Dow Said It Was Recycling Our Shoes. We Found Them at an Indonesian Flea Market
Joe Brock, Yuddy Cahya Budiman and Joseph Campbell | February 25, 2023 | Reuters
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.
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.
The 11th pair remains in Singapore, but their fate is not what Dow and Sport Singapore had promised in media releases and a promotional video posted online. Those shoes – a pair of men’s white Reeboks – ended up in a public housing project about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from a community sports center where Reuters had dropped them into a donation bin on Sept. 8. Its tracker still blinks from that location, according to the app, an indication that they may have been taken from the donation bin. Reuters visited the housing project but wasn’t able to find the exact location of the shoes.
Presented with Reuters’ findings early this year, Dow said on Jan. 18 that it had opened an investigation along with Sport Singapore, a state agency, and other sponsors of the program: French-owned sporting goods retailer Decathlon S.A.; banking giant Standard Chartered plc; ALBA W&H Smart City Pte. Ltd (Alba-WH), a local waste management firm; and B.T. Sports Pte Ltd, a Singaporean firm responsible for shredding the donated footwear at a local facility.
On Feb. 22, Dow said in an emailed statement to Reuters that the investigation had concluded and, as a result, Yok Impex would be removed from the project, effective March 1. It did not explain why a used-clothing exporter had been involved in retrieving footwear from the donation bins, but said the program’s partners were now searching for another company to collect the shoes.
“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,” said the statement, which Dow issued on behalf of all the sponsors.
Reuters reporters visited the premises of Yok Impex on Feb. 23 to ask about whether it had been removed from the project. The trader’s accountant, June Peh, told Reuters the firm would be leaving the program when its one-year contract comes to an end, without giving a reason for its exit or an exact date.
In January, Decathlon sent Reuters a statement saying it had not authorized the export of any shoes from the program. Standard Chartered and B.T. Sports did not respond to requests for comment. Sport Singapore and Alba-WH referred questions to Dow. Alba-WH is a partnership between ALBA Group, a major German waste management company, and Wah & Hua Pte Ltd, a Singaporean waste disposal firm. The two companies did not respond to emailed requests for comment.