It’s 2023. Do you know where your old running shoes are?
If you believe you’ve donated old running shoes to one of the many charitable causes that repurpose them for use on tracks, courts, walkways, or playgrounds, the answer may surprise you.
In a recent report from Reuters, journalists found that shoes donated by the company in partnership with the Dow Chemical Company intended to be turned into playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore were instead being resold at secondhand stores in Indonesia and elsewhere.
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Arming the shoes with Bluetooth tracking devices, the reporters could track the exact location of 11 pairs of running shoes in real time. Spoiler alert: no shoes were turned into playgrounds.
To follow the trail, the news organization cut a hole into the interior sole of a pair of blue Nikes and placed the tracker inside, hoping to follow them to their final destination. The tracker synced to a smartphone app that showed the shoes’ realtime location.
After a few weeks, the shoes left Singapore and sailed across the Singapore Strait to Batam in Indonesia. Assuming that maybe the first pair of shoes was a fluke, the Reuters reporters kitted up 10 more pairs of donated shoes. But the wayward Nikes weren’t alone: Yok Impex Pte Ltd, a secondhand goods exporter in Singapore, eventually received nearly all the tagged shoes. The company’s logistics manager stated that a waste management company hired them to retrieve shoes from donation bins and deliver them to the warehouse.
Ten pairs of shoes that started their journey in Singapore ultimately made their way to Indonesia, with the Reuters journalists tracking them throughout the country. Three pairs were recovered from Jakarta and Batam, while four pairs ended up in places so remote as to be unreachable by Reuters. Three additional trackers stopped sending a signal after arriving in Indonesia.
Meanwhile, one lone pair of Reeboks stayed in Singapore, where the shoes were placed in a donation bin near a community sports center on September 8 before ultimately being removed from the bin and starting a new life in a public housing project about a mile away.
On February 22, Dow—which has had previous recycling efforts fail—announced in an email to Reuters that Yok Impex would be cut off from the project as of March 1 due to the results of their investigation. Dow is still looking for another firm to continue the program.
Runners who hope to make good use of used gear can look to donation programs that repurpose used equipment, like Soles4Souls, which gives used footwear to entrepreneurs in developing countries to resell.
Laura Ratliff is a New York City-based writer, editor, and runner. Laura's writing expertise spans numerous topics, ranging from travel and food and drink to reported pieces covering political and human rights issues. She has previously worked at Architectural Digest, Bloomberg News, and Condé Nast Traveler and was most recently the senior editorial director at TripSavvy. Like many of us, Laura was bitten by the running bug later in life, after years of claiming to "hate running." Her favorite marathon is Big Sur.
