Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
At a rundown market in Indonesia, Reuters correspondent Joe Brock is following the bleeping sound of a tracking device. It takes him to a mound of secondhand shoes. There they are, the blue Nike running shoes that he fit with a tracker months before so that he could follow their journey. This market is not where they're supposed to end up. They were supposed to be recycled into playgrounds and jogging tracks, as promised by the Singapore government and US petrochemicals giant DAO. Let's rewind several months to unpack where this promise went wrong. What we're doing today is we're going to find out what really happens to your recycling.
DAO, the big petrochemicals company, US firm has teamed up with the Singapore government in a scheme to recycle pairs of shoes. They say they're going to take any shoe which has a rubber sole, grind it down and turn it into running tracks and playgrounds. So we want to see if that's what they're really doing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut a cavity hole in the sole of each pair of shoes, one of the shoes in each pair, place the tracker in there, we're going to then cover it up. I'm going to take this tracker and I'm going to sync it up with my phone. There it goes. Coming up there.
And I'm just going to call this shoe one. And now once we put that in the shoe, we drop it off, we'll be able to see wherever it goes in the world. So DAO and Sport Singapore have set up dozens of locations around the country where you can drop off your shoes. We're going to go to 10 different spots and drop off our shoes and we'll see where they go. DAO is a major producer of chemicals used to make plastics and other synthetic materials, some of which end up in sneakers. In the past, it has launched recycling efforts that have fallen short of their stated aims. The company says it's creating valuable products from plastic waste.
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. In weeks, it was clear to see they had not. In fact, some had traveled much further than Singapore to the point that Joe had to travel by air and sea to find them. I followed the tracker as far as this market in Jakarta and I can see that the signal is coming from inside. I'm going to go in and see if I can find those shoes. I've just bought these shoes from a shop here in this market in Jakarta for 300,000 rupees which is about 20 US dollars. Let's go somewhere quieter and make sure this is the same pair that we dropped off in Singapore.
And there we are. Over a six month period, Reuters put trackers into and donated altogether 11 pairs of footwear. None of them made it to a Singapore recycling facility. Four pairs ended up in locations in Indonesia that were too remote for Reuters to track down in person. In three others, the trackers stopped sending a signal after they reached Indonesia. But before they ended up in far-fung places, nearly all of them came here first, a second hand goods exporter in Singapore called Yoke Impax. Now Yoke Impax is not a recycler.
They are a textile and shoe trader. They buy clothes and shoes from charities and export them to other developing countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia. The question is why shoes that were said to be recycled would be sent to a commercial for-profit trading company. Here Reuters spotted wheelie bins from Dow's shoe program stacked up in a backyard. We spoke to Yoke Impax's logistic coordinator Tony Tan. He said his firm had been hired to retrieve shoes from the bins, by a local waste management company involved in the recycling program. Yoke Impax then delivers those shoes to the waste company, Tan said.
When Reuters told Tan it had tracked donated shoes leaving his facility for Indonesia, he said employees may have sent them there in error. Because sometimes the worker mix with it, I'm not sure. Because we all collect from some other supplier also. So you're saying it's a mistake? Yeah, it's a mistake I think. Some mistake there. We asked Dow, Sports Singapore and their partners for interviews they all declined. When presented with Reuters findings Dow said they had opened an investigation.
That probe has now been completed and Dow sent us the following statement. Going forward Yoke Impax has been removed from the project. The project partners do not condone any unauthorized removal or export of shoes collected through this program and remain committed to safeguarding the integrity of the collection and recycle process. The donated shoes that ended up in Indonesia have also added to a flood of illegal second hand clothing pouring into that developing country, according to a senior government official there. Dow had steadfastly defended its green initiatives as being good for the planet. And the company's efforts in Singapore are already winning accolades. In October 2022, Dow and other partners in the Singapore shoe recycling program stepped onto the stage of an elegant ballroom hosted by the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce.
There, they were presented with the most sustainable collaboration award.
reuters, news, top news, headlines, breaking news, news today, thomson reuters, reuters youtube, markets today, bloomberg, world, business, industrials, consumer