It's recycling, even if the cycle is a little shorter than you thought it would be.
Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
181–190 of 232 posts
Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
> 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.
They solicited donations under false pretenses for PR points and then gave (or worse, sold) them to an exporter. If they want to be seen as trustworthy or given the benefit of the doubt...well they've had 126 years and consistently shown ethical behavior is not a company mantra.
Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Western clothing is normally what poor country industry is made of, or at least a significant part is.
> 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 c…
I’m not talking about used clothes, I’m talking about all the new clothes we can buy, especially the disposable stuff from the likes of h and m.
Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
#184I see a lot of reuse is good so it'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's the ultimate issue here. Dow promised their end was not landfill.
Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
#185Sounds like they were made into shoes with almost no material or energy inputs. Literally perfect recycling.
Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
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Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
#187Earlier 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 mean, the journalists put a giant hunk of metal and a battery in the shoes. There’s zero chance those shoes would ever have been allowed anywhere near the big expensive industrial textile shredders. If it’s a modern operation they’d be automatically and individually plucked out of the ingress path, or if it’s an older one they’d invalidate all the shoes in their bin at some earlier “bulk metal detection” step. And…
The fact that the shoes with trackers were sitting in a giant pile of other used shoes in violation of Indonesian used clothing import laws tells me that it wasn’t just because of a tracker.
Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
#188Earlier 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…
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.
That was my initial thought, but importing them to Indonesia is also illegal. And if Dow really believes that reusing shoes is better, why not just say so?
Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
#189Earlier 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…
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.
Most of the shoes that are exported cannot be resold and turn into trash. That is a much worse outcome than all of the shoes being recycled (plus it is illegal according to Indonesian import law).
Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Those are mostly nonsense reasons.
> who said such cast-offs pose a public health risk
Obviously phony.
> undercut its local textile industry
Free stuff is better than having a local industry. The government can tax shoe wearers to pay the local industry to make more stuff or just relax.
> often pile more waste into its already bulging landfills.
That one is legit.