On the Batam island in Indonesia, a little location tracker was beeping from behind a dilapidated second-hand shoe store. The high-pitched ping led a Reuters reporter to a heap of worn-out sneakers, where he started searching through the collection.
A pair of blue Nike running shoes with a monitoring device tucked inside in one of the soles were there.
These well-known shoes arrived in this pile after travelling through land, water, and an international border. They had no business being here.
The shoes were donated by Reuters to a recycling programme run by the Singaporean government and US petrochemicals company Dow Inc. five months previously, in July 2022. In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberised 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.
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