Most of us care about what we buy and, increasingly so, we try to make choices that are ethical to the best of our abilities. We would buy the red iPhone instead of any other colour because Apple tells us it helps fight AIDS. We feel good buying Bombas socks because they say they buy a pair for someone suffering homelessness for every pair you’ve bought.
So when US petrochemical giant, Dow, announced in 2021 that they’re partnering with the Singaporean government to transform old sneakers into playgrounds and running tracks, I’m sure many of the 22 million shoe buyers in Singapore felt good about shoe shopping. They could take comfort in the fact that when they throw away their old pair of sneakers, they will help build more playgrounds.
However, a Reuters investigation has revealed that not even a single pair of the 11 sneakers they secretly tagged and donated to this campaign ended up being recycled for playgrounds. In fact, most of them ended up being resold in parts of Indonesia.
This week, The Global Tiller digs deeper into the mysterious case of these not-so recycled shoes, what are some limitations of recycling as a practice and what are some solutions going forward.
Two years into Dow’s shoe recycling campaign when Reuters poked holes in their claims, the companies launched an investigation and pinned the blame on a used-clothing exporter. But it failed to explain why a used-clothing exporter had been involved in retrieving footwear from the donation bins when the plan was for the shoes to be used within Singapore.
And before we go ahead and blame corporate capture of the US for Dow’s wrongdoing, it is important to note that this scam is a truly global venture. Dow’s main partner is Sport Singapore, a state agency, along with United Kingdom’s Standard Chartered Bank, French-owned sporting goods retailer Decathlon, and Alba-WH, a partnership between a major German and Singaporean waste management company.
The reason why I mention the national affiliation of these companies is not to shame the countries (although maybe a little bit) but to illustrate the point that these economic giants boast of their robust environmental policies, stand at the forefront of climate negotiations and are supposed to "lead" the world out of the mess they created in the first place. But it is these very countries who have illustrated how beholden they are to the corporations they fathered.
There is little that we, as individuals, can do to disrupt this corruption but we can equip ourselves to spot the greenwashing that corporations and governments throw our way. So is recycling really going to save the planet?
In 2015, for example, we used up 102.3 billion tons of raw material, such as minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass. This includes all the material needed to build apartments, ships, cars, fuel to run those cars, plastic, etc. About two-thirds of this raw material was just lost. More than 67 billion tons of it was scattered as garbage, or drifted into rivers and oceans and only 9% of the total went back into the system through recycling or composting.
Not all materials can be recycled anyway, with plastic being the worst offender. Between 75 and 199 million tons of plastic are currently in our oceans and will take more than 450 years to degrade. Paper and glass are one of the most-often recycled materials, and can be recycled endlessly without degradation of quality or purity. On the contrary, other materials, such as aluminium, can be recycled easily yet as much as 7 million tons still ends up as trash. One of the fastest growing source of waste now is electronic waste yet only 17.4% of e-waste was recycled in 2019.
To tackle this dire situation, governments are mandating companies use a certain amount of recycled material in their production. Last year, the United Kingdom introduced a tax on manufacturers that produce or import plastic packaging containing less than 30% recycled plastic. In 2024, New Jersey will begin enforcing similar rules, albeit with lower targets. California now requires that beverage containers be made of 15% recycled materials, and Washington will enact a similar requirement later this year. The European Commission, Canada, and Mexico are all considering comparable moves. And yes, the irony that it is the same countries I mentioned earlier who are leading this initiative is not lost on me.
This approach still raises questions about how truthful companies will be about source materials, how many more lucrative businesses of 'recycled source material' this will create only for the fad to be exposed — much like it happened for 'organic labels' before a strict crackdown — and which loopholes will allow companies with multiple product lines to get away with using recycled material for some but not their entire product range?
Even if recycling is one way for us to reverse some of the harm that we have inflicted on the planet, this strategy is no where near enough to deal with the mammoth productions taking place in our factories and being sold at markets near us. The best solution going forward is tackling overconsumption and overproduction but, until that happens, shall we take some cautious comfort in the fact that at least something is happening?
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig Deeper
How a tiny location tracker hidden in the sole of an old Nike sneaker allowed Reuters to find the footwear at an Indonesian flea market months later. The shoes were meant to be recycled in Singapore, in a program backed by chemicals giant Dow.
…and now what?
We’ve been hearing about recycling for a long time now: in school, at work, on TV. How often have we been into some kind of “training” or meeting at work explaining the new trash system to recycle the organisation’s waste. And then there are those TV commercial with a catchy song?
Back home in Tahiti, I would hear so many parents saying how their kids brought the idea of recycling from school and got the family started on sorting their bins. It’s been happening for a long time and, in most cases, people are usually on board with the idea of recycling. It almost seems natural or so it seems because marketing campaigns have been efficient!
But look around you. Even if we have different bins in the office, has our consumption of papers decreased? When we go to government departments, how many paper copies of our documents do we have to provide? How often do shops and restaurants give us receipts that we throw away right at the exit. And I’m not even talking about fast fashion, all those trendy products that influencers (see last week’s newsletter) are pushing us to buy…the list can be endless.
If we really dig into the concept of recycling, we actually never went to the beginning of the cycle that needs to be “re”started.
One thing that seems to block the system and prevent recycling to be the spark that will light the fire of a circular economy is that the responsibility and the weight of recycling falls mostly, if not only, on us consumers. Who pays for it? Often, our taxes. Who does it? Us, at home and at work. Who produces and develops those fancy incentives for us to keep overconsuming? Not us, even if as diligent consumers we do our part.
If recycling puts us in a cycle mentality, we need to make sure that we close the loop properly and that everyone gets to participate to the extent of their impact. As far back as Hobbes, political thinkers have envisioned that it would only be fair for every member of the society to contribute according to their consumption and impact on society. So why did we never do it?
Most probably because it’s easier to impose duties on citizens who are not as strong at lobbying as major organisations are. If recycling is not the silver bullet solution, it’s one that could have sparked an interesting change if only it had been encouraged and properly implemented.
But maybe that’s where the problem lies. We can blame as much as we want our governments for their lack of political courage, or even their lack of ethical leadership, but even then it’s just scratching the surface.
Recycling is an invitation to envision the economy as a circular system. But many things in our world are linear: the way we produce (a thinner and thinner straight line as lean management imposes its pressure on our supply chains); the way we envision our organisations (with rigid hierarchies, and rarely a cycle where the management goes back to the beginning every so often to remember what it feels like to be a simple employee); and the way we envision our collaborations whether nationally or even personally (transactionality is for sure a straight line).
So while putting our trash in different bins is actually simple (even if sometimes annoying), taking it to the next level by recycling our models and our mindsets requires another set of skills!
If we want these kind of systemic changes to occur, we need to start reviewing the foundations of our communities. We need leaders who will think and understand circularity, cycles, (r)evolutions and most of what nature does best: going around and around in circles but yet keep moving forward (ask the planets they know that well).
So let’s try to sort out our thinking, our tools and our systems and put those who keep us straight but rigid into the bin of history and start recycling some ideas that may seem brand new but have been there all along. We just didn’t pay attention to them.
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury