'Dow Said it Recycled Our Shoes - But Instead They Went to an Indonesian Flea Ma...

Reuters reports that U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow 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.

Five months earlier, in July 2022, Reuters had given the shoes to a recycling program spearheaded by the Singapore government and U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc. 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....

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....

The findings come as environmental groups say chemical companies like Dow are making exaggerated or false claims about recycling in order to burnish their green credentials, and to undermine proposed regulations to rein in the soaring production of plastics used in single-use packaging and fast fashion.

Dow says it will remove Yok Impex from its project next week, according to the article. But it also adds that Dow "did not explain why a used-clothing exporter had been involved" in its recycling program," and Dow and its partners "did not explain what procedures were in place to ensure that donated shoes weren't exported, diverted for resale or pilfered from bins."

Dharmesh Shah, a policy advisor for a nonprofit working on waste pollution, tells Reuters that when vendors ultimately receive the non-recycled shoes, "a very small percentage is actually reusable. It just gets burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills."