Once bitten… now we're scaring brands away from trying at all

My kids love their Crocs. So when I read that Crocs had launched its Old Crocs. New Life takeback programme in Singapore and South Korea last week, my first reaction was the same one most parents would have. Relief. Someone is doing something about the pile of small shoes that grow out of fit before they grow out of usefulness. I read the announcement properly. Then I read what had been written about it. By the time I finished, the relief was gone.

I was waiting for the scandal.

That reflex is the problem. Anyone who has paid attention to in-store collection programmes over the last decade has been trained to expect them to fail. RedCycle's soft plastics warehoused for years. Dow's Singapore shoes turning up in Indonesian flea markets. Branded recycling claims that turn out to apply to a fraction of one product line. The pattern is consistent enough that consumer scepticism is now the default, not the exception. People do not want to be let down again. So they prepare for it.

The cost of that reflex is enormous, and almost none of it lands on the brands the scrutiny was meant to discipline. It lands on the next programme. The next consumer trying to do the right thing. The next sustainability team trying to get a takeback scheme funded. The next retailer weighing the commercial case against the reputational risk. By the time we are done protecting consumers from the last scandal, we have made the next attempt almost impossible to launch. And the shoes that would have been collected end up where they were always going to end up. In the bin in the home.

The question Robin Hicks raised

Last week Robin Hicks at Eco-Business asked the right question about the Singapore launch. Three years into running the programme across the US, Canada and parts of Europe, Crocs has not published programme-wide volumes, weight of material recovered, or how much of the collected stream ended up back in product. The new launch into Asia carries the same disclosure pattern. Hicks named the gap.

That piece is the right place to start, and the question Hicks asked is the right one. This article picks it up and pushes further. The disclosure gap is the surface. The deeper question is what disclosure can even mean when the system around it cannot see the better outcome when it occurs.

Two "25%" claims that are not the same thing

Crocs has two figures that travel together in the public discourse. They sound similar. They are not the same thing.

The first is 25% bio-circular content across the Croslite material portfolio. That is sourced from waste in other industries, mass-balance accounted, certified through ISCC. It is in roughly 80% of the brand's footwear. It has nothing to do with takeback.

The second is 25% post-consumer recycled content in one limited-edition product, the Keep It Going Classic Clog, made from shoes returned through Old Crocs. New Life. That is the takeback stream. As far as public disclosure shows, three years of collection across hundreds of stores has produced one product line.

The headlines tend to carry the first number. The second number is what the takeback programme actually delivered. Both are real. They tell different stories about what the programme is doing, and neither story is told clearly enough for a customer dropping shoes into a bin to know which one applies to their pair.

The promise that was tested

Three years ago, a different chemical company made a different promise about a different bin in the same city. Dow and Sport Singapore had launched a programme in 2020 to collect old shoes and grind them into rubber for playgrounds and running tracks. By 2022, their collection partner Alba had publicly celebrated 217,000 pairs collected and won a sustainability award for it.

Reuters' Joe Brock and his colleagues put that promise to the test. They hid AirTags inside 11 pairs of donated shoes and dropped them in different recycling bins around Singapore between July and September 2022. None of the 11 pairs were recycled into playground rubber. Three were physically recovered from second-hand markets in Indonesia. Four were tracked to remote parts of Indonesia, fate unknown. Three lost signal after crossing the border. The contract chain ran Dow to Alba to Yok Impex, a textile and shoe trader hired by the recycling partner to retrieve shoes from the bins. Yok Impex was acting outside the scope of the agreement.

The breach was real. The customers who dropped those shoes in the bin had been told one thing and a different thing was happening, which is its own harm regardless of where the shoes ended up. The Indonesian re-export also contravened a 2015 import ban that exists for hygiene reasons, and those reasons are not nothing. Singapore tightened the rules. Indonesia tightened customs. The reporting was rigorous and the response was correct.

But there is something the framing missed.

What was actually in the Jakarta market

Reuters' video records the moment one pair was found. The reporter follows a tracker beeping from the back of a shop on the third floor of a Jakarta market. The narration calls it a "mound of crumbling second-hand shoes". The reporter "digs through the pile". The shoes "weren't supposed to be here". The verbs were crime scene. The visual language was exposé.

What the reporter actually found was a pair of blue Nike trainers, freshly cleaned, with new laces, on sale for 300,000 rupiah. About $20. Someone had taken those shoes, carried them by sea across an international border, cleaned them, re-laced them, priced them, and put them on a shelf. Someone wanted to buy them. Reuters bought them.

The EU Waste Framework Directive sets out the hierarchy that every circular economy diagram in the sector is built on. Prevention sits at the top. Then preparing for re-use. Then recycling. Then other recovery, including energy recovery. Disposal is last. By that hierarchy, a pair of shoes refurbished and worn by a second owner sits two rungs above the same pair ground into playground rubber. For the three pairs Reuters physically recovered in Indonesian markets, the outcome was, by the EU's own stated principles, environmentally better than the outcome Dow had promised. We do not know the fate of the other eight, and that is the honest version of the limitation.

And the journalism called it a scandal.

This deserves to be named carefully, because it is not a defence of the contract chain. Dow's programme failed to deliver on what it promised. Yok Impex was operating outside the scope of its arrangement. The 2015 Indonesian ban was being violated for reasons that include real public health concerns. The customers who dropped shoes in the bin gave their consent on terms that turned out to be false, and that deception is its own harm whatever the eventual fate of the shoes. All of that was correctly reported, and the systemic response was correct.

The narrower observation is about the framing of the environmental outcome for the cases we can actually see. The disclosure system was not built to count reuse. The brand's marketing was not built to celebrate reuse. The journalism inherited the same blind spot. So the better outcome, where it occurred, was framed as a failure because it did not match the marketable outcome that had been promised on the bin. That is a category-of-journalism observation, not a critique of any one piece. The Reuters team did rigorous work that the sector was the better for. The framing convention they were operating within is what the next wave of takeback coverage needs to upgrade.

The asymmetric standard

Here is what the asymmetry produces in practice. The brand that runs a takeback programme faces investigations, NGO pressure, sustainability journalism, AirTag tests. The brand that does not run one faces nothing. The shoes that go into household waste have no chain of custody and no story. They are not investigated because there is nothing to investigate. The reporter following the bleeping tracker into the Jakarta mall would, in the alternative scenario, be standing in front of a wheelie bin in a Singapore housing estate, and there would be no story.

That bin is the unmeasured baseline. The honest comparison for any takeback programme is not "this programme versus a perfect programme". It is "this programme versus the household bin that swallows the same product silently". On that comparison, even an imperfect programme that lets shoes drift into reuse rather than the recycling that was promised is upstream of doing nothing at all.

Almost no commentary on takeback makes this comparison. The default counterfactual is perfection. The actual counterfactual is the household bin, and it wins by default whenever a programme is judged on whether it lived up to its promise rather than whether it improved on the absence of any promise.

What we are actually losing

Trust is the substrate. Every takeback scandal extracts a small amount of consumer willingness from a finite pool, and almost no participant in the system is responsible for replenishing it. RedCycle did not just collapse a programme when it failed in 2022. It collapsed Australian consumer willingness to participate in any soft-plastics scheme for years. Three years on, the Soft Plastics Taskforce run by Coles, Woolworths and Aldi has halved the original 11,000-tonne stockpile to around 5,500 tonnes and is operating in around 120 stores. A new Producer Responsibility Organisation, Soft Plastic Stewardship Australia, was authorised by the ACCC in November 2025 to take over from the supermarket-led arrangement. The supermarkets running the interim scheme openly say they need to "restore trust". They are not exaggerating. They are quantifying a debt.

The Reuters Singapore investigation produced the same dynamic at international scale. Anyone who read it in 2023 is now slightly more sceptical about every collection bin they see in 2026. That scepticism is not pointed at Dow specifically. It is pointed at the category. The brands launching takeback today carry the deficit Dow created, regardless of how their own programme is run.

This is what makes the asymmetric standard so expensive. It is not just that the brand attempting something faces more scrutiny than the brand doing nothing. It is that every attempt, successful or not, draws down a shared trust account that takes years to rebuild. The trust the next programme needs is the trust the last programme spent.

Why the standard is built this way

Two threads explain it.

The first is how recycling is sold. Catlin and Wang's 2013 study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that consumers use more of a product when a recycling option is available. They tested it with paper around scissors and confirmed it in a field experiment with bathroom hand towels. The presence of the recycling bin changes consumption upward. That finding has been replicated and extended for over a decade. There is a behavioural reason recycling is easier for marketing departments to use than reuse, and disclosure has tended to follow that grain. Reuse depresses next-purchase intent. Recycling does not. The infrastructure that gets measured tends to be the infrastructure that has a commercial reason to be measured, which means reuse outcomes, even when they happen, struggle to find their way into the brand's own reporting.

The second is the dynamic last week's piece described. Sustainability teams design takeback programmes under risk-mitigation pressure. Marketing keeps them at arm's length because they do not fit the campaign calendar. So programmes get scoped narrowly, disclosed defensively, and never connected to commercial returns. They become liabilities-in-waiting from the day they launch. A programme that costs money, generates no commercial line, attracts criticism if it underperforms, and gets quietly defunded when budgets tighten is the predictable output of designing it this way. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, because the programme was scoped to fail commercially from the start.

The asymmetric standard and the marketing-economy logic reinforce each other. Brands have a reason to over-promise on recycling specifically. NGOs have a reason to test those promises. Journalists have a reason to report the failures. Consumers have a reason to disengage. The system works exactly as the incentives suggest it would.

Outcome questions and contract questions are not the same question

This is not a criticism of accountability. Reuters' tracking methodology was excellent journalism. Jan Dell's organisation has been one of the most rigorous voices on plastics in the sector. NGOs and journalists that hold brands to their stated commitments are doing work the system needs. Brands that find that uncomfortable should find it uncomfortable.

The narrower observation is about how the question is framed, and the framing convention is mine to argue against rather than the work of any particular reporter. Two questions can be asked of any takeback programme and they are not the same question. Was the contract kept? Was the outcome good? They produce different stories from the same facts. A pair of shoes that travelled to Jakarta, was reconditioned, and ended up on someone's feet is, on the contract question, a failure. On the outcome question, for that pair, it is a step up the waste hierarchy. Both answers are true. Most coverage in the sector currently leads with the first and rarely interrogates the second, with the result that the reader finishes the article remembering they were lied to and not remembering that the shoes were reused. The frame eats the substance.

The cost is paid in the years afterwards. Consumers read the piece in 2023 and disengage in 2026. Brands read it and scope new programmes defensively. Sustainability teams build takeback as compliance rather than commercial channel because the legal exposure of running anything imperfect feels too high. What the next wave of sector journalism could do, alongside the contract question that still needs asking, is also report the outcome question against the waste hierarchy. Both questions, separately, both honestly. Without that, the sector spends its trust capital and gets less circularity in return.

The DPP is not an AirTag

The most common response to all of this, in policy circles and in industry conversation, is that the Digital Product Passport will solve it. It will not, by design.

The DPP is a major step forward for the front of the lifecycle. It tells regulators, retailers, recyclers and consumers what is in the product, where it came from, what it claims to be, what it can and cannot be recycled into. That is necessary, valuable, and overdue. Every brand serious about circularity should be building toward it.

What it does not do is tell anyone where the physical product is after the customer drops it off. The DPP is metadata attached to a product class. Once the shoe leaves the customer's hand, the DPP does not follow it through Yok Impex, does not register that it was reused rather than recycled, does not ping when it shows up on a shelf in Jakarta. The shoes Reuters tracked did not have DPPs in 2022. If they had, the DPP would not have known where they were. The DPP describes the product. It does not constitute a chain of custody.

End-of-life traceability is a different system. It is collection-side data: who collected, who sorted, what split went where, what yield came out the other end, what feedback the customer received about their own drop-off. None of that is in the DPP, and none of it should be expected to be. The brands and policymakers treating the DPP as the answer to end-of-life traceability are setting up the next disappointment, because when the DPP rolls out and the chain-of-custody question is still open, the same accountability journalism that tracked Dow's shoes will track the gap between the DPP claim and the physical reality.

No data system will produce perfect traceability. AirTags in every shoe is not the answer. What the sector needs alongside the DPP is the trust infrastructure: shared schemes, audited operators, member protection, and honest communication about what was collected and where it went. Trust is built by structures, not promised by individual brands.

The institutional answer

This is where Producer Responsibility Organisations and authorised operators earn their place. Most discussion of EPR focuses on the levy, the fees, the tonnage targets. The more interesting argument is what a properly run PRO with audited collection partners actually does for the brands inside it.

It puts the chain of custody under shared governance rather than individual brand promise. The PRO is the entity that audits the collection contractor, sets the data standards, runs the spot checks, and holds the operating licence. The member brand pays into the scheme and receives, in return, a level of protection that no individual brand running its own programme could realistically build alone. If a contractor inside an authorised scheme is found to be sub-contracting to a Yok Impex equivalent, the scheme catches it before the journalist does. The brand inside the scheme is not exposed for the failure of a sub-contractor it never directly hired.

It also creates the conditions for the recovered material to be priced on quality and traceability rather than tonnage alone. Brands that want recycled feedstock with verifiable provenance need to buy from chains that can prove what they collected and how. PROs with audited operators can prove it. Voluntary brand-by-brand schemes cannot, at least not at scale.

The brave brand is not brave alone. The brave brand is the one that builds inside shared infrastructure deliberately, knowing that the next attempt by the next brand benefits from the standards their scheme establishes. That is what coordination looks like in practice. It is also the only model that turns takeback from glorified waste management into a structured market.

What "good" would publish

Four things, published together, would let any takeback programme be evaluated on its actual performance rather than the gap between its disclosure and its promise.

Programme-wide collection volumes by SKU class. Reuse / recycle / energy recovery split, with all three counted because the hierarchy says they should be. Recovery yields by partner, including reconditioning yields, not just material recovery yields. Customer-facing visibility on what happened to each individual drop-off, closing the loop at the participation end so the consumer who brought the shoe back can see whether it was reused or recycled.

None of that requires AirTags. It requires the data discipline that retail already applies to inventory, applied to the reverse direction. It also requires a willingness to publish the reuse share even when reuse depresses next-purchase margin, because the alternative is a disclosure framework that systematically undercounts the better outcome.

What I keep coming back to

I do not yet know what to tell my kids happened to the shoes they brought back to the store, and neither does Crocs, and neither does any other footwear brand currently running a takeback programme. The data does not exist in the form the question requires.

That is the gap. It is filled by trust where trust has been earned and by suspicion where it has not. The brands launching programmes today are operating in a market where suspicion is the default, because the previous decade taught consumers to expect to be let down. The cost of that is borne by every brand that comes after, and the household waste stream wins by default whenever a programme cannot prove it improved on the alternative.

The fix is not perfect data. The fix is not a Digital Product Passport that has to do work it was never designed to do. The fix is brands brave enough to launch imperfect programmes inside shared infrastructure that audits them collectively, journalists generous enough to ask the outcome question alongside the contract question, NGOs disciplined enough to hold the standard without making the standard the enemy of any progress, and a sector willing to accept that reuse in a Jakarta market is closer to what we said we wanted than playground rubber would have been.

Trust is not earned by perfection. It is earned by showing your working. The brands who show theirs first will set the standard the rest of the industry follows. The ones waiting for the data to be perfect will arrive late to a market that has already decided what good looks like.

Robin Hicks's piece is here. It is the kind of question the trade press should be asking more often.

Disclosure: Utilitarian builds infrastructure for in-store takeback and EPR programmes, including the chain-of-custody and consumer-visibility tooling this piece argues the sector needs. The argument that an answer of this shape is needed is one I would make whether or not we sold one.