Reuters #JunkJournalism: @JoeReuters Brock's Anti-Recycling #Shoegate Gone Wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m5bblM1yVw  

Joe Brock of Reuters "spent months" putting GPS trackers into perfectly wearable shoes, sent them to a Singapore textile and shoe grader, who both exports good reusealbe shoes and delivers junk and mismatched shoes to a Dow-funded downcycling operation that grinds up the shoes for beneficial use - to be made into rubberized gym tracks.

His thesis at the beginning of these months of reporting is that addressing the problem of non-exportable shoes is illegitimate unless all of the shoes are recycled and non are reused.

Look, I'm glad that my local hospital has a legitimate morgue. That does not make the recovery room evidence of greenwashing or a crime. Is Dow contributing to the environment by creating a legitimate end market for non-reuse shoes? Is Dow intending to shred the shoes for planned obsolescence purposes to keep the secondary market from competing with them for customers? Either would be a story... but we get #junkjournalism instead.

"Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market"

Here we go again. Joe Brock of Reuters spends a lot of time and money to show a "scandal" in recycling, following the well-worn path of #gotchajournalists who fail to talk to a single business or trade expert. It's alarming Reuters Editors let this shark-jumping reporter get so far.

Bloomberg columnist and bestselling Recycling Author Adam Minter chimes in via Twitter that he sees this report as an example of "Waste Colonialism".  

As a defender of savvy reuse and repair workers in emerging markets, to me Joe Brock poses next to journalistic #CollateralDamage like a TrumpKid who shot a rhino. The Singapore recycler (Yok Impex) looks like he's doing exactly what he should - put good pairs of shoes in the reuse bin and mismatched and damaged shoes in the recycling bin. Dow is funding the latter. 

This has to be the worst reporting in a decade. A Reuters reporter hypothesizes that used shoe reuse is a scandal and sets off to prove it with GPS trackers.

1. We see a significant percentage of donated shoes are imported in emerging markets

2. His evidence reveals majority of those imports are legitimately and essentially meet the needs of people who cannot afford new shoes

3. He provides there no evidence that any of the shoes tracked should not be reused.

4. There is no credible environmentalist or expert interviewed. There is no importer or store owner interviewed.

5. There is no effort to explain Dow is aiding the system by financing a recycling program that would help the eventual need to downcycle the shoes.

6. This could have appeared in The Onion

7. Reporter implies that refraining from commenting to him is evidence of wrongdoing.

JoeReuters Brock doesn't know and we can't tell whether Dow and Nike have planned obsolescence in mind, and seek to shred these good shoes to keep them off the secondary market, or whether Dow legitimately intends to contribute to systems to handle the eventual end of life of third hand shoes. The latter is an important contribution to recycling - we NEED processes to scrap end of market shoes. But none of the shoes this reporter tagged were waste shoes. It's like bringing someone healthy to the hospital and demanding they be sent to the morgue.

But the Reuters reporter is demonstrating why this kind of anti-reuse tracking is environmental collateral damage. His hypothesis is that something bad is happening and he's reporting on it without trying to understand what he's seeing.

My role in all of this is to be the guy who creates enough noise about a false claim that it gives journalists and trade journalists "between space" to politely confront editors at Reuters, board members and clients of E-Stewards, etc.  

Ombudsman at Reuters, the Singapore recycler has been impugned by your reporter Joe Brock without evidence of wrongdoing, and with no evidence in any of the photos that the shoes Mr. Brock tracked were unuseable. If he cut them in half, or sent a single shoes, he might have a case of something, but his entire hypothesis is "if these get reused, that is fraud".  We have enough real fraud to expose in the world, it is a disservice for reporters to spend months implying fake fraud where it isn't.