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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

#141

Post by SilasX »

woodruffw wrote: post #118
Robotbeat wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Again: literally everyone in this thread agrees that it's preferable, and nobody is mad. The error here is in "they": Dow doesn't get credit for doing the preferable thing, because there's no evidence that it's what they intended to do. All available evidence suggests that Dow intended to do a worse thing, and someone saw a business opportunity within Dow's apathy.

No, not literally everyone. Don’t exaggerate. In addition to the litany of people hand-wringing about the harms of lying (which you will probably not count), there’s comments like this one, complaining that the clothing influx “hurts” the economy (which I don’t agree with but is another counterexample).

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.

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

#142

Post by Dylan16807 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #115
nextaccountic wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So they did even better than that because that plan didn’t make sense. I’m glad for it, and I’m angry at the hall monitor type attitude that would want to punish them for doing the objectively better thing.

But how many other plans that don't make sense are they lying about? How confident can we be that all of them have happy endings too?

It's not hall monitor to call out big lies. It's not like there is a clear motive that would help the real program, either. The lie implies that they are being careless, and being careless with waste usually has bad consequences.

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

#143

Post by opportune »

ianburrell wrote: post #43
kzrdude wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

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 proba…

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.

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

#144

Post by mclightning »

throw_away1525 wrote: post #13

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 smolderi…

is burning plastic actually an exothermic reaction?

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

#145

Post by woodruffw »

SilasX wrote: post #141
woodruffw wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: literally everyone in this thread agrees that it's preferable, and nobody is mad. The error here is in "they": Dow doesn't get credit for doing the preferable thing, because there's no evidence that it's what they intended to do. All available evidence suggests that Dow intended to do a worse thing, and someone saw a business opportunity within Dow's apathy.

No, not literally everyone. Don’t exaggerate. In addition to the litany of people hand-wringing about the harms of lying (which you will probably not count), there’s comments like this one, complaining that the clothing influx “hurts” the economy (which I don’t agree with but is another counterexample). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34938256 And that’s without making a serious effort to find any! Please don’t…

That's an adjacent thread.

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

#146

Post by kube-system »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #128
kube-system wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But my point is, why isn't the solution to create more jobs that aren't shoe-making so that they can contribute to the economy in a new way (idk, making yoyos) and now they have both yoyo's and free shoes?

That is the ultimate solution. But it’s extremely difficult to leapfrog any steps in the process of advancing an economy. It’s hard to take a shoemaker and turn them into a scientist. Usually it’s a better idea to give the shoemaker a good shot at turning their kids into scientists.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by pipeline_peak »

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.

> Clearly it is better in the save the planet sense that perfectly good shoes were reused rather than destroyed for playground padding.

You mean, only to be thrown away again but this time in a landfill?

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

#149

Post by Clubber »

kennywinker wrote: post #85
mirkules wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incredibl…

> 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…

>China was taking our "recyclables" that were never actually recyclable, telling us they were recycling it, and instead dumping almost all of it in landfills.

I wish more people understood this. Plastic recycling is mostly a lie and has been for decades. If you use plastic, it's not getting recycled. All your plastic packaging, water bottles, everything ends up in a landfill if responsibly disposed of, or in the ocean if not.

https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/bog...

We should really stop using plastics for the vast majority of packaging. Return to wax paper and cardboard, glass bottles, etc. An easy way to regulate this would be to include the cost of recycling, so selling plastic becomes more expensive than traditional methods of packaging. Another is to limit the amount of stuff you can put in a single plastic container by volume, say nothing smaller than a gallon / 4 liters can go into a plastic container. That would be a start.

It's not going to happen because our politicians' election campaigns are funded by corporations. They can't get elected without taking money from corporations. The person who can get the most donations from corporations wins. The exceptions aren't numerous enough to change any congressional votes. This recycling lie, that's been going on since at least the 80s, was conjured up to prevent pressure of regulation. Nothing to see here, it's recycled. Problem solved.

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

#150

Post by Tao3300 »

jefftk wrote: post #24

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?

I'm wondering if someone didn't say "hey these ones have something weird in the sole, we probably shouldn't grind them up" and they were rejected as unsuitable for recycling.
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