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

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

#221

Post by Tozen »

fergie wrote: post #79

Good. Actual reuse of perfectly good shoes is the best outcome for all concerned (and the environment).

So then what happens to the unhygienic used shoes after the next person has got them (and hopefully not some odd foot infection) and then uses them up to the point where they are no longer wearable? And what happened to the not so good to unwearable used shoes that the useable ones were picked from?

If the answer is just dump them somewhere, then we are right back to where we started, in the mist of a plastic pollution catastrophe. Except, we moved the problem to poorer countries, that have even less resources and technology to deal with it.

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

#222

Post by supermatt »

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.

What percentage of those “reused” shoes end up in landfill?

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

#223

Post by TheRealPomax »

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!…

Indeed - if only DOW had worked with the Indian government to make this happen, given that they're a multi-billion-dollar company and could have easily done so. But no, instead they just decided to crime their way to getting rid of mostly fine used shoes.

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

#224

Post by kennywinker »

concordDance wrote: post #215
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…

Just use landfill. A modern Western landfill is quite safe.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/12/13/the-truth-about...

> As a result, bioplastics often end up in landfills where, deprived of oxygen, they may release methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

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

#225

Post by kennywinker »

concordDance wrote: post #216
Clubber wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Specifically for PLA, there's the issue of methane I linked in my reply to your other comment. For other plastics, the problem I see with landfilling is mostly that you spent a lot of energy creating this material, and now you're throwing it away and spending that energy again to create more. On top of just being wasteful, and emitting a bunch of carbon, all that material production is also funding an industry that is hellbent on destroying the planet.

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

#226

Post by pnt12 »

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…

> we (consumers) like to buy stuff

This is naive. We are marketed to buy stuff. And then, the stuff we buy doesn't last and is built in the least environment friendly way possible, as long as it saves a dollar.

Let's start pointing some fingers to the big guys who keep fucking up the planet to make their graphs go up and their shareholders happy,and the politicians who side with them.

If corporations aren't supposed to be ethical, let's be ruthless in our criticism to them, because they already spend billions in marketing and PR to look good and blame us.

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

#227

Post by concordDance »

kennywinker wrote: post #224
concordDance wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use landfill. A modern Western landfill is quite safe.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/12/13/the-truth-about... > As a result, bioplastics often end up in landfills where, deprived of oxygen, they may release methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Methane is also quite short lived in the atmosphere, right?

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

#228

Post by kube-system »

hgsgm wrote: post #192
paulmd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the terrible thing about economics is that it's very complex - "the parable of the broken window" is only a parable. the entire field of keynesian economics says that yes, you can break a window and then pay someone to fix it and increase net economic activity, as long as it's not crowding out actual economic activity that would otherwise have occurred. the "burying jars of money in the desert and paying people to di…

Keynes' point is that money stimulates economic activity, breaking deadlocks. Paying people to do useless work is only helpful because it is more socially acceptable than paying people to do no work. In no case is the useless production valuable.

In a practical sense this is pretty avoidable for the general population, however. Because you just choose something that would be useful, e.g. public works.

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

#229

Post by rldjbpin »

this is not fair in the sense of the word, but it is still better than dumping waste in another country in the name of recycling.

playing devil's advocate, nobody would send their shoes if dow would come clean and say that they will sell it elsewhere to make money. most people would irrationally ask for a cut even tho there's logistics involved in getting it to the other country.

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

#230

Post by tremon »

concordDance wrote: post #227
kennywinker wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/12/13/the-truth-about... > As a result, bioplastics often end up in landfills where, deprived of oxygen, they may release methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Methane is also quite short lived in the atmosphere, right?

...and then decomposes into CO2 anyway. So you get a short-lived (10 years) very potent greenhouse gas, and then the long-term effect of CO2 on top of that. So whichever way you slice it, releasing methane is strictly worse than releasing CO2.
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