I prefer to be able to make my own choices, not have people lie to be and then do whatever they feel is cheaper. They have to pay to recycle, but get paid for donations. This is fraud, pure and simple. They asked for the donations under false pretenses. (There's a chance it was whatever firm they paid - but then they're just willfully incompetent.)
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 countries are donated and can be profitably sold at much lower prices, covering only logistics.
Economies grow prosperous when there are more opportunities for economic exchange.
in the real world domestic workers don't all go on to become farmers (oops that's dumped onto by subsidized western businesses too) or some other business... some degree of protectionism has consistently worked well to the extent it's arguably necessary*. And don't take this as me defending sweatshops either ;) but a moderate degree of protectionism and public investment has very consistently allowed countries to move beyond the absolute basic "we have sweatshots and scrap out old electronics and recycle garbage" stage of development. Neoliberalism and free trade will suck away any public investment you give it the opportunity to, and engineer around any comparative advantage you can find.
But having a strong textile manufacturing industry promotes the development of other adjacent industries (e.g. dyes, chemicals) that would not be able to stand on their own initially, and can output products that are useful to more than just textile manufacturing. It easier to develop a new industry if the country already has other industries that can support its growth.
In a sense, it is like a tax on clothes, paid by the consumers, funding textile-adjacent industries, but directed by private actors rather than the government. If it pays off, other things become cheaper and potentially offset the increased cost of clothes.
In no way is being poorer the solution to not being able to afford things.
1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2015/04/30...
2. https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/are-poorer-countr...
3. https://www.trade.gov/trade-guide-wto-subsidies
4. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ten-Years-of-Anti-dump...
If this issue was isolated to shoes, and those were technically unavailable for local manufacture, then you'd probably be right. But these practices destroy all industry, leaving the people without any manufacturing base or value creation outside of cultural artifacts, and tends to keep the poor countries poor.
You haven't proposed a viable alternative. Should developed countries voluntarily stop exporting used clothing? Would that actually make people in poor countries better off?
I was explaining the problem and now not solving it is my fault.
> Should developed countries voluntarily stop exporting used clothing? Would that actually make people in poor countries better off?
Yeah, that's what the developing country said in this instance.
And the charity promised to use the shoes for an experiment in recycling which would have brought knowledge benefits at least even if not producing a superior product. They clearly defrauded their donors regardless of Indonesian trade policies.
While the exporter isn't doing anything illegal in Indonesia, the Indonesian importer certainly is (according to the explanation in the article). Abetting criminal activities in a neighbouring friendly country is rarely desirable.
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 material (which is lossy in terms of energy and materials).
The same argument about shoes may not apply to the specifics of say e-waste - where harmful materials, rare materials, or electrical efficiency come into play - but in the case of this article, we should be happy that usable shoes are being put on feet rather than shredded and chemically decomposed.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
[0] https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/science-and-sustainability/p...
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 you 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 'well 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.
The end does not justify the means. In this case perhaps the end is environmentally similar, but then the deception serves no purpose and only discredits them so we ignore everything they say afterwards.
There are side effects to deceptive means that are often worse than the topic at hand.
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.
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 incredibly expensive [1] and it's hardly making financial sense anymore. "Reducing" is the least expensive because it doesn't require any energy, but we (consumers) like to buy stuff, so once a product is in a person's hands, "reduce" is out of the equation. That leaves us with "reuse," which not only helps reduce new products from being made, but also has the potential to make money for companies. This is actually a win-win scenario, and should be encouraged rather than frowned on.
The issue is that "green marketing" has been in vogue since the mid 2000s, and companies (apparently shockingly!) lie in their messaging to sell their products. But Dow, in this case, is actually doing their part in being environmentally conscious. You can even call this a white lie or something like that. Nobody would buy new shoes or donate old ones if the marketing said "In order to reduce waste, we are going to resell your used shoes in Indonesian flea markets". (There is one "reduce" idea, ha!)
As for companies not caring, I point to the whole purpose of a company's existence - to make money. Everything else is irrelevant. If environmental impacts are an issue, and legislation is forcing their hand, then they must find a way to remain profitable or simply go out of business.
The linked Planet Money podcast highlights this predicament. It's important to remember that not everything is black and white as it's made to be in articles like this.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...
> Nobody would buy new shoes or donate old ones if the marketing said "In order to reduce waste, we are going to resell your used shoes in Indonesian flea markets". (There is one "reduce" idea, ha!)
This is the entire business model of Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. These companies and non-profits take donations of old clothes, try and sell them locally, and then cycle them through other markets if they can't sell them locally. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that the tees I give to Goodwill end up in an Indonesian flea market, and that knowledge would have no purchasing effect on me.
Even beyond that: plenty of high-end/luxury brands have old/vintage resale processes. Patagonia is somewhat famous for theirs[1].
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 by the promise of everything being PLA bioplastic. I've diligently saved up my misprints and plastic scrap, and now that I have a decent amount collected, I'd like to dispose of it responsibly. As far as I've been able to find, my options are: landfill, or shipping it at my expense (and the planet's) across the continent to the one place that claims they recycle filament. I can't even compost it anywhere local. Disgusting.
you also need to separate your prints properly so that other plastics are not contaminating the scraps.
You also need to buy pellets in order to get a good color.
And also the recycled PLA will probably end up being inferior to the stuff you will buy.
See also: https://www.cnckitchen.com/blog/recycling-old-3d-prints-into...
Which means PLA is not actually a functionally recyclable or compostable material. Technically, yes. Functionally, no. Which means anything I do on my 3d printer is destined for the landfill, the ocean, the groundwater. Which is why I'm going to avoid 3d printing in the future except when it's absolutely the right tool for the job.
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 ocean if not.
https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/bog...
We should really stop using plastics for the vast majority of packaging. Return to wax paper and cardboard, glass bottles, etc. An easy way to regulate this would be to include the cost of recycling, so selling plastic becomes more expensive than traditional methods of packaging. Another is to limit the amount of stuff you can put in a single plastic container by volume, say nothing smaller than a gallon / 4 liters can go into a plastic container. That would be a start.
It's not going to happen because our politicians' election campaigns are funded by corporations. They can't get elected without taking money from corporations. The person who can get the most donations from corporations wins. The exceptions aren't numerous enough to change any congressional votes. This recycling lie, that's been going on since at least the 80s, was conjured up to prevent pressure of regulation. Nothing to see here, it's recycled. Problem solved.
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.
A modern Western landfill is quite safe.
> 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.
From a commercial perspective, "reducing" isn't about "reducing" the purchase of marketed goods, but rather reducing the waste/pollution/etc. that goes into manufacturing those goods. Like reducing plastic wrapping on boxes, etc.
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.
When I was young we'd take glass soda bottles back to the store to be cleaned and refilled and we'd get a little money back. That was "recycling".
But that's not really the issue at stake (reuse is good!). The issue is that Dow is lying, at the bare minimum, about their ability to enact a particular recycling program.
> In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated shoes, then grind down the material for use in building new playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore.
It's not hall monitor to call out big lies. It's not like there is a clear motive that would help the real program, either. The lie implies that they are being careless, and being careless with waste usually has bad consequences.
I miss Bon Accord Red Cola.
The much more likely explanation is that Dow doesn't care, and expressed that lack of care by paying someone even less scrupulous to "care" for them. That party in turn doesn't care (because they can see Dow doesn't), and simply did whatever made them the most money.
Many nasty things will occur if this is violated.
Sounds like hell?
If “hell” means “telling the truth” or “acting with basic diligence,” well.
What level of diligence should Dow be doing here, especially since the outcome doesn't seem to be a bad one - if anything, a better one?
"None of the 11 pairs of footwear donated by Reuters were turned into exercise paths or kids’ parks in Singapore.
Instead, nearly all the tagged shoes ended up in the hands of Yok Impex Pte Ltd, a Singaporean second-hand goods exporter, according to the trackers and that exporter’s logistics manager. The manager said his firm had been hired by a waste management company involved in the recycling program to retrieve shoes from the donation bins for delivery to that company’s local warehouse."
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.
you don't know any of this, you're making it all up to please you misplaced sense of priorities. Perhaps they solicited the donations knowing that they would sell them to a recycler, and the recycler knew they could recover costs or even profit from selling much of this stream to flea markets, and recycle the rest. No false pretenses, not "or worse sold", just an "it's Uber Eats for old shoes" elevator pitch.
Reusing perfectly good shoes is a good outcome, and nobody in this thread has suggested otherwise. But it isn't recycling in the way that Dow stated, either literally (since they claimed a polar opposite use) or definitionally (since the shoes aren't turned into new shoes).
The error here is in "they": Dow doesn't get credit for doing the preferable thing, because there's no evidence that it's what they intended to do. All available evidence suggests that Dow intended to do a worse thing, and someone saw a business opportunity within Dow's apathy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34938256
And that’s without making a serious effort to find any!
Please don’t act like everyone on your side of this is making reasonable arguments just because you are. That’s sanewashing and tunnel-visioned.
So then what's your substantive point? You claimed no one is mad, no one made a particular argument in location A. Someone made it in location B. So what great misconception did you think you were refuting? It seems that all your comment does is tell people to ignore an argument that's actually being made ... on the basis that it's not being made in one specific arbitrary boundary.
It's also kind of funny -- even if you restrict it to this "thread", under your cherry-picked definition of "thread," you claimed no one in this thread is mad ... a few sentences before you expressed contempt for what Dow did.
>Dow doesn't get credit for doing the preferable thing, because there's no evidence that it's what they intended to do. All available evidence suggests that Dow intended to do a worse thing, and someone saw a business opportunity within Dow's apathy.
If you really want to dig your heels in, I'd love the lecture on the difference between contempt, derision, and anger.
May I suggest a better path: accept that the argument exists and use your deep understanding to refute it rather than to convince others it doesn't exist.
- The shoes having found their way to a market does not mean that they will be bought and reused.
- If they aren't bought, what will the store owner do with them?
- If they are bought, what will the buyer do with them after they are no longer usable?
(Of course, in this case the reporters presumably bought them. How will they dispose of them now though?)
Maybe the reporters should have sent in shoes that are obviously broken and can't possibly be reused as shoes.
Did we really need this example to show it? Shoes?
Nestle is trying to buy all the water, maybe that would be a better place to focus.
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 either way, those shoes would have to be disposed of in some other manner.
I get the “big company bad” crowd, but I mean.. what alternate option did Dow have in this case? (From the article Dow appears to be throwing contractors under the bus — plausibly, in my opinion, based upon the article. But let’s assume that the ‘malfeasance’ here was done directly by Dow — what’s the “right thing” they should have done when receiving donated intentionally-tampered-with shoes that would have damaged their machinery?)
But that doesn’t change the fact that stuff which is going to be shredded always goes through a validation process first and — unless the process failed for some reason — those shoes were never going to reach the grinders and were never going to end up in paths/pavings, even if they did get to Dow.
“Metal was detected in the shoes, so they couldn’t be recycled” is a pretty good defence.
Reusing them as was the case is of course better.
> “They sort through it and a very small percentage is actually reusable,” Shah told Reuters. “It just gets burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills.”
The issue is that it seems like all the shoes were sent to Indonesia, regardless of reusability, and they turned a blind eye to what happened to them after that.
Apparently it may be closer to half than 10%.
And protectionism in Indonesia makes it illegal to import used shoes because of “hygiene”.
I’m not absolving Dow, but there was a lot to get angry about in the article.
Shipping shoes over the ocean is not the most eco-friendly thing.
Additionally: do we know the shops in Indonesia are going to recycle them? Or is it more likely they will sit in a store for years and are then thrown out?
corporations will never take a more costly and less profitable approach towards productions unless regulations and watchdogs keep them to their word -- this outrage is a necessary function to a degree , if you care to hold corporate groups to the same mantra.
You're not looking deep enough. The outrage should be that companies imply playground padding (maybe what? 100 tons/year at most) is somehow a reasonable approach to solving any waste problem. THEN they have the gall to not even do that.
The valid outrage is how easy it is for companies to manipulate people.
You mean, only to be thrown away again but this time in a landfill?
From the OP:
> A torrent of cheap, unregulated second-hand clothing flowing into Indonesia also adds to the country’s mounting garbage problem, said Dharmesh Shah, a policy advisor to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a nonprofit working on waste pollution. He said much of that merchandise is in such poor condition that vendors can’t resell it.
> “They sort through it and a very small percentage is actually reusable,” Shah told Reuters. “It just gets burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills.”
> Two market vendors in Batam, who asked not to be named, told Reuters they buy sacks of shoes of differing grades from used-clothing traders such as Yok Impex, but don’t know exactly what they’re getting until they open them up. They said it’s not uncommon to throw out half the shoes they receive because the footwear is not good enough to sell.
It is true that for a lot of plastics, you can find someone happy to be paid, less than it would cost to recycle, to bury it, or incinerate it, or toss it in a river or lake. And indeed that is the destination of a lot of plastics that on the front-end are claimed to be headed for recycling.
So why recycle at all, right? Apparently the invisible hand says that the best and highest use for this trash is to be buried and burnt -- as long as you can find someone in enough need of the money you're willing to pay them to burn or bury it.
We could imagine, for the purpose of making it more conceivable, keeping all waste within national borders. We could imagine that within the USA, wealthier areas wouldn't really want to bury your trash next to their homes and businesses -- at least not for the amount of money someone is willing to pay, especially when they can find a poorer more desperate area that will take much less to bury or burn your trash next to an elementary school or what have you.
So, why recycle at all?
I mean, indeed most plastic isn't really that recyclable, so this isn't a totally rhetorical question. But then we should probably produce a lot less of it, and the way the industry gets out of people thinking that is by convincing you that it'll be recycled.
Which is really the motivation for this recycle-fraud. Industry wanting you to believe that it'll be recycled, to avoid pressure to reduce production. (the first `r`). Which is exactly why Dow can't let on that it knows the stuff will never be recycled.
PS: I fully expected to find the HN comments section full of people saying that exporting used tennis shoes to poor countries is a better use than recycling them, and it's somehow "privileged" to want to recycle them, instead of supporting the landfill and incineration business of some third world country which can really use the funds. I was not disapointed.
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.
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.
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.