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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

#211

Post by acyou »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #193

It looks like most people didn't make it to this part of the article: >In 2015, Indonesia’s Ministry of Trade introduced the Prohibition of the Import of Used Clothing regulation. The measure banned the import of used clothes and footwear over concerns about hygiene and the potential of these items to spread disease, as well as the need to protect the local textile industry. Part of the problem here is that, yes, reu…

Yep, next up in the global effort to stave off deflation and maximize consumption: second hand goods are unsafe and need to be disinfected before resale, or better yet thrown out. Need your state certificate of resale legality and certification of disinfection or be subject to prosecution.

We ridicule it at the start, this is how this stuff eventually gets memed into existence. It's not fiction, it's already reality!

What diseases are spread through textiles, that need to be stopped at the cost of people not being able to afford to wear shoes on their feet? Not everyone can afford new shoes...

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

#212

Post by throw_away1525 »

prepend wrote: post #103
ianburrell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Burning trash produces CO2 and that needs to be factored in. My understanding is that waste incineration includes co2 scrubbers to capture co2 so it isn’t released into the atmosphere.

Capturing CO2 from flue gas requires a lot of energy (for something like a coal fired power plant, it takes about 30% of the power plant's energy output to capture the CO2) and you still have to deal with the CO2 after you've captured it - what do you do with it?

The only way to sequester it is to inject into underground reservoirs, but that requires a very specific geology which very few places have.

You can liquefy it and sell it... but then it's typically going to get released to the atmosphere by the purchaser, not sequestered.

I am not an expert in waste incineration (although I am an expert in carbon capture processes) but I seriously doubt that they use CO2 scrubbers. Scrubbers for other nasty molecules like SO2, sure, but the CO2 is probably just sent out into the atmosphere.

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

#213

Post by kleiba »

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 thing is, however, these second-hand shoes might sit in that store for a while and then, after they haven't been bought by anyone for some time, be thrown in a landfill after all.

That's quite different from giving people an incentive to donate their used shoes (rather than selling them on themselves, mind you) because they think they're going to be used to build playgrounds for children.

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

#215

Post by concordDance »

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…

Just use landfill.

A modern Western landfill is quite safe.

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

#216

Post by concordDance »

Clubber wrote: post #149
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…

>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 ocea…

I still don't understand what people have against putting plastic in landfill.

In developed countries they are well sealed, so you're not getting groundwater contamination, and they're eventually topping off and can be used for pasture or a park.

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

#217

Post by concordDance »

acyou wrote: post #211
TheRealPomax wrote: post #193

It looks like most people didn't make it to this part of the article: >In 2015, Indonesia’s Ministry of Trade introduced the Prohibition of the Import of Used Clothing regulation. The measure banned the import of used clothes and footwear over concerns about hygiene and the potential of these items to spread disease, as well as the need to protect the local textile industry. Part of the problem here is that, yes, reu…

Yep, next up in the global effort to stave off deflation and maximize consumption: second hand goods are unsafe and need to be disinfected before resale, or better yet thrown out. Need your state certificate of resale legality and certification of disinfection or be subject to prosecution. We ridicule it at the start, this is how this stuff eventually gets memed into existence. It's not fiction, it's already reality!…

A lot of consumer regulation is for the benefit of the middle class, who can afford things costing slightly more but are much more safety conscious. The poor generally get screwed by it.

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

#218

Post by concordDance »

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…

Landfill is better because it doesn't release CO2.

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

#219

Post by civilized »

jessaustin wrote: post #204
civilized wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that someone who has a perspective different from yours has equal or greater context? On what basis do you assume that you have more context, that a person who has the context you have would automatically be convinced of what you believe? If you get X for cheap, that frees you up to make Y's. In a poor country, there's no shortage of Y's that people need or want.

"Someone" might know something, but you in particular have no idea what you're talking about. You think you know better than Indonesians what their laws should be, but you don't.

I guess people can decide that for themselves.

Just one question: did "Americans" decide to make becoming a licensed hairstylist require hundreds of hours of training and thousands of dollars in course fees? Or was it special interest groups?

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

#220

Post by Tozen »

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.

But, here's the thing about reuse, what happens after the next person is done using the shoes? Looks more like kicking the can down the road. Not only is there a hygiene problem involved with this type of reuse, but then the 2nd hand shoes still end up being part of the massive plastic pollution problem.

Dow seems to just have "exported" the problem to another country, lied about it, their people or associates are kind of making money under the table, and the environment continues suffering. At some point, governments are going to have to hold companies accountable for the plastic waste problem.

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