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

Yeah, that place out 'there'. Anything not really Cambodia related should go here.
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Kung-fu Hillbilly
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Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market.

Post by Kung-fu Hillbilly »

Image

By JOE BROCK, YUDDY CAHYA BUDIMAN
and JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Filed Feb. 25, 2023


U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc and the Singapore government said they were transforming old sneakers into playgrounds and running tracks. Reuters put that promise to the test by planting hidden trackers inside 11 pairs of donated shoes. Most got exported instead.


At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile.

There they were: a pair of blue Nike running shoes with a tracking device hidden in one of the soles.

These familiar shoes had traveled by land, then sea and crossed an international border to end up in this heap. They weren’t supposed to be here.

Dow, a major producer of chemicals used to make plastics and other synthetic materials, in the past has launched recycling efforts that have fallen short of their stated aims. Reuters wanted to follow a donated shoe from start to finish to see if it did, in fact, end up in new athletic surfaces in Singapore, or at least made it as far as a local recycling facility for shredding.

To that end, the news organization cut a shallow cavity into the interior sole of one of the blue Nikes, placed a Bluetooth tracker inside, then concealed the device by covering it with the insole. The tracker was synched to a smartphone app that showed where the shoe moved in real time.

Within weeks, the blue Nikes had left the prosperous city-state and were moving south by sea across the narrow Singapore Strait to Batam island, the app showed. Reuters decided to put trackers in an additional 10 pairs of donated shoes to see if wayward pair No. 1 had been a fluke.

It wasn’t.

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.

But that’s not what happened to the shoes donated by Reuters. Ten pairs moved first from the donation bins to the exporter’s facility, then on to neighboring Indonesia, in some cases traveling hundreds of miles to different corners of the vast archipelago, the location trackers showed.

Using the smartphone app to trace the movement of each shoe, Reuters journalists later traveled by air, land and sea to recover three pairs – including the blue Nikes – from crowded bazaars in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, and in Batam, which lies 12 miles (19.3 kilometers) south of Singapore. Four pairs ended up in locations in Indonesia that were too remote for Reuters to track down in person. In three other cases the trackers stopped sending a signal after they reached Indonesia.

A pair of pink and orange New Balance sneakers – donated by Reuters in Singapore on Sept. 7 – landed in the same Batam market a week later, the tracking app showed. By early October, they had moved to a nearby island called Bintan, before making a 400-mile journey to Medan, a city of 2.4 million people in northern Sumatra. On Oct. 10, the shoes traveled another 800 miles to Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, according to the app.

Three weeks later, on Nov. 1, two Reuters reporters searched a frenzied mall in Jakarta looking for the shoes, eventually discovering them in a cramped shop on the third floor. The sneakers, freshly cleaned and fitted with a new pair of laces, had crisscrossed Indonesia on a marathon eight-week journey. They cost Reuters 300,000 rupiah ($20) to buy back.

To learn more about Yok Impex’s role in the movement of these shoes, Reuters on Jan. 6, 2023, paid an unannounced visit to that used-clothing exporter, and was invited onto the premises. There reporters spotted wheelie bins from Dow’s shoe program stacked up in a backyard. Inside, women sorted through tables piled high with old shoes, carefully placing them into piles and then transferring them into sacks like the ones seen at the Batam flea market.

“It’s a well-organized activity because when we raid them in one place, then it will go quiet, then continue again,” Anggrijono told Reuters in an interview at his office in Jakarta. He said the importer is the party liable under the law, not the exporter or market seller.

On the evening of Oct. 6, Fong and other partners in the Singapore shoe recycling program stepped onto the stage of an elegant ballroom at the Equarius Hotel beach resort on Sentosa Island, just off the mainland. There they were presented with the “Most Sustainable Collaboration” award at a glitzy event hosted by the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce, the city-state’s oldest business association.

full article.https://www.reuters.com/investigates/sp ... dow-shoes/
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Jerry Atrick
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Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market.

Post by Jerry Atrick »

Must visit that market for some cheap on brand kicks next time I'm in Indonesia
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Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market.

Post by Alex »

So what? Reusing is even better than recycling.
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Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market.

Post by Doc67 »

Alex wrote: Sat Apr 01, 2023 12:42 pm So what? Reusing is even better than recycling.
Sure is, but this is more about the deceipt of this, and many other, greenwashing activities. They obtain these shoes by deception, sell them on and then accept awards for their environmental activities.

Personally, I don't believe a word of any big corporations' claims of sustainability or their self proclaimed 'green' credentials. I laugh when airlines offer you the chance to pay them more money to offset your carbon footprint. What kind of mug pays that?
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Re: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market.

Post by IraHayes »

Doc67 wrote: Sat Apr 01, 2023 12:48 pm
Alex wrote: Sat Apr 01, 2023 12:42 pm So what? Reusing is even better than recycling.
Sure is, but this is more about the deceipt of this, and many other, greenwashing activities. They obtain these shoes by deception, sell them on and then accept awards for their environmental activities.

Personally, I don't believe a word of any big corporations' claims of sustainability or their self proclaimed 'green' credentials. I laugh when airlines offer you the chance to pay them more money to offset your carbon footprint. What kind of mug pays that?
Just tell the airline you are already off-setting your carbon footprint by flying commercial and not taking your private jet.
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