[HN Gopher] Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them a...
___________________________________________________________________
Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian
flea market
Author : boristhespider
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-02-25 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| patrick451 wrote:
| 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 outrage is so tedious.
| uberman wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| "reduce resell? recycle"
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yes, that's the point and why I describe equanimity with
| bad means as a problem.
| ianburrell wrote:
| 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.
| LightDub wrote:
| Wanting not to be lied to is not false outrage.
| baron816 wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/science-and-
| sustainability/p...
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >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.
| DamonHD wrote:
| 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.
| uberman wrote:
| 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.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| 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.)
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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?
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > You haven't proposed a viable alternative.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| 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.
| 7speter wrote:
| Huh? Western clothing _is normally_ what poor country
| industry is made of, or at least a significant part is.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-44951670
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| If you put a shoemaker out of a job and give them free
| shoes, they now can't afford anything other than shoes.
|
| Economies grow prosperous when there are more
| opportunities for economic exchange.
| paulmd wrote:
| 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.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| 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?
| joshuaissac wrote:
| 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.
| hattmall wrote:
| Well they lost track of 3 pair, which could mean they were
| indeed shredded and recycled. 0
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I wonder if they hid the fact that good enough shoes would be
| reused because some people don't want that to happen.
| brookst wrote:
| 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".
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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_.
| pmorici wrote:
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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).
| moronicQ wrote:
| [dead]
| Robotbeat wrote:
| [flagged]
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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.
| SilasX wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34938256
|
| And that's without making a serious effort to find any!
|
| Please don't act like everyone on your side of this is
| making reasonable arguments just because you are. That's
| sanewashing and tunnel-visioned.
| grugagag wrote:
| 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...
| oblib wrote:
| 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".
| nextaccountic wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| ... 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.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| 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.
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| > the purpose was to show that companies like Dow can't be
| taken at their word when it comes to environmental
| initiatives
|
| 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.
| mirkules wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-
| shou...
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1]: https://wornwear.patagonia.com/
| kennywinker wrote:
| > 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.
| leipert wrote:
| 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.
|
| See also: https://www.cnckitchen.com/blog/recycling-
| old-3d-prints-into...
| kennywinker wrote:
| 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.
| aeternum wrote:
| Why isn't this caring more? It is a much better outcome than
| grinding up the shoes and trying to use them as playground
| fill or something.
| woodruffw wrote:
| "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.
| danielfoster wrote:
| 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.
| serf wrote:
| >However, the mantra is "reduce reuse recycle".
|
| 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.
| rippercushions wrote:
| 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.
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _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."_
| notpushkin wrote:
| Why don't they put non-reusable shoes back to recycle though?
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| sp332 wrote:
| That would take actual resources.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| 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.
| smugma wrote:
| "They said it's not uncommon to throw out half the shoes
| they receive because the footwear is not good enough to
| sell."
|
| Apparently it may be closer to half than 10%.
|
| And protectionism in Indonesia makes it illegal to import
| used shoes because of "hygiene".
|
| I'm not absolving Dow, but there was a lot to get angry
| about in the article.
| honkycat wrote:
| 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?
| driggs wrote:
| 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.
| peyton wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| Are you saying you'd be more likely to throw things away
| than recycle them because it's possible that rather than
| being recycled they will be reused?
| cjrp wrote:
| Or is it more like "well if they lied about that, what
| else are they lying about".
| natch wrote:
| I mean, it is Dow Chemical...
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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.
| contingo wrote:
| From the article:
|
| >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.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > But from a global resource consumption perspective, it's
| far preferable to re-use good shoes
|
| 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.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| 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?
| naet wrote:
| 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.
| SergeAx wrote:
| 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?
| jefftk wrote:
| I wonder what they would have seen if they'd put the trackers
| into shoes that were unusable, instead of ones that someone might
| want to wear?
| hermitcrab wrote:
| This is a great piece of investigative journalism. We need for of
| this holding big companies to account.
|
| BTW Trainers being re-used is good. But big companies lying to us
| to is not good.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| "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."
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| throw_away1525 wrote:
| 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.
| settrans wrote:
| Indeed this is HWFO's core thesis:
| https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-...
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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.
| ianburrell wrote:
| 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.
| opportune wrote:
| Any trash that will sit in a landfill will still produce
| emissions (especially methane) and may release a lot of
| that CO2 anyway due to decay.
|
| Completely agree that plastic is fine to end up in
| landfills or to be burnt though.
| throw_away1525 wrote:
| However, incinerating waste produces heat/energy which
| would otherwise have been obtained from burning fossil
| fuels.
|
| At the end of the day it is a complicated problem and the
| only real solution - consume less shit - is basically
| untenable, so :shrugs:
| prepend wrote:
| > Burning trash produces CO2 and that needs to be
| factored in.
|
| My understanding is that waste incineration includes co2
| scrubbers to capture co2 so it isn't released into the
| atmosphere.
| prepend wrote:
| > since only God knows where the plastics in the recycling bin
| end up.
|
| They likely end up in the same place as your waste.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Isn't reselling them recycling them? I'd only be outraged if they
| ended up in a landfill.
|
| Perhaps they should have tried shoes that weren't in wearable
| condition to see if those got recycled.
| RobLach wrote:
| So actually they're doing something better than recycling?
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Yeah, selling people shoes with trackers in them.
|
| That's good. That's what you are okay with.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, they didn't know they had trackers in them. I reckon I
| wouldn't be mad at Goodwill if I bought shoes there and they
| had trackers in them.
|
| The trackers are only there because Reuters was running a
| sting.
| RobLach wrote:
| You misinterpreted the article. Journalists are putting
| trackers in shoes, not Dow.
| nmilo wrote:
| > 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.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| 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
| opportune wrote:
| 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.
| morelisp wrote:
| Undercutting local manufacture is a centuries-old colonial tool
| to keep countries poor. Please acquire some context rather than
| have the knee jerk emotional reaction corporations are
| expecting you will have.
| civilized wrote:
| 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.
| vondur wrote:
| They will never have a local textile industry if you have to
| compete with free.
| vkou wrote:
| Poor countries have local textile industries, where do you
| think all the clothes we wear are made?
|
| If you have a problem with who owns those textile factories,
| well, that's an entirely different conversation.
| opportune wrote:
| Free secondhand clothing doesn't prevent local textile
| production for export or for higher quality than you get with
| secondhand.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That's recycling. In its purest form even.
| junglistguy wrote:
| Most organisations that collect clothes for charity are usually
| scams.
| code_duck wrote:
| It's much more efficient to use shoes as shoes vs. chop them up
| and make them into pavement.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| See also https://www.ban.org/ which does similar tracking
| projects for e-waste.
| taylorius wrote:
| The shoes getting sold second-hand, and used again seems a
| perfectly legitimate form of recycling tbh.
| jrmg wrote:
| 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.
| phyzome wrote:
| 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.
| htrp wrote:
| 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.
| kailanb wrote:
| It's called out later in the article.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| 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.
| excalibur wrote:
| > What's the scandal here?
|
| The money these journalists wasted chasing sneakers all over
| Asia, while hypocritically complaining about others' misuse of
| resources.
| booi wrote:
| It is reduce, reuse and recycle _in that order_. If anything
| seems like they did a great job here.
| gowings97 wrote:
| Interesting how that phrase has largely disappeared from the
| current green message carried by major media. Especially the
| reduce component.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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?
| drak0n1c wrote:
| 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.
| ender341341 wrote:
| *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.
| audunw wrote:
| 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".
| ender341341 wrote:
| > What's the scandal here?
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mqus wrote:
| 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.
| notatoad wrote:
| >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.
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| rr808 wrote:
| Genuinely expected the answer to be Indonesian rubbish dump.
| davidhyde wrote:
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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?
| analog31 wrote:
| Or the sea.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| What disease can be spread via old shoes, if you, for example,
| steam them at high temperature?
| drno123 wrote:
| But this is better to reuse them first, right? Instead of
| consuming energy to convert them into other materials.
| fergie wrote:
| Good. Actual reuse of perfectly good shoes is the best outcome
| for all concerned (and the environment).
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I'm super curious to know the Bluetooth tracker device they used.
| I have a strong feeling it's Apple AirTag.
| tylershuster wrote:
| Look at the screenshots. They say they used the "Find My" app.
| tamade wrote:
| The journalists went out of their way to not call them AirTags
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
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