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

reuters.com

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

#131

Post by RC_ITR »

uberman wrote: post #2

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 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.

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

#132

Post by kennywinker »

leipert wrote: post #91
kennywinker wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 wi…

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.

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

#133

Post by Gordonjcp »

oblib wrote: post #88
woodruffw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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".

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.

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

#134

Post by PeterisP »

driggs wrote: post #9
uberman wrote: post #2

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 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…

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.

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

#135

Post by audunw »

booi wrote: post #31
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #29

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 accordin…

It is reduce, reuse and recycle in that order . If anything seems like they did a great job here.

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".

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

#136

Post by RobLach »

jasonlotito wrote: post #28
RobLach wrote: post #18

So actually they're doing something better than recycling?

Yeah, selling people shoes with trackers in them. That's good. That's what you are okay with.

You misinterpreted the article. Journalists are putting trackers in shoes, not Dow.

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

#137

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

nradov wrote: post #95
LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 out…

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?

> 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. 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.

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

#138

Post by naet »

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.

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

#139

Post by opportune »

stainablesteel wrote: post #56
nmilo wrote: post #41

> 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 c…

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 hav…

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.

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

#140

Post by opportune »

vondur wrote: post #52
nmilo wrote: post #41

> 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 c…

They will never have a local textile industry if you have to compete with free.

Free secondhand clothing doesn’t prevent local textile production for export or for higher quality than you get with secondhand.
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