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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

#21

Post by brookst »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #15
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 wonder if they hid the fact that good enough shoes would be reused because some people don't want that to happen.

My guess is that messaging simplicity won out over precision. “Recycle your clothing” is a much clearer message than “give us your clothing and we will evaluate whether it’s condition and materials better suggest reuse elsewhere, or partial or full recycling”.

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

#22

Post by mirekrusin »

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.

"reduce resell? recycle"

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

#23

Post by anigbrowl »

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 have no problem with the shoes being reused, neither does anyone else apparently. I have a big problem with corporations lying, which lies are not mitigated by a beneficial outcome.

This is the problem with utilitarianism; it has no red lines. You can try to be utilitarian and think you're only concerned with outcomes, but the reality is that foresight and perception are highly limited. In practice people assume the shoes were being recycled until they hear different, then appraise the actual outcome in some utilitarian calculus; the ends are actually OK, so that validates (or at least excuses) the deceptive means. After all, one can rationalize, without the promise of recycling the shoes might never have become available for reuse and would have ended up in landfill or rotting away in someone's basement.

But this is vulnerable to all sorts of abuses. Being completely results oriented is only as good as your ability to accurately appraise the results. And if it turns out the outcomes are awful, utilitarians often retreat into 'we'll do better next time'. As a result, the utilitarian ethos tends to turn a blind eye to reports of problems until the outcomes are known, which opens the doors wide to fraudsters and scammers, from the petty to the political. Utilitarians reason that people are bad at making decisions and need to be incentivized into the creation of good outcomes; and utilitarians are themselves incentivized by this idea of a rosy meta-outcome to not question the premises or means of any given proposal.

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

#25

Post by LightDub »

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.

Wanting not to be lied to is not false outrage.

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

#26

Post by gruez »

baron816 wrote: post #12
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 guess it was plastics companies like Dow that convince us that recycling was just as good. I have frequently encountered the attitude of "these single use plastics are ok to use since we can just recycle them". Even under ideal circumstances, recycling uses a lot of energy.

>I guess it was plastics companies like Dow that convince us that recycling was just as good. I have frequently encountered the attitude of "these single use plastics are ok to use since we can just recycle them".

That's funny because I've never heard anyone saying this, yet every time there's a discussion about recycling comments like this inevitably show up.

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

#27

Post by jasonlotito »

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 from a global resource consumption perspective, it's far preferable to re-use good shoes

But they were not good shoes. They had tracking devices put into them. Full stop.

Imagine putting tracking devices into children's shoes and then having them "reused" like this.

Yes, reuse is great. And if that's what they said they were going to do, awesome. But that's not what happened here, and exposes a very real problem.

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

#29

Post by kylehotchkiss »

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!

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.

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

#30

Post by kzrdude »

settrans wrote: post #17
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…

Indeed this is HWFO's core thesis: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-...

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 "recycling" goes into the same system in many parts of the country. I don't mind in principle - it is their (local government's) system, they are tasked with being professional and disposing of collected plastic in the best way possible. If that's going to be burning with retention of heat, then that's acceptable.

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