(2023-02-26) Doctorow Dow Promised To Turn Sneakers Into Playground Surfaces Then Dumped Them In Indonesia

Cory Doctorow: Dow Ppromised to turn sneakers into playground surfaces, then dumped them in Indonesia. Dow Chemicals plastered Singapore with ads for its sneaker recycling program

Plastic recycling's origin story starts in 1973, when Exxon's scientists concluded that plastic recycling would never, ever be cost-effective

Exxon sprang into action: they popularized the recycling circular arrow logo and backed "anti-littering" campaigns that blamed the rising tide of immortal, toxic garbage on peoples' laziness.

Bluetriton (formerly "Nestle Waters")... is a private equity-backed rollup that has absorbed most of the bottled water companies you're familiar with, including Poland Spring, Pure Life, Splash, Ozarka, and Arrowhead

When they were sued in DC for making false claims about their "recyclable" water-bottles, their defense was that these were "non-actionable puffery." According to Bluetriton, when it described itself as "a guardian of sustainable resources" and "a company who, at its core, cares about water," it was being "vague and hyperbolic."

Reuters hid tracking devices in cavities in the soles of sneakers, dropped them in one of Dow's collection bins, and then followed them.

Of the 11 pairs that Reuters tracked, not one ended up at a recycling facility

Dow blamed all this on Yok Impex, but didn't explain why its "recycling" program involved a company whose sole trade is exporting used clothing.

Dow does this all the time. In 2021, Dow's "breakthrough technology to turn plastic waste into clean fuel" in Idaho was revealed to be a plain old incinerator:

The ruling class's pet economists have a name for this policy laundering: they call it "regulatory capture."

Think of the billions of human labor hours we all spent washing and sorting our plastics for a recycling program that didn't exist and will never exist – imagine if we'd spent that time and energy demanding that our politicians hold petrochemical companies to account instead.

At the end of Break 'Em Up, Zephyr Teachout's outstanding 2020 book on monopolies, Teachout has some choice words for "consumerism" as a theory of change. (monopoly)

The problem isn't that you have chosen single-use plastics – it's that in our world everything for sale is packaged in single-use plastics.