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SINGAPORE — At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the again of a crumbling second-hand shoe retailer. A Reuters reporter adopted the high-pitched ping to a mound of outdated sneakers and commenced digging by the pile.

There they had been: a pair of blue Nike trainers with a monitoring machine hidden in one of many soles.

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These acquainted footwear had traveled by land, then sea and crossed a global border to finish up on this heap. They weren’t alleged to be right here.

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5 months earlier, in July 2022, Reuters had given the footwear to a recycling program spearheaded by the Singapore authorities and U.S. petrochemicals large Dow Inc. In media releases and a promotional video posted on-line, that effort promised to reap the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated footwear, then grind down the spongy materials to be used in constructing new playgrounds and working tracks in Singapore.

Dow, a serious producer of chemical substances used to make plastics and different artificial supplies, up to now has launched recycling efforts which have fallen wanting their said goals. Reuters needed to comply with a donated shoe from begin to end to see if it did, the truth is, find yourself in new athletic surfaces in Singapore, or no less than made it so far as an area recycling facility for shredding.

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To that finish, the information group reduce a shallow cavity into the inside sole of one of many blue Nikes, positioned a Bluetooth tracker inside, then hid the machine by protecting it with the insole. The tracker was synched to a smartphone app that confirmed the place the shoe moved in actual time.

Inside weeks, the blue Nikes had left the affluent city-state and had been shifting south by sea throughout the slender Singapore Strait to Batam island, the app confirmed. Reuters determined to place trackers in a further 10 pairs of donated footwear to see if wayward pair No. 1 had been a fluke.

It wasn’t.

Not one of the 11 pairs of footwear donated by Reuters had been changed into train paths or youngsters’ parks in Singapore.

As a substitute, almost all of the tagged footwear ended up within the arms of Yok Impex Pte Ltd, a Singaporean second-hand items exporter, in line with the trackers and that exporter’s logistics supervisor. The supervisor stated his agency had been employed by a waste administration firm concerned within the recycling program to retrieve footwear from the donation bins for supply to that firm’s native warehouse.

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However that’s not what occurred to the footwear donated by Reuters. Ten pairs moved first from the donation bins to the exporter’s facility, then on to neighboring Indonesia, in some circumstances touring a whole bunch of miles to totally different corners of the huge archipelago, the placement trackers confirmed.

Utilizing the smartphone app to hint the motion of every shoe, Reuters journalists later traveled by air, land and sea to get well three pairs – together with the blue Nikes – from crowded bazaars in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, and in Batam, which lies 12 miles (19.3 kilometers) south of Singapore. 4 pairs ended up in areas in Indonesia that had been too distant for Reuters to trace down in particular person. In three different circumstances the trackers stopped sending a sign after they reached Indonesia.

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The eleventh pair stays in Singapore, however their destiny will not be what Dow and Sport Singapore had promised in media releases and a promotional video posted on-line. These footwear – a pair of males’s white Reeboks – ended up in a public housing venture a couple of mile (1.6 kilometers) from a group sports activities middle the place Reuters had dropped them right into a donation bin on Sept. 8. Its tracker nonetheless blinks from that location, in line with the app, a sign that they might have been taken from the donation bin. Reuters visited the housing venture however wasn’t capable of finding the precise location of the footwear.

Introduced with Reuters’ findings early this 12 months, Dow stated on Jan. 18 that it had opened an investigation together with Sport Singapore, a state company, and different sponsors of this system: French-owned sporting items retailer Decathlon S.A.; banking large Commonplace Chartered plc; ALBA W&H Good Metropolis Pte. Ltd (Alba-WH), an area waste administration agency; and B.T. Sports activities Pte Ltd, a Singaporean agency liable for shredding the donated footwear at an area facility.

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On Feb. 22, Dow stated in an emailed assertion to Reuters that the investigation had concluded and, because of this, Yok Impex can be faraway from the venture, efficient March 1. It didn’t clarify why a used-clothing exporter had been concerned in retrieving footwear from the donation bins, however stated this system’s companions had been now looking for one other firm to gather the footwear.

“The venture companions don’t condone any unauthorized removing or export of footwear collected by this program and stay dedicated to safeguarding the integrity of the gathering and recycle course of,” stated the assertion, which Dow issued on behalf of all of the sponsors.

Reuters reporters visited the premises of Yok Impex on Feb. 23 to ask about whether or not it had been faraway from the venture. The dealer’s accountant, June Peh, instructed Reuters the agency can be leaving this system when its one-year contract involves an finish, with out giving a cause for its exit or an actual date.

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In January, Decathlon despatched Reuters an announcement saying it had not approved the export of any footwear from this system. Commonplace Chartered and B.T. Sports activities didn’t reply to requests for remark. Sport Singapore and Alba-WH referred inquiries to Dow. Alba-WH is a partnership between ALBA Group, a serious German waste administration firm, and Wah & Hua Pte Ltd, a Singaporean waste disposal agency. The 2 firms didn’t reply to emailed requests for remark.

Reuters tracked the 11 pairs of footwear over a six-month interval. All of the footwear was positioned in numerous donation barrels round Singapore between July 14 and Sept. 9 of final 12 months. Whereas the pattern was small, the truth that none of those footwear made it to a Singapore recycling facility underscores weaknesses within the system.

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The findings come as environmental teams say chemical firms like Dow are making exaggerated or false claims about recycling as a way to burnish their inexperienced credentials, and to undermine proposed rules to rein within the hovering manufacturing of plastics utilized in single-use packaging and quick trend.

The donated footwear that ended up in Indonesia have added to a flood of unlawful second-hand clothes pouring into that creating nation, in line with a senior authorities official there, who stated such cast-offs pose a public well being danger, undercut its native textile trade and infrequently pile extra waste into its already bulging landfills.

Dow instructed Reuters the Singapore shoe venture was making progress. A sports activities facility underneath development in Jurong, a district in western Singapore, will use recycled shoe materials in its surfaces, Dow stated in its January assertion. The corporate additionally pointed to Kallang Soccer Hub, a brand new soccer complicated whose working monitor purportedly was the primary in Singapore to be produced from recycled shoe granules. Dow stated these builds will use the ten,000 kilograms (22,000 kilos) of recycled shoe materials which were produced by the Singapore recycling venture thus far.

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Reuters was unable to confirm if these sports activities surfaces had been constructed as a result of each complexes are underneath development and cordoned off from the general public.

A pilot venture in 2019 collected 21,000 pairs of footwear, Paul Fong, Dow’s Singapore supervisor, stated in a promotional video posted on social media in July 2021 when the nationwide program was launched. One other pilot venture in 2020 collected 75,000 pairs of footwear, Fong stated in that video. Fong didn’t reply to emailed questions.

Dow and its companions declined to say how most of the footwear collected throughout the pilot part had gone on to be recycled, nor would they supply these figures for the countrywide rollout. They didn’t clarify what procedures had been in place to make sure that donated footwear weren’t exported, diverted for resale or pilfered from bins.

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HIDDEN TRACKERS

Dow manufactures silicone rubber and plastic utilized in soles and midsoles of sports activities footwear. The multinational and Sport Singapore stated of their 2021 media releases that their “first of its type” program would divert 170,000 pairs of footwear yearly from the landfill. This system companions didn’t reply to questions on what would occur to those footwear or what number of can be recycled to make sports activities surfaces.

Beneath the slogan “Others see an outdated shoe. We see the long run,” they known as on the general public to donate used footwear with rubberized soles to assist ease the burden on Singapore’s incinerators and its solely landfill.

Dozens of wheelie bins for donations had been positioned throughout the city-state of 5.6 million folks. These containers turned up in parks, group facilities, faculties and retailers of retail sponsor Decathlon. Singapore residents started depositing hundreds of used sneakers, flip-flops and faculty footwear. Within the promotional video, members of the general public, together with college youngsters, talked enthusiastically about donating.

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“I contributed 15 pairs of footwear,” pupil Zhang Youjia stated within the video, which was produced by Dow.

The ten pairs donated by Reuters that had been exported moved initially from the recycling drop-off bins to the warehouse of Yok Impex, located in west Singapore near the island’s largest dockyard.

From there, the footwear traveled by sea to Batam, an entry level for items getting into Indonesia, which has a inhabitants of greater than 270 million folks, the fourth-largest on the earth.

Guided by the smartphone app, Reuters in December adopted two of the trackers to the identical location in Batam: Pertokoan Cipta Prima, a sprawling flea market catering to low-income consumers. There, dozens of distributors figuring out of rows of crumbling concrete outlets patched with tarpaulin and metallic sheets had been promoting every thing from T-shirts and fridges to plastic toys.

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The information company noticed half a dozen shops promoting used footwear, all clustered in the identical space. At three of them, Reuters noticed footwear stuffed into sacks emblazoned with the phrases “Yok Impex,” together with the Singapore firm’s dolphin emblem.

The primary pair to be tracked down had been the blue Nike trainers. The app led to a dark, cluttered shoe retailer. However the sneakers weren’t on show. Utilizing a perform on the app to make the tracker begin beeping, a reporter adopted the sound to the again of the store, lastly finding these Nikes on the backside of a mound of unfastened footwear. It had been 5 months since Reuters had deposited them right into a donation barrel at a gleaming Decathlon retailer in Singapore. Reuters purchased them again for 180,000 rupiah ($12).

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The second tracker – tucked right into a pair of girls’s black Nikes – was situated at a close-by store. Reuters had dropped these footwear right into a Dow recycling bin at a Singapore group middle in September, three months earlier. They value 120,000 rupiah ($8) to repurchase.

Different footwear went on a far longer voyage.

INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

A pair of pink and orange New Steadiness sneakers – donated by Reuters in Singapore on Sept. 7 – landed in the identical Batam market per week later, the monitoring app confirmed. By early October, they’d moved to a close-by island known as Bintan, earlier than making a 400-mile journey to Medan, a metropolis of two.4 million folks in northern Sumatra. On Oct. 10, the footwear traveled one other 800 miles to Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, in line with the app.

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Indonesia’s second-hand clothes trade is made up of a posh community of merchants, and so they usually alternate items throughout totally different areas, two garment retailers instructed Reuters.

Three weeks later, on Nov. 1, two Reuters reporters searched a frenzied mall in Jakarta in search of the footwear, finally discovering them in a cramped store on the third flooring. The sneakers, freshly cleaned and fitted with a brand new pair of laces, had crisscrossed Indonesia on a marathon eight-week journey. They value Reuters 300,000 rupiah ($20) to purchase again.

To be taught extra about Yok Impex’s function within the motion of those footwear, Reuters on Jan. 6, 2023, paid an unannounced go to to that used-clothing exporter, and was invited onto the premises. There reporters noticed wheelie bins from Dow’s shoe program stacked up in a yard. Inside, ladies sorted by tables piled excessive with outdated footwear, fastidiously putting them into piles after which transferring them into sacks like those seen on the Batam flea market.

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Yok Impex’s logistics supervisor, Tony Tan, instructed Reuters that waste handler Alba-WH was paying his firm to gather the footwear from the donation bins round Singapore after which ship the footwear again to Alba-WH.

Tan stated Yok Impex didn’t export footwear it collected for this system. When knowledgeable that Reuters had discovered footwear it had donated being resold in Batam by retailers who had Yok Impex sacks of their outlets, Tan stated it was doable that footwear from this system obtained positioned in error with different footwear it exports to Indonesia.

“Typically the employees combine it up. I’m unsure as a result of all of us accumulate from another suppliers,” Tan stated. “It’s a mistake. I feel, some mistake.” Tan didn’t elaborate.

BANNED TRADE

In 2015, Indonesia’s Ministry of Commerce launched the Prohibition of the Import of Used Clothes regulation. The measure banned the import of used garments and footwear over issues about hygiene and the potential of this stuff to unfold illness, in addition to the necessity to shield the native textile trade.

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Veri Anggrijono, Director Common of Client Safety and Commerce Management on the commerce ministry, instructed Reuters that the unlawful second-hand clothes import market in Indonesia is price hundreds of thousands of {dollars} a 12 months.

“It’s a well-organized exercise as a result of after we raid them in a single place, then it would go quiet, then proceed once more,” Anggrijono instructed Reuters in an interview at his workplace in Jakarta. He stated the importer is the social gathering liable underneath the legislation, not the exporter or market vendor.

Anggrijono stated importers may be charged underneath commerce and client safety legal guidelines, which carry penalties that may embody imprisonment and fines. However he stated thus far the one motion the commerce ministry has taken is to revoke import licenses, in addition to seizing and destroying used clothes.

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A torrent of low cost, unregulated second-hand clothes flowing into Indonesia additionally provides to the nation’s mounting rubbish downside, stated Dharmesh Shah, a coverage advisor to the International Alliance for Incinerator Options, a nonprofit engaged on waste air pollution. He stated a lot of that merchandise is in such poor situation that distributors can’t resell it.

“They kind by it and a really small proportion is definitely reusable,” Shah instructed Reuters. “It simply will get burned in open dumps or goes into rivers or in landfills.”

Two market distributors in Batam, who requested to not be named, instructed Reuters they purchase sacks of footwear of differing grades from used-clothing merchants reminiscent of Yok Impex, however don’t know precisely what they’re getting till they open them up. They stated it’s not unusual to throw out half the footwear they obtain as a result of the footwear will not be ok to promote.

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RECYCLING FLOPS

This isn’t the primary novel recycling scheme launched by Dow that hasn’t lived as much as its billing.

In 2021, a Reuters investigation discovered {that a} program in Idaho that the corporate stated was utilizing breakthrough know-how to show plastic waste into clear gasoline was truly burning plastic trash to gasoline a cement plant.

On the time, a Dow spokesperson stated the Boise program was serving to to “rework waste into useful merchandise.”

The identical 12 months, Reuters discovered {that a} Dow-backed venture in India, which was supposed to gather plastic trash from the Ganges river and use high-tech equipment to rework the waste into clear gasoline, had been shut down following common gear malfunctions.

The India venture was run by The Alliance To Finish Plastic Waste (AEPW), a nonprofit group arrange by massive oil and chemical firms. On the time, a spokesperson for the AEPW confirmed that the venture had ended, due partly to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Promoting the promise of recent recycling applied sciences, whether or not to show footwear into playgrounds or plastic luggage into clear gasoline, is an try to lull the general public right into a false sense of safety concerning the environmental affect of elevated consumerism, environmental teams like Greenpeace and Break Free From Plastic say.

Dow declined additional touch upon these claims or its monitor file on recycling.

Jan Dell, founding father of The Final Seashore Cleanup, a U.S. nonprofit targeted on decreasing plastic air pollution, stated giant petrochemical firms ought to must report on the outcomes of their sustainability initiatives with the identical transparency because the profit-making elements of the enterprise.

“Dow promised to select up these footwear and grind them into supplies and make them into playgrounds, and as an alternative they’re being discovered throughout one other nation. They actually can’t be believed,” stated Dell, after being given particulars of Reuters’ findings.

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Guarantees about new recycling applied sciences additionally make good enterprise sense for petrochemical firms, in line with Dell, who stated throw-away client tradition is sweet for his or her income. Individuals are extra prone to buy extra of a product when they’re instructed it may be recycled into one thing helpful, in line with a 2013 research within the Journal of Client Psychology.

In its Jan. 18 assertion, Dow stated the shoe recycling companions are “energized by the widespread imaginative and prescient of sport championing a greener and extra sustainable Singapore.” Dow didn’t touch upon the Journal of Client Psychology research.

In July of final 12 months, Dow launched an identical shoe recycling program in Malaysia, which has a inhabitants of 33 million folks and neighbors Singapore to the north. In selling that venture, Dow’s Fong pointed to the Singapore shoe program because the blueprint for achievement. For its Malaysian initiative, Dow partnered with an area nonprofit and a textile agency. Neither responded to requests for remark.

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Again in Singapore, Dow’s efforts are already successful accolades.

On the night of Oct. 6, Fong and different companions within the Singapore shoe recycling program stepped onto the stage of a sublime ballroom on the Equarius Lodge seashore resort on Sentosa Island, simply off the mainland. There they had been offered with the “Most Sustainable Collaboration” award at a glitzy occasion hosted by the Singapore Worldwide Chamber of Commerce, the city-state’s oldest enterprise affiliation.

(Reporting by Joe Brock and Joseph Campbell in Singapore and Yuddy Cahya Budiman in Jakarta; further reporting by Xinghui Kok in Singapore; modifying by Marla Dickerson)