SportSG Responded After Shoes Collected for Recycling Found in Indonesia Flea Market

You know the awkward moment when someone hands you a familiar gift, and then you realise that it’s a gift you gave a mutual friend a while back?

Well, that’s kind of what happened with Sport Singapore (SportSG) recently with their shoe recycling programme.

Instead of what the programme indicated, which was that donated shoes would be recycled and used to build facilities such as jogging tracks and playgrounds, reporters from Reuters found out that the shoes that they donated ended up in other places, such as stores in Indonesia instead.

Here’s how they found out and what SportSG and their partners have to say.

Reporters Attached Tracking Devices to Shoes

When reporters from Reuters dropped their shoes off at the collection points, they attached hidden Bluetooth tracking devices.

In total, the reporters placed 11 pairs of shoes at the various donation points and tracked them via a smartphone app that was synched to the tracking devices so that reporters were able to track the shoes’ locations.

The app showed that ten of the 11 pairs ended up in various parts of Indonesia, such as Batam and Jakarta, while the remaining pair ended up in a “public housing project”.

Well, that was definitely not what people were expecting when they donated their shoes.

The shoes in Indonesia were being sold as second-hand items, which is also an issue as Indonesia has a law that bans the import of used clothing or footwear.

Some shoes even travelled to various parts of Indonesia before making their way to other parts of the country. Apparently, it is a frequent practice for sellers in Indonesia to trade their goods across regions.

At the various Indonesian markets, it cost reporters from Reuters between $8 to $20 to repurchase the shoes that they donated.

After Reuters published an article on the matter on Saturday (25 February) and contacted SportSG and their partners with the evidence that the shoes weren’t where the campaign promised they’d be, they issued a collective apology and explained that the situation was caused by “vulnerabilities in the process chain”.

Here’s what they had to say.

SportsSG and Partners’ Apology

Today (27 February), SportSG and its partners, such as US petrochemicals giant Dow Inc and Alba W&H Smart City, released a joint response to the media regarding the issue.

In the statement, the partners apologised for their lapse and noted that they “do not condone any unauthorised removal or export of shoes collected through this programme”.

Additionally, they thanked Reuters for alerting them of the issue in January this year.

Subcontractor’s Fault

According to the partners, here’s where the campaign went wrong.

Alba-WH, the programme’s appointed collection partner, engaged the help of Yok Impex, which is a Singaporean second-hand goods exporter.

In particular, Alba-WH subcontracted the bin collection process in multiple parts of Singapore to Yok Impex as the latter had the capacity as an aggregator for recyclables and reusables.

This decision occurred in January last year.

After Yok Impex received the shoes and sorted the bins out, the company was supposed to send the shoes to Alba-WH’s warehouse for them to be registered and weighed.

After that, the shoes would be sent to the grinding facility of BT Sports. The shoes would be recycled into granules at the facility, allowing them to be used as building materials.

However, Yok Impex had aggregated shoes “in parallel” with its own sorting activities, which meant that the shoes sent to Yok Impex ended up being exported for second-hand selling purposes instead of being recycled like they should have been.

“This was likely how the shoes tagged by Reuters – and possibly others – were extracted from the programme’s recycling bins at Yok Impex’s premises for reuse and exported to other countries,” the partners explained in the statement.

Apart from that, the partners also referred to the investigations that they concluded on 31 January this year.

The investigations showed that the error happened “only at Yok Impex’s facility, and no other”.

Beyond the partners’ statements, Reuters reporters who travelled to Indonesia (yes, they’re definitely more dedicated than your toxic ex) to track the shoes down also saw sellers with bags that had Yok Impex’s company name and logo on them.

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Stopped Partnership With Yok Impex, Will Continue Recycling Efforts

After Yok Impex’s actions were made known, the partners announced that Alba-WH has since halted all sending of collection bins to Yok Impex’s facilities.

In addition to that, Alba-WH will not continue to engage Yok Impex as a subcontractor for the initiative.

As for the rest of the partners, they acknowledged that they would be putting in more effort to “tighten up the process chain based on our learning from this incident”.

“We have learnt from this incident and hope that the public will continue to support this important and meaningful programme,” the partners wrote.

Beyond this incident, the partners shared that 10,000kg worth of used shoes have been recycled and turned into infrastructure.

Some of the infrastructures include the running track at Kallang Football Hub, which is apparently the first running track in Singapore to be built with recycled shoe granules, and a sports facility in Jurong Town that is currently under construction.

According to the partners, they still intend to use the rubber granules obtained from donated shoes to build jogging tracks, fitness corners and playgrounds across the island.