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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

#51

Post by mqus »

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…

1. I did not read it but I assume that the shoes they tried this with were in good condition (at least visibly). They did write that only a small percentage of imported second-hand clothes get actually sold, the rest is burned or put on landfills, e.g. NOT reused.

Of course, it would have been interesting to see what happens with broken shoes. Though I don't believe for a second they would have been recycled (or reused).

2. Apart from this, no one said a small word about the imho bigger issue here: Recycling shoes means that the materials are used to make new shoes. What DOW is advertising is downcycling, a worse fate. We should not allow companies to pervert the meaning of such important terms.

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

#52

Post by vondur »

nmilo wrote: post #41

> 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. Do they even understand the words coming out on the page? I'm sorry but if people c…

They will never have a local textile industry if you have to compete with free.

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

#53

Post by throw_away1525 »

ianburrell wrote: post #43
kzrdude wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

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…

However, incinerating waste produces heat/energy which would otherwise have been obtained from burning fossil fuels.

At the end of the day it is a complicated problem and the only real solution - consume less shit - is basically untenable, so :shrugs:

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

#54

Post by civilized »

morelisp wrote: post #49
nmilo wrote: post #41

> 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. Do they even understand the words coming out on the page? I'm sorry but if people c…

[flagged]

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.

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

#55

Post by vkou »

vondur wrote: post #52
nmilo wrote: post #41

> 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. Do they even understand the words coming out on the page? I'm sorry but if people c…

They will never have a local textile industry if you have to compete with free.

Poor countries have local textile industries, where do you think all the clothes we wear are made?

If you have a problem with who owns those textile factories, well, that's an entirely different conversation.

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

#56

Post by stainablesteel »

nmilo wrote: post #41

> 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. Do they even understand the words coming out on the page? I'm sorry but if people c…

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 have no motivation to make their own

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

#57

Post by kube-system »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #48
joshuaissac wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But if they literally have free clothing, doesn't it make that local industry useless? Literally provides no value at that point. This only seems like a problem to me if people literally can't provide value in any other way. To which the solution would seem to create a new type of industry, not create an artificial need by creating a clothes penury on purpose.

If you put a shoemaker out of a job and give them free shoes, they now can’t afford anything other than shoes.

Economies grow prosperous when there are more opportunities for economic exchange.

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

#59

Post by natch »

cjrp wrote: post #46
brookst wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you’d be more likely to throw things away than recycle them because it’s possible that rather than being recycled they will be reused?

Or is it more like “well if they lied about that, what else are they lying about”.

I mean, it is Dow Chemical…

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

#60

Post by woodruffw »

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’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 caring.

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