Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market

I kind of see where the &quot;outrage&quot; might come from in the lead as apparently they promised that the shoes were going to be recycled.<p>However, the mantra is &quot;reduce reuse recycle&quot;. Clearly it is better in the save the planet sense that perfectly good shoes were reused rather than destroyed for playground padding.<p>I&#x27;m a liberal in general but this kind of false outrage makes us look foolish.

It looks like most people didn&#x27;t make it to this part of the article:<p>&gt;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.<p>Part of the problem here is that, yes, reuse is better than recycle, but these shoes were <i>illegally</i> sent into the second hand market of a country that DOW cannot be prosecuted in.<p>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.<p>&quot;Reduce, reuse, resell, recycle&quot;, 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 <i>quite rightly</i> call out DOW over what they did.

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.<p>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.

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!<p>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.

&gt; 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.<p>Do they even understand the words coming out on the page? I&#x27;m sorry but if people can&#x27;t afford to clothe themselves then fuck the &quot;local textile industry,&quot; aka forcing people to spend money on clothes they probably cannot afford. Wearing shoes should be a human right (God knows there&#x27;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.

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&#x27;ve missed their mark.<p>Maybe if the shoes were damaged or unusable they would have gone somewhere else, but it&#x27;s more wasteful to not consider reuse before trying to extract a small amount of rubber from a perfectly good shoe.

This is a great piece of investigative journalism. We need for of this holding big companies to account.<p>BTW Trainers being re-used is good. But big companies lying to us to is not good.

Seems to me like the probability for scamming is nearly 100% in a program like this because there&#x27;s a long chain of no-name contractors involved. One contractor hires another and says &quot;Get rid of this stuff&quot; 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&#x27;t ask any questions about why the final contractor offered to cart it away for free, but they should have.<p>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.<p>Plus it&#x27;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 actually they&#x27;re doing something better than recycling?

The shoes getting sold second-hand, and used again seems a perfectly legitimate form of recycling tbh.

So Dow actually made better and more efficient use of the shoes than they claimed to?<p>What a scandal? This all seems like hair splitting to me, it&#x27;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&#x27;t we quite worried about microplastics at this point? And isn&#x27;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 wonder what they would have seen if they&#x27;d put the trackers into shoes that were unusable, instead of ones that someone might want to wear?

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.

Genuinely expected the answer to be Indonesian rubbish dump.

See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ban.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ban.org&#x2F;</a> which does similar tracking projects for e-waste.

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&#x27;t specifically call it that for some reason....<p>&gt;One shoe of each pair was implanted with a thin, round Bluetooth tracking device.<p>&gt; 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.

I&#x27;m super curious to know the Bluetooth tracker device they used. I have a strong feeling it&#x27;s Apple AirTag.

Sounds like they were made into shoes with almost no material or energy inputs. Literally perfect recycling.

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?<p>This outrage is so tedious.

This surprises me. I&#x27;d expect the shoes to instead be recycled into fuel for cement kilns, which is what a lot of &quot;recycled&quot; plastic turns into anyway.<p>Anyway, the problem isn&#x27;t that the shoes aren&#x27;t recycled. It&#x27;s that shoes are made from materials derived from fossil fuels.

Good. Actual reuse of perfectly good shoes is the best outcome for all concerned (and the environment).

It&#x27;s much more efficient to use shoes as shoes vs. chop them up and make them into pavement.

I see a lot of reuse is good so it&#x27;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&#x27;s the ultimate issue here. Dow promised their end was not landfill.

Isn&#x27;t reselling them recycling them? I&#x27;d only be outraged if they ended up in a landfill.<p>Perhaps they should have tried shoes that weren&#x27;t in wearable condition to see if those got recycled.

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.<p>playing devil&#x27;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&#x27;s logistics involved in getting it to the other country.

But this is better to reuse them first, right? Instead of consuming energy to convert them into other materials.

What disease can be spread via old shoes, if you, for example, steam them at high temperature?

It&#x27;s recycling, even if the cycle is a little shorter than you thought it would be.

Most organisations that collect clothes for charity are usually scams.

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.

That’s recycling. In its purest form even.

Wow, that&#x27;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?