The phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle" because it's intended to be an ordered taxonomy: reduction comes first, following by reusing existing materials, followed by recycling them into new materials.

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).

Just so we’re clear, this is actually preferable in every way to grinding them up. It’s some hall monitor bulls** to get mad that they’re using a more effective method of recycling than grinding them up to be remelted or whatever.

Again: literally everyone in this thread agrees that it's preferable, and nobody is mad.

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.

No, not literally everyone. Don’t exaggerate. In addition to the litany of people hand-wringing about the harms of lying (which you will probably not count), there’s comments like this one, complaining that the clothing influx “hurts” the economy (which I don’t agree with but is another counterexample).

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.

That's an adjacent thread.

It has the same root comment, so that feels like the same thread to me. Either way, it means you're clinging to a technicality to be right.

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.

There is no outcome yet.

- 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.

It's not considered recycling because reuse is explicitly better than recycling. You aren't supposed to equate the two because it would imply recycling was a viable alternative to reuse.