never take a more costly and less profitable approach towards productions unless regulations and watchdogs keep them to their word -- this outrage is a necessary function to a degree , if you care to hold corporate groups to the same mantra.
The problem is they're illegal in Indonesia as used clothing imports, so they're being confiscated. They may or may not end up being anywhere but a trash bin after all.
I would actually suspect some high proportion of those shoes will just end up in landfills, or perhaps incinerators, without ever being "re-used".
From the OP:
> A torrent of cheap, unregulated second-hand clothing flowing into Indonesia also adds to the country’s mounting garbage problem, said Dharmesh Shah, a policy advisor to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a nonprofit working on waste pollution. He said much of that merchandise is in such poor condition that vendors can’t resell it.
> “They sort through it and a very small percentage is actually reusable,” Shah told Reuters. “It just gets burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills.”
> Two market vendors in Batam, who asked not to be named, told Reuters they buy sacks of shoes of differing grades from used-clothing traders such as Yok Impex, but don’t know exactly what they’re getting until they open them up. They said it’s not uncommon to throw out half the shoes they receive because the footwear is not good enough to sell.
It is true that for a lot of plastics, you can find someone happy to be paid, less than it would cost to recycle, to bury it, or incinerate it, or toss it in a river or lake. And indeed that is the destination of a lot of plastics that on the front-end are claimed to be headed for recycling.
So why recycle at all, right? Apparently the invisible hand says that the best and highest use for this trash is to be buried and burnt -- as long as you can find someone in enough need of the money you're willing to pay them to burn or bury it.
We could imagine, for the purpose of making it more conceivable, keeping all waste within national borders. We could imagine that within the USA, wealthier areas wouldn't really want to bury your trash next to their homes and businesses -- at least not for the amount of money someone is willing to pay, especially when they can find a poorer more desperate area that will take much less to bury or burn your trash next to an elementary school or what have you.
So, why recycle at all?
I mean, indeed most plastic isn't really that recyclable, so this isn't a totally rhetorical question. But then we should probably produce a lot less of it, and the way the industry gets out of people thinking that is by convincing you that it'll be recycled.
Which is really the motivation for this recycle-fraud. Industry wanting you to believe that it'll be recycled, to avoid pressure to reduce production. (the first `r`). Which is exactly why Dow can't let on that it knows the stuff will never be recycled.
PS: I fully expected to find the HN comments section full of people saying that exporting used tennis shoes to poor countries is a better use than recycling them, and it's somehow "privileged" to want to recycle them, instead of supporting the landfill and incineration business of some third world country which can really use the funds. I was not disapointed.
It looks like most people didn't make it to this part of the article:
>In 2015, Indonesia’s Ministry of Trade introduced the Prohibition of the Import of Used Clothing regulation. The measure banned the import of used clothes and footwear over concerns about hygiene and the potential of these items to spread disease, as well as the need to protect the local textile industry.
Part of the problem here is that, yes, reuse is better than recycle, but these shoes were illegally sent into the second hand market of a country that DOW cannot be prosecuted in.
These shoes were guaranteed not first disinfected, they were just put in a bag, illegally shipped into India, unbagged, and then put on a shelf.
"Reduce, reuse, resell, recycle", but not if the step you decided to go with requires actively breaking the law and compromising the health and already health compromised billion-plus population country. Then you get articles like this, which quite rightly call out DOW over what they did.
Yep, next up in the global effort to stave off deflation and maximize consumption: second hand goods are unsafe and need to be disinfected before resale, or better yet thrown out. Need your state certificate of resale legality and certification of disinfection or be subject to prosecution.
We ridicule it at the start, this is how this stuff eventually gets memed into existence. It's not fiction, it's already reality!
What diseases are spread through textiles, that need to be stopped at the cost of people not being able to afford to wear shoes on their feet? Not everyone can afford new shoes...
Indeed - if only DOW had worked with the Indian government to make this happen, given that they're a multi-billion-dollar company and could have easily done so. But no, instead they just decided to crime their way to getting rid of mostly fine used shoes.
A lot of consumer regulation is for the benefit of the middle class, who can afford things costing slightly more but are much more safety conscious. The poor generally get screwed by it.
My city has a waste to energy plant. Anything I put in the waste bin gets burned, and the energy is used to generate power or heat for the city.
I have a hell of a time convincing my wife that we ought to just chuck all plastics into the waste rather than stick them in the recycling bin, since only God knows where the plastics in the recycling bin end up. Maybe they get recycled, maybe they get dumped onto a smoldering trash mountain in Turkey or maybe they end up floating down the Yangtze. Even if they do get recycled into a fleece sweater or whatever, given what we know about microplastic shedding, do we really want that? Just burn the shit and recover the energy, I say.
Landfilling still seems very inefficient. As Sweden has done for a long time: what ever you put in "regular waste" goes to incineration. The heat is used for district heating. Remains from incineration can be landfilled. Exhaust gases are monitored and cleaned.
Regular landfills have thus been abolished, which is a success. It's a small step, but IMO a very notable achievement.
And it has outraged some that plastic "recycling" goes into the same system in many parts of the country. I don't mind in principle - it is their (local government's) system, they are tasked with being professional and disposing of collected plastic in the best way possible. If that's going to be burning with retention of heat, then that's acceptable.
Burning trash produces CO2 and that needs to be factored in. My guess is that CO2 produced transporting waste to landfill is less than that produced by burning. With landfills, there is problem with food and wharf waste producing methane. Separating that out and composting it, which produces CO2, is solution that my city does.
Sending waste to well-run landfill feels wrong but can be best alternative. We should probably worry less about recycling plastic and more about making sure there is no litter.
Capturing CO2 from flue gas requires a lot of energy (for something like a coal fired power plant, it takes about 30% of the power plant's energy output to capture the CO2) and you still have to deal with the CO2 after you've captured it - what do you do with it?
The only way to sequester it is to inject into underground reservoirs, but that requires a very specific geology which very few places have.
You can liquefy it and sell it... but then it's typically going to get released to the atmosphere by the purchaser, not sequestered.
I am not an expert in waste incineration (although I am an expert in carbon capture processes) but I seriously doubt that they use CO2 scrubbers. Scrubbers for other nasty molecules like SO2, sure, but the CO2 is probably just sent out into the atmosphere.
What’s the scandal here? Perfectly good shoes were sent to a country that seems to have a need and market for reasonably priced shoes. The people on the ground there aren’t going to care about some bourgeois project like recycling them into a walking path so more wealthy people’s feet are comfortable on leisure walks through a park. The people working on these projects have their own opinions on it and acted accordingly!
If DOW took their clients seriously, they would have known this and processed the shoes down into much smaller pieces using a cutting machine immediately after collection, and the staff at the offshore recycling facility will have nothing else to do with them.
If they intended to do this why not advertise it, like you said reuse is a better outcome than recycling them. But it's much more likely they found the cheapest bidder to do what they asked and didn't verify anything, so what are their other cheapest bidders doing that isn't reuse/recycling? The scandal is that they're lying about what they're doing so why would we take their word about other things.
the article does a poor job of selling the problem here, but the outrage is that companies encourage overconsumption in rich western countries by telling us things are recycled, and that it's okay to buy more stuff we don't need because it's recyclable. it's just greenwashing.
most of the shoes people put in donation bins aren't going to last long for their second owners, and people in indonesia don't have the same compunctions about throwing things in the trash as people in richer countries do. so all this is doing is shipping waste overseas so an indonesian can throw it in the garbage and it goes in an indonesian landfill instead of a singaporean landfill. they're laundering the waste so rich people can pretend they aren't throwing things in the trash.
The article doesn't focus on their specific shoes with some kind of shallow outrage that they went to the wrong place. The article focuses on the vastly expanded chain of responsibility, through the unexpected routes the trackers they hid in shoes revealed to them. As it turns out, the routes are a big issue because there's very little responsibility ensured.
Used clothing import is illegal in Indonesia, and has been since 2015, according to the article. They aren't allowed to be sent there. So the shoes get confiscated when they're found or intercepted, and it's not disclosed how they're disposed of afterwards. It sounds like in other cases where the clothing imports aren't explicitly illegal, there are middlemen that aren't on the hook to recycle filtering through the shipments and discarding or destroying unsellable rejects.
With permission and some degree of oversight what you say has some merit. But this is a black market import in some places, and just being dumped into flea markets in others. This is shipping your trash to get burned overseas.
Reduce would mean you buy less. Reuse would mean you buy less or buy from other people. Only recycle means you buy the same amount as before. Guess which one companies prefer you do?
There's a form of broken window fallacy going on in green policy circles. Particularly the Cash for Clunkers program, and California's recent banning of trucks made before 2010. It is an attempt to drive demand and raw resource extraction to produce new equipment, by destroying existing supply of refined goods and driving up prices. Used cars are scarce now. Opposite of reduce/reuse.
*diesel Big Rigs/Buses. (It's an important distinction, as one would ban the majority of vehicles in the US). Diesel vehicles are particularly bad for the environment, and as we've seen even worse than we thought because of the widespread cheating from manufacturers for environmental testing, and big rigs & busses have previously had massive exceptions carved out for them from environmental regs already for a long time.
Do you think these shoes all end up being recycled in the end?
If not, they're not doing the right thing. It's only good to do it in that order if all steps are followed. It's not "reduce, barely reuse, discard in a landfill or river in east asia".
I would not be that surprised to hear that the average Indonesian is less picky than the average Westerner WRT shoes, and so I’m sure they are getting plenty of extra life out of those shoes, which is absolutely great!
But the shoes do ultimately have a finite lifespan. It isn’t obvious how Dow is planning to track the shoes through their second, apparently grey-market life, to fulfill their part of the deal. They said the things will end up recycled. If they can’t fulfill that promise they should stop lying.
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.
>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.
> The donated shoes that ended up in Indonesia have added to a flood of illegal second-hand clothing pouring into that developing country, according to a senior government official there, who said such cast-offs pose a public health risk, undercut its local textile industry and often pile more waste into its already bulging landfills.
Do they even understand the words coming out on the page? I'm sorry but if people can't afford to clothe themselves then fuck the "local textile industry," aka forcing people to spend money on clothes they probably cannot afford. Wearing shoes should be a human right (God knows there's probably enough shoes for everyone on Earth) and saying we should stop sending second-hand clothes to places for the purposes of job creation is just breaking windows to make jobs for window repairmen.
this used to be the take until people tried it and realized it only destroyed local industry and created a sense of perpetual widespread poverty in parts of africa
when local economies are forming its usually fabric based products like clothes and shoes that start to get made and sold first, without a spark like this its hard to get anything else off the ground
if you constantly give them a supply of it then they have no motivation to make their own
I’m not a huge fan of this kind of talk economically speaking because there are plenty of other things that Africans and other developing countries need and can do for themselves still. It also does not preclude making textiles for export. Rejecting free clothing seems like a broken window fallacy.
Of course, clothing is lower on the value chain and is a great way for countries to begin industrializing/to enter the global economy in manufacturing. But there are other ways to get in on manufacturing than just clothing - and to be clear we are talking about things like flooding the market with tennis shoes and tshirts here, not suits and other formalwear, rugs, nice dresses. Since those are less mechanized even in products consumed by developed countries they seem like better export candidates (easier to compete on the global market without extensive capital or machinery) than tshirts anyway IMO.
Now, for things like food this is a bit different because that is what typically the vast majority of the population is engaged in economically already (but also is harder to distribute than clothes, since food is perishable and requires a more constant supply than clothing), and it doesn’t make sense for imported grains to price out local farmers from selling to the local market because the imported grains are free.
There pretty much won't ever be a local textile industry unless you have incredibly cheap labour.
Except with protectionism, which is what gives most countries their local textile industry, but that comes at a cost - either higher prices, or wealth drained from other sectors in their economy.
Banning/disincentivizing 2nd hand imports won't create a local industry in most places, unless you do the same with 1st hand.
But it will certain lower the demand. And might push it below what is needed for sustainable industry and supply chain. And I would guess for viable export you need first at least some skills in own market.
Could it be that someone who has a perspective different from yours has equal or greater context? On what basis do you assume that you have more context, that a person who has the context you have would automatically be convinced of what you believe?
If you get X for cheap, that frees you up to make Y's. In a poor country, there's no shortage of Y's that people need or want.
"Someone" might know something, but you in particular have no idea what you're talking about. You think you know better than Indonesians what their laws should be, but you don't.
Just one question: did "Americans" decide to make becoming a licensed hairstylist require hundreds of hours of training and thousands of dollars in course fees? Or was it special interest groups?
We Americans don't have representative government; rather we have an increasingly less convincing simulation thereof. Your question is merely a specific example of this.
You might follow with an obvious question about Indonesia. Since that nation is a vassal of USA, the answer is equally obvious. Let's not stop thinking just yet. This is why context is important. The certification scams you cite serve to move wealth from the poor to the wealthy. That is bad. Requirements that imports to poor nations not be mostly trash serve to protect the wealth of the poor from that sort of extraction. That is good. More familiarity with Indonesia, or with any similar developing nation, would have provided you with this knowledge already.
The shoes were in near brand new condition so they resold them... that is a good thing. If the intention of this article is to expose them for not recycling I think they've missed their mark.
Maybe if the shoes were damaged or unusable they would have gone somewhere else, but it's more wasteful to not consider reuse before trying to extract a small amount of rubber from a perfectly good shoe.
I agree. This is really top notch journalism; something we don't see often anymore. I would give this piece an award honestly.
It seems the real scandal is that they've caught Dow giving lip service about its recycling program. I think I'm fine with where the shoes ended up though. I'd rather see them get used.
so let's imagine what this journalist expected to happen to the shoes really did happen, and mulched up pieces of metal and batteries from the trackers really ended up in playgrounds intended to provide a soft and safe surface to play on.
maybe the journalism is good, but it poses danger to kids getting cut and being exposed to battery chemicals.
also if i ran a playground surface mulching service i would have a metal detectors for safety reasons and not allow these shoes to be mulched, which could be what actually happened.
But where is the lie? Dow says they are making tracks and playgrounds out of shoes. The article grants this is true. But for some reason the article tries to spin the fact that they are also recycling them whole as some scandal.
> U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc and the Singapore government said they were transforming old sneakers into playgrounds and running tracks. Reuters put that promise to the test by planting hidden trackers inside 11 pairs of donated shoes. Most got exported instead.
The journalist spent lots of time and energy tracking these shoes. It appears they went in looking for controversy and are trying to squeeze some out of their benign findings.
"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."
Seems to me like the probability for scamming is nearly 100% in a program like this because there's a long chain of no-name contractors involved. One contractor hires another and says "Get rid of this stuff" and eventually one of them finds somebody who actually wants to illegally buy the usable part of the waste and then he just dumps the rest in a ditch somewhere. The next-to-last contractor in the chain didn't ask any questions about why the final contractor offered to cart it away for free, but they should have.
When the scam is eventually discovered, the publicly-visible company at the front of the chain has plausible deniability and blames it on the contractors. This general pattern is what caused a decent fraction of EPA superfund disasters in the US.
Plus it's waste, so nobody is very motivated to actually keep track of where it ends up. Until bluetooth trackers came along and made that easy, anyway.
So Dow actually made better and more efficient use of the shoes than they claimed to?
What a scandal? This all seems like hair splitting to me, it's not clear if reuse of used shoes is better or worse for the environment than just pulverising them. Recycling has far lower value than most people tend to think it does so reusing shoes for six months to a year is very arguably more impactful.
Am I only one who questions this recycling plan in the first place? Aren't we quite worried about microplastics at this point? And isn't making fields of this which stay in sun and weather just eventually going to spread it around? Not that I have been on a track in long time, but already then I noted the wearing of tiny bits off. Where will all of it end?
I'm wondering if someone didn't say "hey these ones have something weird in the sole, we probably shouldn't grind them up" and they were rejected as unsuitable for recycling.
So? These shoes all look great, even by North American thrift store standards. It would be a total waste to shred them when they can be put to lots of additional use. Maybe they should have tracked some truly worn-out ones.
Well they don't say what happens to the shoes that are in bad condition, I think for completeness' sake they should do the same with tatty and worn out shoes. The trackers would likely get shredded then though.
I think this is only half the story. Why would they shred up perfectly serviceable shoes when they can make money off of selling them?
From memory, and this may have changed in the last 10 years, Indonesia doesn’t really do “rubbish dumps”. They sweep everything in the street, including rubbish from peoples homes into small piles and burn it there and then. Might be different in Jakarta but this is what I saw everywhere else. The smoke and smell of burnt plastic was everywhere. I only spent a month there but I got around a lot and on more then one occasion witnessed Malaysian tourists asking Indonesian locals why there was rubbish everywhere. No bins hey. The national parks were (still are?) especially bad. Anyway, Indonesia is probably not the best final destination for any sort of waste.
IMO, Indonesia is not the problem, its really the farce of plastic recycling.
This might be too optimistically naive, but I wonder if they’re treating the shoes as a commodity. Like, for every 1000 shoes in Dow collection bins, they’re using 1000 shoes in the recycling-to-sports-surfaces projects, but they’re not the same shoes. Hopefully they’re the more worn-out shoes, and thats why the nicer shoes ‘donated’ for this article were not used.
Looks like they used an apple airtag, but couldn't specifically call it that for some reason....
>One shoe of each pair was implanted with a thin, round Bluetooth tracking device.
> a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile.
Ehh, so what? Should they have unstitched the shoes, sold the components to a shoemaker who then restitched them and sold the result in an Indonesian flea market? If the input and output to the pipe is shoes made of existing materials, why should I care about the intermediate steps?
This surprises me. I'd expect the shoes to instead be recycled into fuel for cement kilns, which is what a lot of "recycled" plastic turns into anyway.
Anyway, the problem isn't that the shoes aren't recycled. It's that shoes are made from materials derived from fossil fuels.
So then what happens to the unhygienic used shoes after the next person has got them (and hopefully not some odd foot infection) and then uses them up to the point where they are no longer wearable? And what happened to the not so good to unwearable used shoes that the useable ones were picked from?
If the answer is just dump them somewhere, then we are right back to where we started, in the mist of a plastic pollution catastrophe. Except, we moved the problem to poorer countries, that have even less resources and technology to deal with it.
I see a lot of reuse is good so it's all good. Do we know if the buyers of these reused shoes will recycle then when done or are these ending in a landfill? Because that's the ultimate issue here. Dow promised their end was not landfill.
Imagine that you collect soda bottles and promise you'll recycle them. When you get them, you turn them into sweaters that you sell. If someone who buys a sweater throws it in the landfill after it wears out, does that mean you broke your promise?
this is not fair in the sense of the word, but it is still better than dumping waste in another country in the name of recycling.
playing devil's advocate, nobody would send their shoes if dow would come clean and say that they will sell it elsewhere to make money. most people would irrationally ask for a cut even tho there's logistics involved in getting it to the other country.
I would like to know whether they put trackers into any shoes that were in bad condition. I think that would be a much more damning result if those were sent to the wrong place.
Wow, that's an exemplary investigative journalism! World will be so much better now. Maybe these guys better spend their energy and funds on tracking Russian oil, which is exported in troves bypassing sanctions?
However, the mantra is "reduce reuse recycle". Clearly it is better in the save the planet sense that perfectly good shoes were reused rather than destroyed for playground padding.
I'm a liberal in general but this kind of false outrage makes us look foolish.