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 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.
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...
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".
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?)
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.
> “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.”
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.
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.
But they were not good shoes. They had tracking devices put into them. Full stop.
Imagine putting tracking devices into children's shoes and then having them "reused" like this.
Yes, reuse is great. And if that's what they said they were going to do, awesome. But that's not what happened here, and exposes a very real problem.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
You mean, only to be thrown away again but this time in a landfill?
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.
>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.
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...
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.
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.
They likely end up in the same place as your waste.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 money these journalists wasted chasing sneakers all over Asia, while hypocritically complaining about others' misuse of resources.
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.
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
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.
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.
If you have a problem with who owns those textile factories, well, that's an entirely different conversation.
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.
BTW Trainers being re-used is good. But big companies lying to us to is not good.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's good. That's what you are okay with.
The trackers are only there because Reuters was running a sting.
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.
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?
IMO, Indonesia is not the problem, its really the farce of plastic recycling.
>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.
This outrage is so tedious.
Anyway, the problem isn't that the shoes aren't recycled. It's that shoes are made from materials derived from fossil fuels.
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.
Perhaps they should have tried shoes that weren't in wearable condition to see if those got recycled.
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.
