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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

#151

Post by qiqitori »

woodruffw wrote: post #107
pmorici wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 definitio…

There is no outcome yet.

- The shoes having found their way to a market does not mean that they will be bought and reused.

- If they aren't bought, what will the store owner do with them?

- If they are bought, what will the buyer do with them after they are no longer usable?

(Of course, in this case the reporters presumably bought them. How will they dispose of them now though?)

Maybe the reporters should have sent in shoes that are obviously broken and can't possibly be reused as shoes.

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

#152

Post by dreamcompiler »

Seems to me like the probability for scamming is nearly 100% in a program like this because there's a long chain of no-name contractors involved. One contractor hires another and says "Get rid of this stuff" 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't ask any questions about why the final contractor offered to cart it away for free, but they should have.

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.

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

#153

Post by dawatchusay »

woodruffw wrote: post #106
aeternum wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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…

Innocent until proven guilty

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

#154

Post by SilasX »

woodruffw wrote: post #145
SilasX wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has the same root comment, so that feels like the same thread to me. Either way, it means you're clinging to a technicality to be right.

So then what's your substantive point? You claimed no one is mad, no one made a particular argument in location A. Someone made it in location B. So what great misconception did you think you were refuting? It seems that all your comment does is tell people to ignore an argument that's actually being made ... on the basis that it's not being made in one specific arbitrary boundary.

It's also kind of funny -- even if you restrict it to this "thread", under your cherry-picked definition of "thread," you claimed no one in this thread is mad ... a few sentences before you expressed contempt for what Dow did.

>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.

If you really want to dig your heels in, I'd love the lecture on the difference between contempt, derision, and anger.

(Edit: it's even worse ... your own comment is one of the ones angry over lying. [1] But right, it's in other thread, so in your mind, it doesn't count.)

May I suggest a better path: accept that the argument exists and use your deep understanding to refute it rather than to convince others it doesn't exist.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34940149

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

#155

Post by geoelectric »

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.

The problem is they're illegal in Indonesia as used clothing imports, so they're being confiscated. They may or may not end up being anywhere but a trash bin after all.

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

#156

Post by geoelectric »

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…

The article doesn't focus on their specific shoes with some kind of shallow outrage that they went to the wrong place. The article focuses on the vastly expanded chain of responsibility, through the unexpected routes the trackers they hid in shoes revealed to them. As it turns out, the routes are a big issue because there's very little responsibility ensured.

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.

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

#157

Post by derefr »

mirkules wrote: post #80
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…

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…

> "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.

From a commercial perspective, "reducing" isn't about "reducing" the purchase of marketed goods, but rather reducing the waste/pollution/etc. that goes into manufacturing those goods. Like reducing plastic wrapping on boxes, etc.

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

#158

Post by Ekaros »

opportune wrote: post #140
vondur wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it will certain lower the demand. And might push it below what is needed for sustainable industry and supply chain. And I would guess for viable export you need first at least some skills in own market.

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

#160

Post by lazide »

woodruffw wrote: post #106
aeternum wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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…

So you're judging them by their perceived level of caring and knowledge, even though you have no evidence of it, and the outcome was better than expected.

Sounds like hell?

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