I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only.
This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches.
In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that most of it are produced in small sets anyway.
Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea?
My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2.
The disclosure paperwork and the s/contracts/bribes/ needed to do this will also serve as a nice deterrent for anybody trying to compete with H&M.
"So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2."
The world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.
That EU regulators actually saw need for such regulations makes me both sad and annoyed because they ought not be necessary. What's wrong with clothing manufacture, commerce and trade, and fashion that brand-new clothing can be just trashed and destroyed? Right, we know it's a rhetorical question but we must continue to ask it.
What's happening is sheer madness! If aliens were to witness this from a holistic perspective they'd arrive at conclusion the inhabitants of this planet are de-arranged. Why would any species take effort to gather resources/grow raw materials such as resource-hungry cotton then take time and more effort to manufacture it into useful products then move it holus-bolus to another part of the planet only to discard and destroy it unused—and harm the planet’s ecological systems in the process? That is unless they’re mad.
In a nutshell, why not do something more useful and productive and less wasteful?
What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste is that when I was a kid clothes were expensive, my parents struggled to send us to school neat, tidy and well-dressed. When I ripped holes in the knees of my grey school pants through rough play rather than buy new ones necessity meant my mother would spend hours at the sewing machine mending them.
What’s happening with these clothes is unnecessary waste and vandalism on a grand scale, and the fashion industry along with unethical marketing practices are largely responsible. People not only have too much disposable income but ‘fashion’ has convinced them their clothes are out of fashion almost from the moment they’ve bought them, these days, the notion of actually wearing one’s clothes until they’re worn out is almost inconceivable.
Little wonder megatons of discarded barely-used and new clothes are polluting the planet.
> What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste
To the degree ethics (which I am using here to mean, accounting for negative externalities) are not incorporated into economics, with very few exceptions, every company will optimize their profits with no thought to externalities.
Shareholders might care about waste as individuals, but are not coordinated in anyway that moves corporations. And any corporations that would like to be more ethical still have to compete with those that are not. Some with large margins can do that, but most cannot.
Asking/convincing companies or individuals to be voluntarily ethical, one at a time, is not a solution. It is asking the wiser people to de-power themselves, in a way that just increases the opportunity, profits and incentives for less-altruistic actors.
What the EU is doing is good. But I would like to see a consistent economic governance effort to avoid all significant negative externalities. Both the environment and the economy's value creation and net wealth, are better off without colossal destruction of value happening off the books.
Dealing with each externality as if it were an isolated problem fritters away resources and time, and throws away the clarity and commonality that would allow consistent reforms to happen. We don't have that time to waste.
"Asking/convincing companies or individuals to be voluntarily ethical, one at a time, is not a solution. ...just increases the opportunity, profits and incentives for less-altruistic actors."
Exactly, it's why we need to reintroduce regulations many of which were removed or weakened from the late 1970s onward. Moreover, we need intelligent regulation not just gut reaction to an immediate problem. That's proving much more difficult (reigning in the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism that were let out of the bag ~50 years ago with deregulation won't be easy).
Absolutely. Poorly thought out, too strict, performative, or obsolete regulations create opposition for any regulation.
I also think we need to co-opt the “enemy” to be regulated, in their terms. E.g. get all the major fossil fuel CFO’s in a room, and figure out the financials encouraging green energy, and away from polluting and geopolitically complicated energy, that would make cold business sense for them.
Include and involve the military, insurance giants, large food security/supply chain companies like Cargill, reactor companies, big enterprise customers that want rapid energy growth, and all the other major sectors that take climate change and energy expansion seriously and will get value out of a more stable world, with better energy technology in practical terms. The people that CEOs respect.
Once the biggest resisters can profit off not resisting, you will see a genuine change of heart. That can sound very cynical, but it’s just how people are. “First, I shall do no damage to my own turf.” But once they take a new position, their power doesn’t just cease it’s friction, but becomes another rocket for progress.
Whatever tax breaks and other incentives it took, to make green their best move, would be worth it. Bribe? Maybe. Better understood as the cost of faster consensus and coordination. Where the price of waiting for everyone to change due to the hardship that is being locked in, is so much higher.
On the other hand, after consensus, change itself needs to happen smoothly, not suddenly. Incentives and disincentive need to operate slower than we might want to make change practical. The most important thing is that those reinforcers are credible. Companies are forward looking. They will naturally move their investments today where the profits will credibly be tomorrow. They don’t need to feel pain, just know what to do to avoid it, and most importantly, prosper.
> include and involve the military, insurance giants, large food security/supply chain companies like Cargill, reactor companies, big enterprise customers that want rapid energy growth, and all the other major sectors that take climate change and energy expansion seriously and will get value out of a more stable world, with better energy technology in practical terms. The people that CEOs respect
Oh yeah let the corpos and MIC rule the world even more than they already do, great idea :)
We should really reform the "free market" IMO. It is way too free now. They get all the benefits and none of the responsibilities.
> Despite growing corruption, there are still competent people in these organizations to work with.
This is the part I strongly doubt. Well, not the competence exactly. But the motives. These people don't make their own decisions, they do what the board and shareholders want. And all they want is money. It's the only thing that counts for them. So the only solution is making these externalities have a cost. Business won't collaborate on that because it's only a negative for them.
I don't believe in public/private collaboration anymore. In Holland that was tried way too long.
> The military has labeled climate change a global destabilizer for years. Insurance companies and farmers are dealing with the fallout already.
Yet they continue to run full steam to meddle in oil-producing countries. I doubt they will keep this climate change classification up anyway as it is directly in contradiction to the dogmas of the current administration.
> Yet they continue to run full steam to meddle in oil-producing countries.
That isn't military strategy. That is the politicians choosing oil over alternatives and delegating action accordingly.
The military can warn about the threat of climate change or China's growing technical, manufacturing, scientific and potential AI dominance. But it can't (and shouldn't) set the elected leaders' agenda, or refuse to implement it.
A non-governing military is an anti-corruption firewall.
> This is the part I strongly doubt. Well, not the competence exactly. But the motives
There have been streams of people in power resigning as their particular role gets pinched between corruption or resisting. When that stops, maybe there won't be anyone competent with good motives left. But many people are quietly doing the best they can in the meantime, and hoping for a turnaround in the future.
> And all they want is money.
Yes, for those directly profiting from damage, we are going to have to address that directly if we want to acheive change.
But large segments of the economy are being financially hurt by that damage. So there are many natural allies.
For social media, I think we need some hard laws, to give regulators some teeth. For energy, where the damagers are also value producers (we can't just cut off fossil fuels instantly), whatever financials it takes to straighten that out will result in a net benefit.
People on the right often want companies to be able to do whatever they want, ignoring the damage. People on the left often want to eliminate damage, without any cost. Neither of those viewpoints leads us anywhere but off a cliff.
Boldness here is our friend. The sirens of making little changes, or imagining a big change won't take tremendous coordination or cost something, are mirages.
> I don't believe in public/private collaboration anymore. In Holland that was tried way too long.
That leaves a coupe, which isn't going to produce any improvement. "Tear it down" rarely morphs into building anything. "MAGA" as a soft coupe (democratically elected, undemocratic policies) is a mild example.
It's easy to shoot down the potential for change. But that isn't a plan, a step, or a mindset that has any chance of achieving anything.
Although I 1000% relate to the many reasons we have for cynicism and apathy.
Since the 1970s, some industries were deregulated, but overall legal and compliance complexity has still grown over time, according to all studies that I'm aware of on the subject of the regulatory burden.
The studies indicate that a few large early regulations aimed at clear externalities — like major air pollution — delivered substantial benefits on the balance, but many of the smaller restrictions added afterward, especially as they accumulated, mostly generated paperwork (huge compliance industries) and fixed costs (that made smaller firms less competitive) with diminishing returns.
The sensible goal should be to massively reduce the regulatory thicket, while keeping the small set of restrictions that have clear, major benefits and are straightforward to enforce, and replacing the rest with simpler standards or pricing mechanisms that prevent negative externalizations without dragging down productivity through top-down micromanagement of the economy that regiments the actions of private citizens.
"So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2."
> The world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.
I don't see any cynicism here, only pure realism. The real question is why EU law tries to create a utopia on paper while ignoring real-world situations. That's what has always frustrated people in the EU about the institution: its lack of decisions that are close to the people and grounded in reality. Yes of course, everyone gets the idea and the good intentions behind it, but good intentions alone are not worth the paper that they are written on.
For quite many years I saw EU as something mostly good. Since ten years back I'm hesitating. Enforcements when it comes to cars (like the (EU) 2018/858) where the manufacturers are forced to implement "safety" features that customers don't want/need and "environmental" features (such as AD blue) that makes worse products. Regulations that perhaps were good on paper, but that will backlash on manufacturers and consumers (as the cars since then became way more expensive).
Regulations on sorting out textile (such as worn underwear, textile diapers) created huge issues in Sweden to take care of the textile waste to a big surprise for the politicians..
I see this response as the exact same one about tax cheating and how the rich will just move away or be better at cheating taxes.
Did we forget how to discover and punish bad actors? Do you think we should just do nothing and let casual bad behavior go because some people are gonna be abusive? No. I refuse to accept that. It is not your false dichotomy.
If people abuse the system, fine and punish them. More than they profit off of the bad actions.
> Do you think we should just do nothing and let casual bad behavior go because some people are gonna be abusive? No. I refuse to accept that.
I'm with you, and I also give a clear: No.
My criticism is about how it is handled. If you introduce a new law and already know there is an immediate workaround that makes the situation even worse than before, then you should close that loophole in the first place. If you can't close the loophole because of strong resistance from lobbyists, then it's obvious this is just about "good intentions on paper" so the EU can say they've done something.
That extra step mean selling what remains at low cost might be more financially interesting than if they could destroy it 'on site'.
Not a perfect solution, but it push the incentives in the right direction.
What's wrong with clothing manufacture, commerce and trade, and fashion that brand-new clothing can be just trashed and destroyed?
The industrial process (and, to add, global economy relying on slave-cheap labour in a far enough country) has become effective enough that it literally costs less to make surplus items than to scrap them. Not exactly the level of cost in duplicating copyrighted bits but low enough that the sales effort to find buyers for the clothes after the season is more expensive than the profits from it. Often the price of items doesn't even warrant paying for returns: many online shops just tell you to keep the product if you claim a defective product and want your money back.
But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets alone: when it comes to cheap items any reasonable business would source a bit extra in the hopes of selling more. If you source fewer items than what will sell you'll be losing money. Given the profit margins it makes sense to just source X percent extra and calculate that it's cheaper to pay for them but not sell, rather than pay for too few and limit your profits by running out of stock. It's like insuring yourself by taking a slice of your profits today to prevent a rainy day from happening.
Us consumers of the modern commercial wonders are not without guilt either. We support this by buying new, crap quality garments that last only so long we'll soon be buying more. The price is low but the value is even lower, and that's the profit of the clothing industry. Buying new again and again is what enables the industry to operate. You can still have your clothes handmade by a tailor with lasting quality and for prices astronomical enough that you'll surely won't be (nor afford to) throwing them out too soon. Few people choose to do that, of course.
The exact same thing is happening on varying scales in: consumer electronics, appliances, cars, houses...
"But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets..."
Nor stupid consumers, but watering down blame will weaken resolve to fix the problem. Perhaps it should become fashionable to criticize those who buy too many clothes by asking "do you really need that item?". Criticizing and ostracizing works, it greatly reduced cigarette smoking.
It's far easier to ostracize cigarette smokers (because you can see them smoke). You don't really know how many clothes somebody has unless you really pay attention to them, and nobody does.
There are multiple ways to tackle the problem, once we had competitions such as 'Miss World', 'Miss America', etc. that were popular but which now are very much seen as sexist.
The message would soon get across if being seen browsing in a clothing store wasn't the best look (like being seen in a porn shop is embarrassing). Or imagine the impact it were embarrassing to be seen at a fashion show or buying fashion magazines. Throughout history there have been bigger changes in social attitudes than that.
A rowdy mob picketing a few fashion shows would attract world attention to the problem.
It’s what already happens with recycling in Europe, it’s resold several times to companies claiming to recycle it and ends up shipped to the poor parts of South East Asia and burned or dumped.
> What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste is that when I was a kid clothes were expensive
Clothes used to be more expensive and that makes you upset now?
But go back before the mechanized loom to see ACTUAL expensive clothing. When people were robbed, they literally took their clothes. People were murdered for the clothes they wore.
Now let's rethink this. Should you be angry that you didn't get beaten for destroying your clothing when you were a kid, because actually clothing was insanely cheap compared to pre-industrial ages? No, we should know our history and be glad that things are cheaper now.
Why not regulate thrift stores and force them to have 40% of their inventory at fixed prices? $3 for shirts and $7 for pants/shorts? Part of the problem, at least in the US, is that thrift stores are filled to capacity. But just like everywhere else, their prices are high as well. If we want to interfere with a free market, why not start there, to force higher turnover and keep them from rejecting donations?
They’d be filled to capacity even if they literally gave everything for free, because the unsold stuff is mostly the kind of things that people don’t want in the first place. The good stuff would be snatched, and the things nobody wants would linger there forever.
The only thing that can objectively reduce waste is well, simplifying access to people's data/surveillance capitalism. This way corps will have a better idea of what people want to wear and at which price they are willing to buy it, and products will be wasted less.
They are making the best decisions based on available information. No one trashes products for fun.
lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now. It took China putting on regulations on their side to disrupt that industry. Now you have to find other smaller economies to do that.
I'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law says we must do this. Please contact your representatives you dumb fucks"
The original comment says "sell them to «resale» companies". Selling goods means being paid for it, while you and the parent comment are both saying money goes in the opposite direction.
Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.
Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.
There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.
They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.
The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.
I don't think you can sell at loss in Europe (not sure, happy to be corrected), so might be small but it'll still be positive. The bet is it will be high enough to be a deterrent. The other bet is that at some point the rest of the world will push back being a corporate dumpster.
This particular thread of the argument can go on for a while. I can't well articulate the doubts I have because I'm not in the industry, but many such well-meaning laws have a tendency to backfire once given enough time for bad/poor actors to game it.
There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.
The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.
The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.
Oil companies have been doing this for over a century in US. Sell abandoned well to a small llc, llc files bankruptcy, big OilCo off the hook! Everyone happy!
>The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner.
This is what these countries get for having weak laws that allow people to do illegal dumping and then hide behind a corporate veil to avoid accountability.
Trouble is if democracy worked properly then corporate entities wouldn't be able to lobby and influence governments to weaken laws out of self-interest.
Read their comment and yours? What great advice. I would suggest you do the same, but I think you'll continue to misread it.
> No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.
> lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now.
They are saying that paying to dispose of the clothes/waste is how it's done. And then... you said the same thing. Perhaps you're assuming they're just taking a guess, rather than coming at it with understanding that this is how it has been done for a while.
There's already strong financial incentives to not over-produce. Nobody wants to dump cash into inventory that can't sell. Trying to force them to sell it all is going to reduce choice and availability for consumers, unless the businesses find a workaround. I'm pretty sure they will find a workaround, and it won't be to sell at a steep loss to the same market that refused the products to begin with. But these workarounds will cost money, and consumers will pay for the fantasy that waste is being reduced.
They will be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar so that some fraction of them can be resold for cheap in Africa or somewhere else poor. Those companies can then dispose of them however they wish.
The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever.
And, as usual, EU regulations achieve absolutely nothing -- if anything, this is worse than nothing.
1. Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.
2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.
3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.
1. You can buy a cotton tshirt from LIDL for 3 bucks and it'll hold for years. It won't be cut perfectly or have the softest material but it's definitely not bad.
Of course, if I get it from Temu for 6 cents it'll probably fall apart in a week, but modern clothing isn't really covered by "the cheapest thing I can find".
Same for ultralight fabrics, that, while lovely in summer, usually get trashed in a season or two simply because the thing weighs fuck all.
I'd even say we're in a golden age for clothing. I can get a motorcycle jacket that can slide at 80kmh for 40 bucks with shoulder and elbow protectors and a thermo layer insert.
Cheap cotton cannot hold for years, the fiber length and yarn quality makes it simply impossible. On top of that, cheap cotton is bleached and fast dyied which makes the clothing change after few washings.
I mean if you mean "hold" like, you can't still wear it albeit it looks nothing like it did two washings before, of course it does.
But then you look exactly like what you buy, someone with worn low quality clothing which looked nice in the shop and first wear.
The 3 buck LIDL tshirt isn't really intended for casual business attire tbh.
If you want good looking (symmetrically cut, better stitched, etc) tshirts long term I then raise you Uniqlo with 7 bucks per DRY synthtic tshirt and 12 for a supima cotton one. I pretty much daily them and in over at least 3 years they haven't shown significant aging. Only the supima ones have mostly lost the "supima" text on the inside at the back of the neck area.
Comically enough I also have 3 shirts from Primark for 1$ each that are now at least 5 years old, probably more like 7 that still look fine. I still wear them to work without worry. The shaping of them was all over the place though. No two in the pile were identical.
Dying could be an issue, I wear gray and black ones so your mileage may vary with colored washing. I also don't blast them at 90 degrees C but rather 60 for black/gray, 40 for everything else.
Or your standards are just ultra high compared to mine, for better or worse. From my perspective tshirt quality ends at Uniqlo and I then go to Olympus business/casual shirts. From there the only option I have to look more businessman-y is the wool suit.
> 2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.
The market for regular second-hand clothes is on the verge of collapsing in Germany though. Charities are flooded with low quality and unsalable stuff ever since it was made illegal to throw away clothes in the regular trash. You must bring them to recycling facilities instead now. It not profitable for charities to sort through them because of the volume. There is a market for quality vintage clothes but that's a totally different thing.
> 3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.
That's probably the only thing that motivates brands not to overproduce. But lets be real, they will rather find loopholes for destroying them instead of selling them for cheap.
> Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.
Hard disagree. Live in Central Asia, buy locally produced relatively cheap clothes and they have been lasting years so far.
Isn't it a thing that poor countries can't get their own textile and clothing companies going because of donations or cheap used clothes? I'm fairly certain that's a thing.
There seems to be 3-4 other issues colluding with that. If customers prefer or can't afford new domestic clothes, then it would make it hard for a business to succeed.
a firm isn't going to sell them to reseller in the third world as it will cause brand dilution, additionally current customer base will feel shortchanged and shop elsewhere.
Much more likely is as the op said: selling to a company that will dispose of the stock.
Retailers don't want their excess inventory to be sold at a discount. They'd rather it be destroyed. A small fee to have someone else destroy it is just a business expense. The OP should have put "sell" in scare quotes.
China for decades paid the U.S. and Europe for their "recycling", this practice was only banned in recent years. Clothes seem more valuable than plastics waste.
That was because you could make money by turning old things into new things. Not so with garbage disposal, a service for which you almost always have to pay.
There is already a healthy trade for second-hand clothing to 3rd world countries (see pics of kids with "<Final's losing team> World Champions 2022"). The prices will be better for brand new clothes. The gray distribution channels already exist and will readily pay for new clothes - at steep discounts, but pay for them nonetheless.
Describing it as a market is not entirely correct. The clothes these people wear are garbage. As a species, we produce more clothes than we could ever wear. I am reminded of a story of a charity that accepted clothing donations for the victims of an American hurricane, and immediately had to stop because their warehouse filled up. Many clothes are not even worn once before they're thrown away, and one of the cheaper ways to dispose of them is dumping them on 3rd worlders. It's quite dystopic really the underclasses who dig through our trash.
… and put local African cloth producers out of business. The same happened with shoes sent to African countries by NGOs. Well intentioned, but local shoe manufacturers went out of business. The local population did not really benefit, because traders would get a hold of the free shoes and sell them on for just a bit less than locally produced shoes.
I’ve heard there’s a practice of selling bundles of clothes to Africa and then the purchases pick through the bundle for what’s good and what’s useless. The impression I was left with is that this used to be more lucrative but now you’re almost as likely to get complete garbage as something good. So it’s like a sad loot box.
It's a big issue in Africa, as it completely destroyed to local clothing industry. As a side effect, you see people wearing westerner style clothing even in the midst of Africa, which is quite unsettling.
Some places sell their cardboard scrap. I'm guessing that places with the right sorts of metal scrap get paid for their waste.
And folks have to pay for much of the rest. Some of the issue with dumping waste in a business's trash is that the business pays directly for waste removal in many places, unlike a lot of private folks, which pay through taxes.
This is the current state of things. What has changed is the sort of service that they need to pay for. Instead of destruction, they'd be paying for recycling or resale. Like now, they have the option of donation or reduced prices.
Forecasting demand is hard. If you will produce less than needed you will sell less than could have sold (lost revenue) while overproducing is relatively cheap.
> b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.
The main reason unsold items are destroyed is to avoid price depression - giving unsold items for next to nothing will reduce future demand for full priced items. It's wasteful and harmful for environment but as others noted it's hard to fight with this given that destruction could be outsourced to other countries.
"financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing."
That's not how it works in practice, with the economies of scale/production it makes more economic sense to produce goods surplus to requirements then destroy remaining stock so it will not detract from/devalue sales of next/forthcoming product.
It's an old trick and applies not only to clothes but many goods. There are variations such as destroying trade-ins, used equipment etc. rather than sell it to remove it from the market (thus only new equipment is available).
Some companies took this to extremes in that they'd only rent equipment which would be withdrawn from the market and deliberately destroyed at the end of its service life so it couldn't be sold or ratted for spare parts (photocopier manufacturers were notorious for this). IBM used a cleaver approach with its computers, they'd sell off old computers as 'valuable' scrap (some parts could be still useful to others) but anything deemed as spares for their existing machines would be partially disabled (still useful but couldn't be used as a spare part). For example, they'd break the edge connectors off circuit boards but leave the electronic components intact.
They won’t “sell”. Imagine LV selling originals in Africa , Africa would immediately resell them in Europe and us and Asia for much higher price and dilute the brand. It will be officially sold to a reseller, not officially they will pay a special African company to destroy it.
So same shit as before. Slightly more expensive. No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap.
> No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap
This is just inherently incorrect. In Europe we have a load of outlet villages which is where big brands do exactly that. It’s where I do most of my shopping. Last year I bought two pairs of Nike Dunks for £25 a pop. I bought Salomon hiking shoes for £60 instead of £140. A pair of Levis 501s for £20. Just an example or my most recent purchases.
You have to pay to burn them, at home or abroad, and the cost is likely a few % of a clothing piece, where the margin is already >70%.
Tl;dr the EU will say "Mission Accomplished" because no clothing has been burned in the EU since 2026(tm), while all of the emissions are produced abroad.
The same show has been going on with industry, where the dirtiest parts are done in India or China, so that we can say that we are "clean".
The big brands should be penalized for doing the burning or destroying themselves, enforcing such destruction through contract laws or any formal communication, or even through punishment by denying future contracts.
The receiver on the other end should defect and renege on their contract and sell the goods in the open market for pennies on the dollar. While they won't be able to bring it back to western countries, they should absolutely be able to sell them locally. It should be legal for them to renege on any illegal contracts.
I live in a poor country. People here buy "American clothes" which importers get inside "pacas" (random bundles). Those clothes come USED from rich countries.
My assumption is these clothes are dumped to someone to get rid of them, and then that person bundles them and ships them to poor countries. Once here, someone buys the bundles, sort the content according to their expected retail price and sells them to resellers.
There is junk that can't be sold and is destroyed. Except in some cases, like in Chile, where they are just dumping the used junk "intact" in the desert.
Prohibiting destroying new clothes is a net positive. There is market for clothes in poor countries, but it is already being exploited. Some clothes will always be dumped in poor countries, but not all of it can be resold. The manufacturers will make less clothes, there is no way around it.
> manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes?
Surely these companies aren’t paying H&M for the privilege of destroying their surplus clothes, so by reselling them they’ll be getting paid to take the clothes and paid again when they resell them. Why would they ever destroy them?
They would destroy clothing because it is not sold. This already happens to second hand clothing that is shipped to Africa. Part of it is sold, part of it is dumped. This is well documented.
Define what you mean by "better". Putting them on a giant CO2-burning ship to transport around the world to find every last person who wants a $1 shirt is much more harmful to the environment than just throwing it into a hole in the ground and making another one.
Given how absurdly efficient shipping stuff in container ships is, I don't believe its actually worse. Specially if the company can just save money by being slightly more conservative in terms of how much they manufacture in the first place.
Sure, let's conveniently not count the horrifically-polluting trucks in <3rd world country with zero environmental regulations> to distribute them across the interior.
You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?
The point is to change what companies believe is the optimal number of products. Right now companies produce what they expect to sell, with errors in both directions being valued equally. In the future they will have to produce only what they are certain they can sell.
The point is increasing the cost of over-production. Its not about the EU knowing better, but imposing a higher price for waste. Not sure how you are confused about that.
The additional shipments aren't going to drastically go up over a few more companies throwing second hand clothing on ships. Large crate ships are relatively efficient for what they tow.
As basic napkin math, if there's 1000 cargo ships moving in and out of the EU in a year, and this law adds 10 more. That's 1% increase. It's a bigger 1%, but I wouldn't be surprised if the emissions are less than the 9% of discarded clothes talked about in the article.
I'm going to speculate that it won't "add" ships at all
As you say, ships are moving in and out of the EU each year - the question is, how many have "back loads" - if some percentage of the ships leave Europe empty to return to Asia for more manufactured goods, then it seems very likely that they can have the containers of unwanted clothes as part of the trip.
Oh cool, so I can fly commercial all I want at zero marginal CO2 emissions just because they don't have to build an extra plane just for me? I can burn that jet fuel and not feel bad because they were going to burn that gallon of fuel anyway?
Some of these arguments are so silly that I'm starting to understand why the EU thinks regulations are a free lunch to improve the environment with no costs whatsoever.
Airlines adjust capacity to demand — empty seats represent foregone revenue and future flights get cancelled or downsized.
Cargo ships don't work that way. A container ship returns to Asia whether it's carrying 1000 containers or 5000. The marginal emissions of an additional backload container are genuinely close to zero, not as a rhetorical trick but as a structural feature of how bulk shipping economics work.
Yea they will, they'll resell what they can, and destroy the rest, probably by throwing them into a giant burn pit in a place with zero environmental regulations.
I live in the US, but I would hope the EU doesn't have "burn pits".
But the 3rd world country they are about to be shipped to definitely does have burn pits that will incinerate both 1) any remaining unsold inventory, and 2) the older clothes that are replaced with the fancy european stuff.
Or better yet, they'll just be thrown into the river like most other things in Africa and SE Asia...
All you're doing is outsourcing your own pollution to make yourself feel better. It's idiotic.
A lot of the apparel being destroyed is unsold inventory of up-market brands to protect their pricing power. If they shipped that to less affluent countries for destruction, it's unlikely that they'd be destroyed, because those items would fetch a good price on the black market.
This is also how plastic "recycling" goes. Stuff gets collected, sorted, baled up, and a checkmark for "this is recycled" is placed. Then it gets loaded onto a ship and exported and ends up in landfill or incinerated anyway. And every step in the chain gets a ton of money, ultimately from taxpayers.
I'm sure some plastic gets recycled / reused. But as long as it's cheaper to just produce new plastics, the problem will remain. Recycling plastic is only viable for goodwill points and marketing (e.g. if people actively seek it out) and with government subsidies or rules.
Same as when the EU puts a ton of restrictions on farmers within the EU countries -- Co2, fertiliser requirements, etc. -- making food so expensive to produce many go out of business and the remainder become practically luxury food, and then countries just end up having to import food from countries outside the EU _without_ those restrictions, simply offloading the environmental burden on "some other countries somewhere".
Food is actually pretty cheap in the EU (in absolute prices compared to the US and relative to income compared to most other places), so I don't know what you mean.
EU is a net food exporter and the only agricultural products the EU isn't self-sufficient in are animal feed, sugar, and tropical fruits & vegetables.
So, no, EU farmers are struggling at the moment because they aren't as competitive on the global markets as they used to. Not because Europeans aren't buying their food anymore.
Australia currently bans the sale of "recycling" plastic and e-waste to certain countries in South East Asia because of this problem (dumping to companies that have no qualms about throwing the waste into waterways etc)
The waste is still making its way to those countries, and the way that we know is that NGOs are tracking it[0]
I suspect that clothing will get similar treatment - initial illegal dumping as you predict, followed by determined NGOs holding the supply chain to account.
It's about maintaining exclusivity - if you sell your $100 T-shirt for $50 instead of $100, then it's a $50 T-shirt now. Even if they always cost less than $10 to make.
It's degenerate bullshit so I'm all for the EU banning it, but there is a business rationale.
I understand why a the original manufacturer might want to destroy their remaining stock to keep up an inflated perceived value. What I don't understand is why the business buying the remaining stock would want to do the same.
If this was the US, yeah I'd agree with you, but it's not. EU values the spirit of the law, which changes things drastically. Before anyone comments otherwise, please search online what spirit of the law is and how it's different from the US (I want to avoid fast answers here, enable your "thinking" functionality before answering).
I'm no expert and don't know the full extent of what's already happening and what this ban would change, but I would say there is evidence that this is already happening.
In a recent episode of Clive Myrie's African Adventure where he goes to Ghana, he "heads to one of the world’s biggest second-hand markets to meet the designers giving discarded clothes a second chance".
They show a lady that bought a "crate" of random unsold clothes for around 500 USD, and she prays before opening it hoping it will contain clothes in good condition she can resell. The show claims that on a "good day" she can make something like 50 USD on such a crate.
They also (very) briefly show a huge landfill of what appear to be discarded clothes.
Keep in mind that this is only an entertainment show, so this is most likely only the tip of the iceberg.
> manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia
Look, I fully agree with what is going to happen in reality. But isn't it a bit misleading and ironic to accuse the recipient countries as disrespecting the "rule of law", when the companies selling them there are fully/partially aware and doing business with them to bypass the exact (proposed) law being discussed? As with historic examples of waste management, recycling, etc as well, where everybody in the chain knew and wanted what was /actually/ happening.
I thought you were going to go somewhere else with that. With excess clothing they'll unload it in Africa and Asia for cheap, weakening local clothes manufacturers. A bit of what happened with Tom's Shoes
Without knowing any details and thinking about this for just a min, i dont think this actually makes sense.
Most of this stuff AFAIK is destroyed to keep brand value or as the cheapest solution to oversupply.
Oversupply is less likely because it costs more, and the cost of removal now at minimum is the cost of a shipment.
For actual good clothes, the company can now decide if they want to pay more to destroy it elsewhere in an attempt to hold brand value, or simply not put in a destruction clause in the sales contract before it is shipped off and maybe make a bit of profit.
Alternative story: they take these still-perfectly-functional finished products and find other markets for them. This isn't second-hand, damaged clothing, it's unsold new product.
Have you been to a poor country? Say you'll sell a pile of clothes for a dollar. You'll have 100 people rushing in offering to buy it off you because they know they can resell it. And if it's brand name stuff, demand will be higher. That's something they could even sell to tourists.
Warehouses aren't really necessary for clothes outside of rich countries where people can afford to just throw away literal tons of it.
This is already how it works today. If there demand curve shows an increase in desire for the same items in another jurisdiction, rather then make more and ship for <x> location, they are reshipped from your geography, even store to store.
Secondly, disposal is one of two things:
1. Donation to a company that collects clothes, who in reality sell these clothes by the tonnage. Most of the clothing recyclers are companies of this nature.
> Those companies will then destroy those clothes,
I disagree. Suppose that this is even allowed, What's the incentive for these off-shore resale shops to destroy the items? Do they get paid per ton of ash produced? There is a stronger incentive to re-sell it, it'll create more economic value. I could care less if it's sold off-shore or within EU; as long as it's not being destroyed.
Why would they destroy the clothes instead of selling them to consumers? Developing countries already have huge markets for selling, altering, and repairing second-hand clothing that gets sent by thrift shops in developed countries.
If anything this would be displacing lower quality used clothing (often graphic t-shirts) that currently makes up a large part of the textile markets in developing nations.
Because at some point it becomes cheaper to ship and destroy than to store and sell.
Inventory is "dead money" in accounting books!
Money has been converted to Obtainium and Obtainium just sits there until it is converted back to (hopefully more) money, taking valuable space that could be filled with more Obtainium as soon as it goes away.
At some point that Obtainium sitting there unsold just becomes un-space and destroying it becomes the cheapest move.
The kind of clothes we're talking about are not regular clothes. It's the unsellable kind. When H&M is doing a big sale, order the clothes by price, lowest price first. You will find stuff so hideous that they can't even sell it for four bucks. That's what I would expect most of the disposed clothing to look like.
Why wouldn’t these non-EU then just sell the goods in those countries? It would mean they turn a cost (destroying) into revenue (sales).
It’s not like there isn’t already a massive industry selling counterfeit goods. So in your hypothetical scenario, if those companies are already shady then I could easily see them selling those surplus stock in the same shady markets.
Because the cost of doing business in those markets is probably more than what they could get for the product. And if they lower the price in that market, it might devalue the product line as whole and potentially causes brand damage.
The brand isn’t the one doing the business. It’s the 3rd party who we’ve already established is unscrupulous. So why should they care about the brand value?
Spitballing here, why not shred these clothes as filler for insulation instead of literally burning them? PFAS and fiber inconsistencies as these clothes are probably a hodgepodge of all sorts of chemicals, so they probably need to be characterized. I think chemical recycling is also being looked into.
Wild how random, just getting by people can manage to recycle their motor oil and try to make better choices but businesses can only do the most shitty thing possible.
I feel like you accidentally flipped a minus sign in your equations and then doubled down on your conclusions. Who would pay you to take something away and destroy it for you?
It's fine to come up with creative solutions using an LLM, but you have to apply some critical thing before throwing your weight behind the conclusions!
What's stopping the price from being extremely low? Plenty might pay $1 to take a bundle of 1000 items of clothing, pick through it and find 20 items they like, then destroy the 980 other items.
Except being destroyed locally in a controlled or regulated process and shipped to be destroyed overseas with more relaxed regulations are not equal footprint wise
980 items being shipped then destroyed versus 1000 items being destroyed.
It's 980(x+y) instead of 1000(x)
I have no knowledge of the tradeoffs, but I might also imagine that the method of destruction could be worse: incineration vs landfill vs thrown in the ocean, etc
What is going to happen is that what is left of European manufacturers in the sector are going to move production and warehouses abroad, and from there they will move to EU only about what they need. They will continue to operate as they used to, the only difference being less business (and less jobs) being done in EU.
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring.
Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at.
People used to ice skate on the lake near my house during Winters up until the 70s. Now they're swimming there throughout the winter. We had a ski lift fifteen minutes from my house 20 years ago. Now in a good winter, we have a week where there's enough snow for kids to go sledding.
Very similar pattern here (UK): circa 1900, ice skating on the local pond every winter. The ice was thick enough to walk on the pond twice in the 1980s. For the last decade, the pond hasn't completely frozen over once. We got about two days of 30% coverage this Jan.
sure, though New York has gotten a real honest-to-goodness winter this year. There's been a foot on the snow on the ground continuously for the last month, and it's been cold enough that the pipes in one of my bathrooms froze. I think it's easier from the West Coast to bemoan the end of East Coast winters than to live through one :)
This has been a decent, classic winter. It’s an important part of the regional character. We need to have snow occasionally, remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.
> remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.
Are they still doing it?
I had a few "proper winters" in the UK during my early 20s. The roads are gritted (and ploughed if necessary) by local councils in lorries, but the footpaths are supposed to be done by residents. The first proper winter, after the snow had refrozen a few times overnight, the paths were lethal. We have these yellow grit bins scattered everywhere that residents are supposed to use to get grit to do the paths. But nobody was doing it. Anywhere. As a pedestrian you just had to walk in the road. This was a real "society has failed" moment for me.
Not that it matters any more, though. Such winters seem a distant memory. The last I can remember was 2018's "beast from the east", but that was more of a freak event than a normal winter.
Just based on what I’ve seen waking around: yes, New England still does a pretty good job of snow removal overall. I’m actually not sure how it’s handled in major cities (maybe the city hires people), but I’ve lived in small cites and college towns where the locals are responsible for this, and the paths are usually clear.
We all have in Europe and the US - but it too is a sign of harsh climate change, because the reason it is cold "down here" on our latitudes is that the arctic is super hot, pushing the cold down to us.
The problem is that one cold winter doesn't mean we fixed the problem. We need to look at the average change throughout the years, and that's very worrying.
> Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer
This is something that's scared me ever since I learnt about air conditioning and how it works in the 90s when I was like 10.
Air con heats up the outside, so air cons are fighting with each other to cool down their respective buildings. So, more air con, using even more power, all heating up the outside a little bit more. The snowball effect is going to be enormous.
I guess I thought as a 10 year old that some adults would have this under control. Or maybe I realised, even back then, that the only thing really separating adults from children is big bodies and that you don't get told off for being greedy any more.
Unless you're in a dense urban area, the effect of your air conditioners on neighboring houses is negligible. There's so much other thermal reservoirs around (like the ground and plants) as well as circulation from the wind that the extra heat from the air conditioner has only a small effect on the environment.
Compare the volume of your house to the volume of area around your house (including several hundred feet vertically, since that is easily part of the circulation). If you're cooling your house 20 degrees then that would correspond to heating an area 20x the size by 1 degree. How many times bigger is the circulating area around your house (100x? 1000x?)?
It’s honestly terrifying. I’m in the PNW and we haven’t had winter yet. Extremely low snowpack in the mountains and not even a single day below freezing where I live.
I’ve been observing the change for the past 10 years or so here and this is the first year that’s it’s been so “in your face” obvious instead of just subtle changes and effects.
If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.
Climate change needs to be the number one focus and policy for every nation on earth right now. Not AI, not economic growth, not wars.
Here in the Seattle area, plenty of sub-freezing days (which is itself unusual for the area, in 25 years of living here), just no precipitation. And you know what Seattle is known for, especially in the winter? But when we do get precipitation, it’s warm enough in the mountains that it comes down as rain, not snow. Rough year to be a ski area.
>If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.
This is a certainty.
Scientists have been ringing the bell since at least the late 60's and our only reaction was to laugh at them and floor the accelerator pedal and continuously increase our emissions over 5 decades. It is unlikely to change with the AI boom.
That is delusionnal. The growth is globally way too slow and too late to have a major impact, especially when the climate is already provoking chain reactions like the large emissions from melting permafrost.
Apparel firms exist not to clothe people as common sense would suggest but to make a profit, and this practice of erring on the side of overproduction is more profitable than under production. The perfect solution would be to produce exactly the number of goods they will sell, but forecasts aren't perfect so they overproduce. Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste, so this adds another incentive and removes the pollution externality they have been enjoying. So now either they err closer to under-production and risk missing out on sales or secondary market supply of their goods increases leading to possible brand dilution. So in the end the value of these companies ends up lower than before, less pollution, and apparel is cheaper. I'd like to know more about the equity and carbon effects of the process they will need to now follow. So they trade destruction with shipping a crate to Africa. What is the difference? Firms will be less profitable, manufacturing is reduced, who is impacted by that?
> Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste
Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt cheap to produce, that they have less of an incentive to let it go to waste. When I buy socks they get holes after wearing them 7 times, and then they go in the bin too.
Update: I made a silly math mistake. That's $9 profit per shirt. So if you make 100 shirts but only sell 50 and burn the rest, that's $450 profit. You make $4.50 per shirt manufactured.
Stated another way: you can total up the manufacturing cost of the shirts you destroyed ($50) and distributed evenly among the ones you sold (50/50=$1 each) and just add that to the cost of each shirt you sell when calculating profit. Same result.
This would been that more competition would be good for the environment because it would drive down prices and margins, and thus the incentive to overproduce. But this rule actually decreases the competitive pressure and increases margins because market exit barriers = market entry barriers
There is in France a kind of shared network of hot water used to heat up our homes (well, those that are connected and paying into the system at least). Part of the system works by burning trash and capturing the heat in the process. Supposedly they also work on using renewable energies to do the work.
Some people argue that the whole system is going against the objectives of recycling stuff but at least it's better than just burning it to get rid of it.
This isn't exactly a supply and demand situation that might cause prices to increase by restricting supply, like what you sometimes see with global commodity cartels such as oil.
What's happening in this case is that they are overproducing because profit margins are high enough that they can overproduce and still be happy with the profit after discarding the extra, in the hope of capturing the stochastic upside of extra sales from never being out of stock.
This might cause various random fast fashion junk items to occasionally go out of stock when they wouldn't have in the past, but it's not like you're going to see long waiting lists or high aftermarket prices. People just won't buy that stuff because there will be lots of alternatives, are they just won't buy anything at all and realize they don't need it.
So yes, in an abstract textbook sense, the price might go up in the sense that you might experience some probability of your desired items selling out when that probability was lowered before. But I don't think anybody in their right mind would argue that's a serious economic detriment.
Maybe there's a case to be made that this is a crude way to address what is essentially an allocation failure. But that alone doesn't mean that we shouldn't try it or that it's bad policy.
Economically, producing less to start with is not very different from what is currently done, destroying excess inventory. Therefore I don't think it's at all a given that prices will go up.
The only error in the whole post. I think it's more productive to ignore that and focus on the important stuff... which is about why this kind of market interference isn't going to work out the way a naive optimist would hope.
Overproduction is not an issue. The issue is that they damage unsold things instead selling them for a market price dictated by supply and demand.
This is not only clothing and apparel, also sporting goods and many other items.
This should be forbidden across all industries. Unsold stock should be delivered to non-profits at no cost for further distribution.
If you can't prove that you either sold or transfer to non-profit an item you manufactured then you should be fined for each unaccounted item proportionally to their market price.
Not always a win. There have been a few reports that sending large numbers of clothing donations to areas that don't specifically need them has the result of harming local industry that would otherwise be able to produce and sell clothes.
OK, send them somewhere else or sell them at a discount
but brand dilution
I don't care. If you over produce then you made a bad economic decision, tough luck. Destroying goods for accounting reasons is an abhorrent policy driven by greed.
This is kinda the real thing at play here... and the 'wave' in the economics;
After all, the company could have arguably instead produced fewer product, sold what they have already sold for the same price, paid their workers the same amount of money to do less work, they wouldn't have to pay for the destroyed goods, and wouldn't have had to pay for the wasted input materials...
The appearal industry is among the most exploitive in the world. It's good to kill it before it springs up. Bangladesh is not anyone's example of a model country.
You seem so certain despite having it backwards as likely as not.
the western ordered cheap quality overproduction solution of swamping developing countries with it, where much also ends in a trash heap, means they can continue the exploitive and environmentally destructive mass production.
Smaller local industries would be economically better for the countries, supply more aligned so less waste, and there’d be less of the bad factories in Bangladesh.
I'm specifically talking about local, small business. Giant companies usually have better labor protections in the 3rd-4th world than small buisness does.
people making clothes for themselves to and to sell in a subsistence living style isnt quite comparable though, and not working exploitatively to extract the wealth from labour to a different country has a value of its own
The US and I assume Europe have laws against "dumping" - selling a product for below cost - because it drives local competitors out of business. That is exactly what shipping containers full of clothes to Africa does.
The funny thing is that textbook economics has all of the answers about why laissez-faire market economics doesn't work as a foundation for economic policy. It's almost as if it's never been about making good policy and always about doing whatever is best for big businesses and the small number of wealthy people who stand to gain the most from minimizing consumer surplus.
totally. In fact the current monopoly-coddling dispensation is antithetical to market economics, which clearly espouses real competition. It's kinda been coopted and hijacked.
It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
You should check out "Ascension" (it is on Paramount unfortunately). It gives a pretty close up look at China and factory culture and how their entire country is mobilized to push maximum consumption. The corporation's don't view Americans high per-capita consumption as a problem but instead wonder how to drive the rest of the world to consume the same absurd amount. It gives you a sort of fly on the wall view of the whole thing and it really makes you question what kind of psychotic road we are barreling down.
I agree with you about food though. I care about food and healthcare, very occasionally transportation. Can we focus on those instead of all the bullshit "amenities" corporations are churning out, are we really gonna decimate the planet for clothes, cosmetics and plastic conveniences?
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
It's good exactly because of this. Every company is pushing us to consume more, and Wall Street is at the top of this, growth at all costs (including human lives, mental health, just anything)
Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.
We should be making shoes which lasts 4 years, clothes which last at least 2 years with no "fashion" industry pushing us to change it every 2 days.
Not trying to pick apart your point but I rotate a small set of staple clothes and they’re in fine condition after two years (haven’t had much time for clothes shopping since toddler arrived), despite me abusing “quick wash” and “drycare 40c” constantly on Miele W1/T1 stack for “90 minute, good to fold” laundry.
I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.
Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)
Plus, I may be deluded but I’m of the opinion that polo shirts and jeans/neutral trousers are a multi-decade winning combination.
I might add, I've had some pretty long lasting clothes with Gildan heavy weight 100% cotton, and a few wool shirts I rotate. I think there are a few tricks that I accidently stumbled on to making my clothes last a long time: Firstly, I use mild detergents, and usually set the machine to "tap cold". I haven't noticed that my clothes are less clean. Secondly, I usually air dry on a rack instead of a dryer. I was forced to do this when I lived in an apartment, and suspect that this is a big factor. Thirdly, and maybe the most important, I spent some time learning what colors I look best in. Turns out there is quite a rabbit hole you can go down in terms of styling your clothes to match not what you "like" but what compliments your skin tone, body shape, and so on.
I actually think the last point has been profound, because I rarely _feel_ like buying clothes, because I look good in whatever Is in my closet.
For reference, I cycle through about 7 t-shirts. I wear the same one in the gym. I have a pair of rotten clothes for when I'm farming or hunting, but my daily clothes endure more daily wear and tear than urban living for sure.
making low quality items that wear out quickly and influencing people to over consume just so big businesses profit more is not "using resources to make life better"
Shoes which last 4 years and clothes which last 2 years are widely available, if you want them. They're not particularly expensive. But many consumers prefer to buy less robust items that won't hold up to daily wear and then complain about longevity.
It is ok companies think like that. It is not ok we let them do it without any limits or regulations. We just need to be careful with unintended side effects and tighten the controls carefully
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
This regulation is not about consumption but about production. Yes, this would not solve the potential over-consumption (I agree generally with what you say) - people actually buying shit they use once - but imagine how bad it is if for each shit used once the company produce 3x that shit...
> most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
It shouldn't be cheap. The world got used to the luxury of cheap meat by being unethical and harmful to the environment (humans' environment) and animals.
Cows are insanely resource-intensive to farm, bad for the air, bad for the water, bad for the land. Factory-farmed chicken meat is infamously inhumane, using genetic mutants to produce more meat faster, as well as being bad for the environment. They require more land and water use just to produce the feed for the animals. Both produce toxic runoff that goes into our water and land. Drugs pumped into animals land in us or our water, causing cancer or breeding superbugs. And we accept all these negatives so we can buy a cheap burger we don't need (we have plenty of other food).
Pigs are actually pretty sustainable, as are rabbits, goats, and venison. We used to eat a lot more of them, before the factory animal farms changed our diets to prefer cow and chicken.
How are pigs, rabbits, goats and venison more sustainable? Unless you mean eating meat twice a year.
I live in a farmer family; our cattle needs around one hectare each, because we don't feed them processed food, only grass; because concentrated food is even less sustainable, and more importantly, more expensive than letting them roam (fenced areas)
Rabbit is not sustainable. There were some people trying to commercially rise and sell them and it didn't work. They would need concentrated food, which is expensive.
Goat meat is much more expensive than cows because they are less efficient than cows and pigs and chicken. I know two people who rise goats to sell them, and it doesn't make them money; really, they do it because they kind of like the critters as a pet project.
Only pigs and chickens are more sustainable, precisely because of theirinhumane(?) short life and their genetics. They are very efficient meat producers.
I know poor people who rise chickens and pigs; those animals take longer to reach "maturity", and the meat is not tender; but since the animals are eating whatever they scavenge, it can't be done at scale; again, we would eat meat like twice a year (This might be an exageration, but chicken pig and cow farms really produce all the meat we eat; of those only cows eat grass under the sun)
By sustainable I mean its impact on the environment, animals and humans. I don't mean how profitable or easy it is.
Rabbit is one of the most sustainable livestock. It requires less food to produce more rabbits and they don't need much land. A single female produces ~50 kits per season, taking 8-12 weeks to come to market. Ironically, they aren't considered livestock by USDA, so you can skip most of the red tape. As far as feed goes, there are many options that will depend on the farmer; pelleted feed is the best but most costly, so you can mix in either foraging or supplement with various other feeds like different hays, oats, etc. Whether it's economical depends on a number of factors, but there's over 3,000 rabbit farms in USA right now.
Same with goats, very sustainable. In many places like islands, goat is the preferred livestock as it requires less land and feed. And obviously you can forage goats in places most animals won't since they'll eat nearly any plants.
Pigs (and other livestock) historically were raised through the year and only slaughtered in winter. It's the last 100 years that has completely changed how and when people in the West eat meat, people's assumptions about how we must farm, how we must eat, etc. Our diets don't have to remain the way we are. For example, since Chinese people prefer to eat pork, they actually have half the world's pig livestock. We like beef so we have a lot of cows. It could've been reversed if our cultural tastes were different. Similarly, we could just eat less meat, and our tastes would develop towards the whole universe of non-meat foods.
Families would raise one pig they would slaughter once a year and it would be a regular source of preserved meat and fat over the following year.
All of this was pre "green" revolution so it has to be carbon neutral at that level of consumption(which is admittedly lower than that of most people these days).
Eating meat once a year is an exaggeration when it comes to pork.
For all the grievances people made against food pyramid, this is actually the real reason why it was instituted. Meat has always been expensive, and with limited money people had, they'd rather spend it all on grains and save the money for something else. Food pyramid encourages people to at least add some proteins in their diet. And it works, people's height had been increasing decade-by-decade.
In a way, the movement to disparage food pyramid because it institutes too much grain really seems like a first world problem. Especially any that encourages more meat.
You have already gotten two answers showing why this causes the manufacturer to lose money. A third: I hike, enough that pretty much all my gear out there is the good stuff. I do not care one bit about brands and would prefer not to be an ad for the outdoor companies--but I am anyway because it's not just a name.
Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. People like me don't want that big X on our stuff, if we learn Y is the same thing we are going to buy Y. And next year their sales of X drop because people like me waiting for the secondary stuff. Thus even if you do not consider brand dilution it's still in their interest to not sell the technical stuff in the secondary channels. When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
> Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y.
Does that actually happen? What I see happening instead in the bike clothing market is that either after the season, or if a new design is to be unveiled after several seasons, the items gets heavily discounted (often more than 50%). It's just your decision if you need the most expensive newest items right now or you buy possibly older or out of season designs much cheaper. But the branding is also very much integrated, so it would be hard to change the branding on an existing item.
There are a few brands that try to limit this and keep the discounts in check like Assos, but that only means it's harder to find a heavily discounted item, still possible.
> When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
Sure, if you can find customers that accept that, why not. In that case just manufacture fewer items.
50% discounts on technical stuff are basically only the very last ones that are unlikely to be your size. Real world, you're not likely to do better than 20% off. It's in the manufacturer's interest that I know it's unlikely I can find a better sale.
Note that I'm talking technical stuff, not designer stuff.
Am currently riding in an Assos winter jacket, midlayer and pants that were about 50% off and far from last pieces. Also a 7mesh winter jersey with 50% off but that was indeed last piece of that color.
This feels like the argument for why not deflationary currency. Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary. Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.
That is inflationary. Goods costing more monetary units is inflation. In deflation same amount of monetary units buys more goods. So you would want to sell your house now if you have other options and then next year you could buy similar house and still have monetary units left over...
Deflationary currency is like a highway that you're allowed to park on. People will park their car on the highways and then charge you a fee to let you through.
>Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary.
Uhm, if money is deflationary, your house will be worth less than X denominated in the deflationary currency. This means if the money grows in value faster you'd sell all your assets as quickly as possible and replace it with a useless scrap of paper.
>Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.
Again, if money is deflationary, you'd hold onto money and wait for house prices to drop with the aforementioned mechanic.
You might say this is appealing, but the problem is that your income depends on other people's spending and they have the same incentive as you do, which is to earn more than you spend. That's something that is not possible in aggregate, where total aggregate spending and total aggregate income must always be equal. This is a zero sum game purely mathematically and this is not a moral judgement but an explanation how the rules work.
When people follow the rules of the game, something weird happens. The promised outcome of a wealthy society from everyone being prudent savers doesn't emerge. The reason is as follows: If you have 1 million paper notes that represent the wealth of the entire nation and the value of the paper notes goes up, the represented wealth of the entire nation goes up, but the nation still has the same 1 million paper notes. No matter how much value people try to save in the form of money, they will still only have paper notes.
Those paper notes do not have intrinsic value and that is for a good reason. Giving the paper notes intrinsic value doesn't change the fundamentals, it just makes the tokens more expensive to produce. It's like having a golden toilet.
If money is worthless, then trying to give it non-transient value is a fools errand. Trying to say that a house is equally as valuable as a small bundle of cotton fabric is only acceptable for the purposes of accounting, but saying that the same bundle of cotton fabric (whose value is decreed) ought to buy more house next year is batshit insane. You couldn't come up with a better system to reward laziness and idleness.
This is a big blow to High-end Luxury Branded Companies, Many of these companies willfully destroy unsold inventory to not devalue their Brand. Manufacturing costs are just 1/20th of the marketed price.
Most probably, the returned items just sit in the warehouse of the companies than selling to ordinary customers. Golden times for warehouse companies.
I think these rules should have a pre-determined shelf life. They are not bad at the current state of the world - they push in the right direction - but they complicated law, and I bet there will be many second-level outcomes that are hard to predict now. Besides that - once the capabilities for reuse are built - they should be sustainable - so the second level outcomes will actually dominate.
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
How is it you dont have winter anymore but when it gets cold it gets stupidly cold?
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
> The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.
Where I currently live has about the same climate as it did 20 years ago. More variability, I think (people started complaining about weird harvest times about 10 years ago, and we're now all used to chaotic year-on-year yields), but roughly the same averages. Flood infrastructure needs maintenance, but not a redesign. However, the behaviour of the migratory wildlife has changed, and you only have to travel a few dozen miles before you reach somewhere that has needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure.
"A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.
If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust.
This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.
It's a terrible idea because approximately 90% of the cost of clothing is not in producing it, but in the supply chain - keeping it in stock, transporting it to and from warehouses, the manpower needed to organize and sorting and inspect it.
So by saving the 10% of the cost of the clothing, you end up wasting way more in labor and transport and inventory costs. All of which ends up way worse for the environment than had you just shredded it and treated it as compost.
The clothing that ends up in the landfill also needed to be transported, stored and organized. So if you don't produce those clothes to begin with you not only save the pollution and resource usage that would come from producing it, but also the pollution and resource usage from transporting, etc. It may _cost_ the company more, but only producing what can be sold will be strictly less polluting.
There's no way to perfectly forecast demand; all things equal I'd prefer that companies overproduce and we live in an age of plenty with a bit of waste (which companies are already incentivized to avoid), rather than face shortages in goods.
I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet.
The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.
Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.
It's partly explained by all the non-US contributors here. That's my theory.
Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.
Most software developers are not founders, but they like to hang out here for the news and community anyway. It used to be a lot more libertarian back when I joined (even more so when I only occasionally lurked) but things have shifted rather dramatically over time.
In evaporative cooling, the warmer particles are more prone to evaporate and escape leaving the remaining substance cooler than it was. Likewise, as individuals with more of a libertarian or founder-sympathizing mindset stopped contributing to HN as much, the overall tone of the site turned more negative against business and successful founders.[1] I don't want to speculate too much on why they started leaving--I hope it's because they all got too busy being successful founders--but once the effect started to happen and HN turned into less and less of a site for founders to discuss their startups and turned more and more into the proverbial peanut gallery, I think a feedback loop started pushing more of them away.
mftrhu is probably correct in attributing the origin of the analogy but I don't specifically remember where I got it from and I think some of the examples EY gives in that essay would be uncalled for to apply as a direct analogy to HN. HN was never a doomsday cult and I'm not even trying to say that all of the smart and reasonable people left HN, but rather that there was a specific attitude and mentality that's not well represented here anymore.
[1] This is oversimplified. Classic HN still had lots of people complaining about big tech companies, it's just that the criticism was usually voiced from the perspective of another founder rather than from the perspective of a progressive critic. For instance, I remember lots of complaints about Apple's arbitrary and capricious App Store policies, but then that directly affects the startup founder who wants to build an iPhone app.
Why would it require becoming a billionaire to benefit? A lot of big companies are able to purchased by the public. There are even fractional shares which lowers the bar even further in being able to get exposure to these companies.
> The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services
Some of us like the intent of the law but are wondering what the consequences of the law are.
We have already seen all the schemes that corporations use for greenwashing. We have already seen all the recycling that isn't. Most of us assume that these corporations will simply do the absolute minimum they have to do to comply with the letter of the law. That likely means "selling" crates of these clothes back to some country willing to discard or destroy them.
In addition, we already have a ton of problems from Always Late Inventory(tm), and this seems like it's going to add to that. Are you even slightly outside of the normal body shape? Sorry, no stock for you evermore.
I think the law is a good idea, but, sadly, laws mean nothing without implementation. The devil is in the details.
I am not against this in spirit but what are the higher order effects and unintended consequences?
The only thing that is more annoying to me than market fundamentalist, neo-liberal bullshit is emotional appeals that sound right on paper but have a total disregard for higher order effects and unintended consequences.
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." - (probably not) John Steinbeck
I guess with inflation we can update the quote to “temporarily embarrassed billionaires”
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
I was in the bar in Revelstoke (where I lived, at the time) chatting with an old-timer the other year, and I asked him "is it just me, or did it used to snow more?"
He laughed, and told me that when he was a kid growing up, they weren't allowed to play on the tops of snowbanks because you'd get electrocuted by the high tension power lines. At the time, mid-winter, it was raining outside with a sad pile of slush maybe 1 foot deep.
Even when I was a kid in Revy, snowbanks were 10' deep mid-winter, every winter. It's been raining in town for the last 5 years, all winter. Winter's over. Time to start surfing, I guess.
"Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare."
Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.
If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.
If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it!
But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some winters are colder than average. This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
They could, but it’s a tradeoff. Inventory costs money and if you cut production, that means laying off workers and possibly selling productive assets, at which point it becomes more expensive to scale production back up.
Every business decision is a tradeoff. Smart government interventions in the economy add weight to that tradeoff to reflect externalities not otherwise accounted for; this is how cap-and-trade on SO2 emissions works. Hamfisted government interventions set hard and fast rules that ignore tradeoffs and lead to unintended consequences.
I don't think this is accurate. It's more that the textiles are produced in Asia and transported in containers.
Due to the high shipping costs, they err on the side of filling up the containers to cover the fixed cost. After selling the clothes, there might be enough clothes left over to fill shipping containers to return the clothes, but they will be clothes from different brands and manufacturers.
It would require extraordinary coordination on both the origin and destination country to return the clothes to the manufacturer where they could add the left over clothes to the next batch that is being shipped out to a different country.
Do we really need warehouses full of "just in case" inventory? It's not life or death, it's just slightly more profitable for companies to overproduce than it is for them to attempt to meet demand exactly.
Climate change is coming, fast and brutal. I'm okay with these multi-billion-dollar revenue companies making a few points less in profits, if it means slowing climate change by even a fraction of a fraction of a point.
They don't need those profits. But our children need a viable planet.
Companies can't meet demand exactly, no matter what profit margin they take, because it's not possible to predict demand exactly. Biasing towards overproduction is how you minimize the risk of shortages when there's a bit more demand than you expected.
as far as a market clearing problem goes, we should be forcing them to sell it at lower and lower prices, or even going to negative and payoyng people to take it off their hands.
supply and demand is that an oversupply makes prices fall, rather than driving artificial scarcity
Well, it sounds like that's what the EU is going to try. My guess is that the manufacturers are mostly destroying stuff for economically rational reasons, and will respond with production cuts leading to that same artificial scarcity from a consumer perspective.
(Although the original commenter would say, I suspect, that it's perfectly OK if there are minor consumer shortages in luxury goods for the sake of the climate.)
> This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
Clothes are something extremely overabundant in the EU. And even if they weren't, the unexpected overdemand will result in just using your old coat another year or buying one you like less. Workers are being unnecessarily exploited and resources are being unnecessarily wasted... so I think nudging companies in the right direction is way overdue. Will it work the way EU thinks? Probably not. Just like GDPR was well-intended, but the result is higher entry barrier to new companies and a bunch of annoying popups. But I'd argue that's a result of "not enough" regulation rather than "too much". Companies caught abusing our data should have been outright banned IMHO.
What about cases where 2 pieces of clothing when bundled together have value due to making it more efficient for people to find the right size, but over the right size is found the other becomes waste? A company can't prevent a consumer from ruining the wasted clothes.
But that is how physical stores currently work, where you can try the stuff on, before you buy it? If you care about this, you can of course take the upper one to try on, like all do and then buy the lowest one. But you wash the clothing anyways before actually wearing them, so it doesn't really matter. Honestly I don't get your point.
The worth is zero because the producer doesn't pay for the externalities (pollution, landfill usage etc). So essentially it is "free" because it is subsidized by everyone.
The "headache" is just : produce what you sell, sell what you produce, don't fill the world with your shit.
Also: this will lead to it being harder to find clothing in your size in the EU (since each size is a new sku and must be inventory managed per the law)
In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.
What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.
It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
I buy mostly from liquidators, where everything is sold as-is, but that doesn't stop end users from trying to make a claim, so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty. For example, Ryobi brands the items with a plastic welder, leaving a tell-tale wavy mark.
A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who participate, so finding ways to allow products to be truly sold as-is is vital, otherwise the next most logical option is to put those items in a landfill.
It's also important that there's no legislative hurdles to seelling items as-is, or there may be no legal way to sell a salvage products without completely overhauling them, which is usually not cost effective.
> so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty
With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.
But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as not eligible for warranty. They just want that coverage
We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products they bought through gray market channels.
This is mostly how statutory warranty works in most countries. It’s actually the retailer who bares the responsibility, but good/big manufacturers will just provide the same direct to consumers.
What do you mean, 'statutory warranty'? At least in the US, aside from a few specific circumstances (door to door sales for example with a '3 day cool off' period) there is no mandatory return policy or timeline.
There is a U.S. federal law which gives warranty of merchantability among others (not sure about E.U.).
A major store sold me an expensive item that didn't work, and the store's return policy didn't cover it, so the store said file a warranty claim with the manufacturer. I just did a credit card charge back instead, because the store has to sell me something that works.
If for whatever reason the credit card charge back didn't work, I could use the store in (small claims) court and win.
AI: "The implied warranty of merchantability is a legal guarantee that a product will function as expected for its ordinary purpose, such as a toaster toasting bread. It is automatically applied to most consumer goods sold by merchants and does not need to be in writing."
Resellers fraudulently claiming a liquidated item is new, or that they are an authorized distributor allowing for the product to be warranted, is its own problem. It's usually not a large enough fraud that it's worth it for law-enforcement to follow up on, but generally online marketplaces, like eBay, have their own enforcement practices to keep traffic away from fraudulent sellers.
On the author hand, Amazon has made it difficult to avoid fraudulent sellers, but they also don'e even sort items by price when that option is selected, so I avoid buying through their site.
It's not like you wouldn't have this problem anyway though? Like customers have a % of crazy people regardless.
I mean the "ididnthaveeggs" subreddit exists purely to make light of people who post reviews on recipe sites where they overtly use the wrong ingredients and then downvote the recipe as a result.
Hah, I just read a one-star review on Goodreads, because the narrator was boring. Goodreads is reviewing the book itself, not an audiobook adaptation.
Also, all I could think of was the Seinfeld episode where George wanted audio books, because he couldn't stand reading in his own voice, but the narrator ended up sounding exactly like him.
Goodreads also has listings for audiobooks. Reviewing the narrator in an audiobook is like reviewing the font choice in a paper book. Both are legitimate. (If someone's posting a review of an audiobook to the listing of the main format, that's wrong)
> We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products
These days this is often the only recourse you have, because going the legal route you get stonewalled unless you are willing to spend serious money on pursuing a case. And it'll cost you gobs of time. An example is my mother buying new pants for 220 bucks from a reputable seller, the stitching starts to disintegrate after 7 months, and both the retailer and the manufacturer tell my mother to go pound sand.
So please do not portray customers trying to get their due as "ragebaiters".
> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.
Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling.
If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:
1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.
2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation
3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then
the recycler will have undoubtedly violated a contract they have with ExampleCo and will lose in civil court and pay significant penalties greater than the money they made selling never worn ExampleCo jeans and also, undoubtedly, suffer from not having ExampleCo as a customer for their services in the future.
But the recycler has all the papers and documentation that they lawfully contracted an overseas company for wholesale recycle of the product. What's your civil court's jurisdiction? You might be able to play wack-a-mole with ebay, temu, alibaba express sellers through civil court in your jurisdiction assuming you have the money of course.
I'm supposing ExampleCo's civil court's jurisdiction covers the recycler's location, otherwise ExampleCo would have really stupid management.
I'm supposing the contract with the recycler would hold the recycler liable, and whatever third party contracts they made with another company would not matter one bit. If ExampleCo contracts with RecycleCo to recycle pants and they do not get recycled then RecycleCo is liable to ExampleCo, yes RecycleCo has contracts with OverseasRecycleCo and it is up to RecycleCo to sue OverseasRecycleCo to recoup the losses they had to pay to ExampleCo; ExampleCo will probably not be suing OverseasRecycleCo, they will take their pound of flesh out of RecycleCo. All of this of course implies that they have some way of verifying that pants they find out in the world are in fact pants that should have been recycled.
What jurisdiction will the suit between RecycleCo and OverseasRecycleCo be taking place in? Depends on the location of the two entities, and possibly also on contractual conditions.
I totally admit that it is not ideal to sue over breaches of contract, it is almost always preferable that breaches not happen because when breaches don't happen it means that things are going the way you specified that they should go and you should be happy.
But let's go to another point here:
what is it about recycling that means that clothes will be taken and resold instead of recycled in greater numbers than clothes that were supposed to be destroyed? Nowadays clothes that are meant to be destroyed are sometimes not, and sold and ExampleCo suffers in the same way as they would with recycled clothes. I suppose ExampleCo must be able to tell if clothes that they find out on third party sites are among clothes that should have been destroyed nowadays otherwise this whole thing is moot and exactly the same as it is now.
Sometimes clothes are stolen from trucks and trains and sold, will this stop happening because of all these clothes that were supposed to have been recycled destroying the market for stolen clothes?
Most non-authorized sales of ExampleCo pants are not actually lower quality ExampleCo pants destined for destruction but fake ExampleCo pants, because ExampleCo as a brand is just so exciting that there are lots of fake ones made, because most pants that are sent for destruction are destroyed and only some are diverted to resellers.
Will the surplus of pants from ExampleCo that were supposed to be recycled but for some reason are not because "oh no, it is impossible to sue people in this new world with recycling going on" going to be so great in amount that instead of completely fake ExampleCo pants there will instead be only ExampleCo pants of lower than normal ExampleCo pants quality?
Why exactly will lower than normal quality ExampleCo pants destroy the brand value of ExampleCo more than counterfeit ExampleCo pants? Are counterfeit ExampleCo pants better than real ExampleCo pants that failed some part of QA process?
Frankly a lot of the argumentation as to how recycling opens up the doors to destroying the value of ExampleCo seems specious, in that it seems like it would not damage ExampleCo any more than it can currently be damaged by breaches of contract where destruction of inventory is concerned or other civil and criminal acts.
What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels? Or why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?
I suspect this will need to be a cultural change. If ExampleCo does it but not RandomCo, of course your reputation will suffer. But if the law is for all of EU, it gives everyone an equal footing.
> What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels?
They can. Doesn’t help with the reputational damage though. People who think they bought an ExampleCo jean will still think that the company quality has slipped. They will still tell all their friends that the “new jeans made by ExampleCo are not like they used to”. Not all of them all the time, but some of them some of the time.
> why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?
Especially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.
Had this recently, bought a dehumidifier for a good price, marked as new - arrived and had obviously been opened and didn't work. Out of a desire to have a dehumidifier sooner than later I was about to open it up when I saw it already had been, so I opened a return instead and sent it back.
I can only assume it is worth it for the seller to sell untested goods as new, a good number must work long enough for the buyer to be happy.
I still remember Fry's Electronics and trying to find anything that hadn't been opened-returned-reshinkwrapped. Often it was impossible. Not sure why they had so many but eh whatever, it mostly worked fine.
It’s not hard to mark things as defective, liquidated, etc. so those eBay sellers can face fraud charges. We shouldn’t be sending stuff to landfills just to save a few pennies in permanent marker.
There are people in jail for this right now who presumably don’t find it funny, and in this scenario the volume would be high enough that prosecutors would definitely be interested.
And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.
The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.
No, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.
I think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.
If I donate something on the premise that it's going to be used for some charitable cause and then it just ends up on some skuzzy listing on ebay, that would, at best, be deceitful. It's "good" insofar as the item is not being dumped in some landfill but it's not "good" insofar as it was obtained through deception.
Beautiful insight into processes that most of us never see, thanks!
My initial thought was "reusing an item is even better than recycling" but then realized that a warrantied item is quite likely to have flaws and get warrantied again very soon.
I have recently been trolling eBay for used computing equipment rather than buying new, after it was suggested I sell my old hardware that I don't think anyone would want. And man has that been a great experience, it's way more fun than browsing Newegg or doing pc part picking from new catalogs. I need neither the compute hardware nor the cost savings but it's a fun activity on its own, not unlike so many computer games where you do deck optimization or similar.
I heard that the clothes especially from high end brands are destroyed to keep the value of the brand high ie not to cannibalize sales. Which doesnt seem like good enough reason to burn 300.000+t of clothes (that created untold emissions)
Do high-end brands even produce 300 kilotons of clothing? Assuming, very generously, that a piece of clothing, with packaging and all, weights 1 kg, it would be 300M pieces of clothing; that could be an entire production run of something very ubiquitous (say, Levi's 501), but definitely not high-end.
I think that tonnage is for all textiles, not just high-end clothing.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
Not covered by this regulation in spirit and (probably, haven't read it yet) in text. The spirit of the regulation is targeting fast-fashion on-prem retailers (think H&M, Primark, Zara and the likes) and online retailers like Shein, who have heaps of products that just aren't sold because they're not wanted - and also the occasional luxury brand trying to maintain scarcity [1].
> but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.
This is also very detrimental to buyer experience. When you search for a specific new product, prices from different sellers can vary widely. Most often there is no way to tell what is the reason for the difference. Is the cheapest offer simply the best deal, or is it a refurbished product, or even a fake?
>but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out.
I used to work in IT Recycling and I feel like I was for some time, this process.
We would take stock to be destroyed from refurbishment/replacement pipelines, fix it up "just enough" and if we werent worried about serialisation, it would go out via eBay, otherwise it would be gifted to clients who would say it was for their kids but I had suspicions that sometimes it was going back into retail eventually.
I still have a lot of shit that should have been destroyed.
This does happen: for example in Macbook repair, it is common to buy defective motherboards, in order to salvage the chips off them (which are apple-specific, hence not purchasable elsewhere). Those boards often come from China, and often have holes drilled in them, I guess exactly to prevent them from being repaired.
It's a shame, because some of those boards could (and would, they are valuable enough) be fully repaired by a skilled repair person. Instead, the chips are picked off and the rest goes to waste.
I did buy a batch once that didn't have holes drilled, and they all turned out to have all sorts of strange, often random issues, so I suspect those were RMAs that somehow "fell off the back of a truck" and escaped the drilling.
Probably, but part of the point of outsourcing the recycling was that you wouldn't have to set up infrastructure, process and people for that. If they weren't crooked, you could even have customers ship the products directly to the recycler. To drill it first, then you are paying for shipping twice, on an item that is already worthless to you.
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
If you had bothered to read TFA, you'd have understood that the rules only apply to products that have fully passed QA, were being kept as stock but ended up not selling. They don't apply to experimental batches, to defective or damaged items, etc...
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.
They quite clearly are. Burberry was caught a while ago https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983, but it's well known that every major upmarket brand was doing it to avoid the loss of prestige of sending the items to outlets.
you can try to reason with the people who post comments like the one you're responding to, but the truth is they are just there waiting for anything a regulator does to desparage it, defend corporate and capital, and change nothing about the status quo. The worst part is that they do it thinking they are so edgy for knowing exactly why just another piece of regulation will clearly not work.
Funnily enough, the EU track record proves that, apart from some exceptions, these type of regulations work really well.
USB-C. Data Roaming across all of Europe. Laws on single use plastics. Etc.
But yeah, it's just another regulation! EU BAD!
It’s a fair criticism, but note the Draghi report:
“The regulatory burden on European companies is high and continues to grow, but the EU lacks a common methodology to assess it. The Commission has been working for years to reduce the "stock" and "flow" of regulation under the Better Regulation agenda. However, this effort has had limited impact so far. The stock of regulation remains large and new regulation in the EU is growing faster than in other comparable economies. While direct comparisons are obscured by different political and legal systems, around 3,500 pieces of legislation were enacted and around 2,000 resolutions were passed in the US at the federal level over the past three Congress mandate:
(2019-2024). During the same period, around 13,000 acts were passed by the EU. Despite this increasing flow of regulation, the EU lacks a quantitative framework to analyse the costs and benefits of new laws.”
I agree with Draghi 100%, he’s a genius and I would love to see him take Von Der Leyen’s place.
That said, the original comment has a very different intent.
> you can try to reason with the people who post comments like the one you're responding to, but the truth is they are just there waiting for anything a regulator does to desparage it, defend corporate and capital, and change nothing about the status quo. The worst part is that they do it thinking they are so edgy for knowing exactly why just another piece of regulation will clearly not work. Funnily enough, the EU track record proves that, apart from some exceptions, these type of regulations work really well. USB-C. Data Roaming across all of Europe. Laws on single use plastics. Etc. But yeah, it's just another regulation! EU BAD!
How about extending others some good faith?
These are political disagreements with decades (sometimes centuries) of history, and unless you're fifteen years old, there's a better explanation for the fact that others disagree with you than "I am the single smartest person in the universe, and all my political opinions are so irrefutably correct that anyone who disagrees must be doing so in bad faith and out of ignorance".
The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.
> The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.
I'd personally disagree with that assessment. I think the vast majority of people want what's best for them and the cohorts they're in. Which is quite different from wanting what's best for society as a whole.
> These are political disagreements with decades (sometimes centuries) of history, and unless you're fifteen years old, there's a better explanation for the fact that others disagree with you
The better explanation is that they have acquired their political tastes mindlessly and are now defending them in an equal manner. The presumption of good faith is wasted on them.
> The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.
That's incorrect. Just take a look at the housing situation in the US: what's best for society is to build, but a majority of the people (the current owners) are blocking that because it suits them.
> The presumption of good faith is wasted on them.
That's just assholery masquerading as enlightenment.
> That's incorrect. Just take a look at the housing situation in the US: what's best for society is to build, but a majority of the people (the current owners) are blocking that because it suits them.
Maybe if you call the majority stupid some more, that's famously convincing in a democracy. You'll definitely build sustainable coalitions for the policies you want this way.
Capital loves this kind of left wing politics. Off-putting and impotent.
I don't doubt that some luxury organizations destroy unsold inventory rather than allow it to diminish the status of their brand. My claim is that if they could have sold that inventory at a profit, they would have.
It's theirs to do with as they please. They paid for it to be made.
If you don't like how they run their business, don't buy the overpriced garbage they sell.
People seem to be so concerned about externalities like CO2 emissions, but it's difficult to believe this problem represents a scale even remotely meaningful in that area. It feels like the plastic straw bullshit that took over the US for a few years. A useless, symbolic gesture that causes far more harm than good.
As a side note, it's a weird feeling to jump to the defense of an industry I generally despise, but the regulation just seems so ludicrous.
>It's theirs to do with as they please. They paid for it to be made.
This is not how that works. You have to pay for things within a legal framework setup by the government. If the legal frameworks changes then you have to deal with that.
Indeed. The government represents a legal framework for us all to operate in together. Sure.
If I pay for something to be made, that something belongs to me. It becomes private property and (at least in the US) I'm free to destroy a thing I own.
If you want to talk about options for protecting the environment, that seems great. There are ways to destroy textiles without fouling rivers or the air.
The OP article raises the spectre of "CO2 emissions" and "pollution" but doesn't provide any meaningful data (units or scale) related to these concerns.
My claim is that there is no way this activity represents any reasonable scale of impact relative to those separate concerns and that we already have lots of regulation related to keeping our water and air clear.
We can discuss ideas about how to do even better on those fronts, but this does not seem like a great way to have a large impact, if the environment is the actual concern.
How about all the laborers who were able to feed their families making these products that were destroyed? What happens to them when the company decides next year to be more conservative and make less stuff?
I'm not advocating for waste, I'm just pointing out that legislation like this often (almost always) comes along with unintended consequences that wind up causing more harm than good.
> It becomes private property and (at least in the US) I'm free to destroy a thing I own.
Only within the confines of the law. If I buy a skyscraper I can’t blow it up without permits. I can’t burn trash in my yard in the middle of the city. I can’t tear down a landmark in a historical district, even if I own it.
Yes, these laws have unintended consequences. I think at the continental scale the EU operates every law or decision has that.
But the current incentives in the fashion market also has unintended consequences: companies producing a lot of garments only to destroy them to protect perceived intellectual property value.
And here's the thing: this brand image value is relative. So by forcing all companies to comply no one has to take the negative brand image hit that would be required to unilaterally decide to do this.
> My claim is that if they could have sold that inventory at a profit, they would have.
That's utterly incorrect. They don't just want profits - that would be easy to obtain by sending the merchandise to an outlet - they want high profits in a way that maintains high profits in the future too. Any discount "cheapens" the brand by giving customers the expectation of low(er) prices in the future.
Agreed. A good business will take both short and long term profit into consideration when making a decision. They will strive to maximize profit (within reason) in whatever they do.
I don’t presume to know anything about the fashion industry and generally find it uninteresting.
My point is that I assume the people running those businesses know what they’re doing. Many of them have been around for many decades.
I’m admittedly surprised to find so many people here with so much confidence in their own ability to effectively constrain an entire industry they obviously also know nothing about.
Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.
It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies.
One can speculate that this is an easy way to force the companies to pay for their externalities - given that production in third countries are much harder to touch for the EU.
Clothing items are so cheap to make it's hard to believe. I used to work in a distribution warehouse for a national baby and children's clothing chain. Containers would arrive from China and we'd enter items into the warehouse stock system. Cost basis for most items was under 10 cents.
> Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.
No they shouldn't. Sometimes it's not a matter of paying for the externalities. If you're doing harm at scale the only sane option is to stop doing that, period.
When we figured out that leaded gas was bad we didn't make companies pay for their negative externalities. We banned that shit and that was it.
> As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I remember watching a documentary in which they tracked a package of coffee returned to amazon (unopened). It traveled through half of Europe to end up in an incinerator in Slovakia, which is funny because amazon doesn't even operate there.
Big companies are doing a lot of weird shit because at their scale if it's even 1ct cheaper to burn 10 coffee pods vs reprocessing them back in their store it's going to make a huge difference in the long run.
Of course they're not. They're destroying goods that they can't sell at a profit because, for example, the cost of processing some unworn but returned goods outweighs the potential profit from those goods.
In TFA it's estimated that between 4% and 9% of clothing put on the EU market is destroyed before being worn. An admittedly high uncertainty, but even 4% of all clothing sold in the EU is still a heck of a lot of clothes.
Luxury brands do in fact intentionally destroy old stock to make sure their value doesn't drop due to excess supply. I suppose the next step is making everything extremely limited like hypercars?
However hypercars are not purposely limited. It takes an enormous amount of time and labor to build them unlike a handbag where the limit is artificial to sell more.
Are you serious? Pricing theory includes both supply and demand, and limiting supply makes the remaining items more valuable by dint of rarity. Companies absolutely limit supply on items to maximize profits. How is this even a question?
I personally know that L’oreal will buy back and destroy products of theirs from outlets, just to keep the prices up. These items are often bought in bulk on grey markets by discount outlets. Not only does L’oreal destroy the products, they pay for them to do so. None of this is shocking IMO.
> I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand
if a manufacturer finds it too complex to not overproduce and not add all kinds of negative externalities then their business model is flawed or they’re not up to the task.
either way, it isn’t “the bureaucrats” fault they’re overproducing, and they absolutely are overproducing.
It couldn't have been easily sold because brands establish a floor below they don't want to go with value to maintain their perceived premium.
It's been known for ages that they operate like this. Some more ethical ones cut off the labels from the garment before they sell it in bulk. Most will destroy the items altogether.
This legislation targets this vanity and I applaud it.
I don't see anything shocking here. Corporations doing corporatey things, which is maximizing profits and that can easily literally mean destroying unconsumed stuff since it would cost them 2 cents more per tonne to ship it and sell someplace cheaper. Ever heard the term economies of scale for example? Those distort many things in money flows.
Those corporations don't give a fuck about mankind, environment, future, long term stuff etc. Any approach to similar topics which gives them benefit of the doubt is dangerously naive and misguided from the start. It's up to society to enforce rules if its healthy and strong enough. Some are better off, some worse.
It's about preserving brand image. Destroying a product is favourable compared to selling it at a discount and making the brand you spent so much marketing appear "cheap".
They absolutely do, source: warehouse job where you occasionally just opened boxes of unsold merchandise and smashed them. Something something tax write off. I never understood it. US based personal experience from almost two decades ago so take it was a grain of salt.
Yeah, it is shocking. And that's why it needed to be legislated. Companies prove time and time again that they will take the easiest route to minimise losses and maximise profits, even if that means destroying the environment or wasting perfectly good merchandise to do so.
They're not destroying clothing because it's inherently unsellable, or hazardous, or damaged beyond repair. They destroy it because it's easier to dump excess stuff than it is to set up responsible channels to get rid of it.
Many "high fashion" shithouses intentionally destroy excess stock so that their precious branded status symbols can't get into the hands of the filthy proles, which would dilute their brand recognition.
These "regulatory burdens", as you call them, are the only thing holding back companies from further messing up the planet and I welcome them with open arms.
I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?
I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in.
It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.
You have an odd perception of what constitutes "micro-targetting".
Why apparel specifically? Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles.
Why was USB-C mandated specifically on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: it wasn't. It was mandated on smartphones in general, and Apple was the only company that specifically tried to fight the regulation because apparently they're special.
Slight correction: it wasn't even for smartphones alone, it was for portable devices in general [0]. As a consequence, all ebook devices like Kindle etc, vapes and other devices had to switch from Micro-USB to USB-C.
> Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles
If that's so bad, why is doing so the cheapest option? What makes you think you know better than the market what's wasteful?
> What makes you think that what's cost effective...involves optimally conserving resources
The words "cost" and "effective "perhaps?
> Polluting
Pollution is an economic externality. If I buy a shift and throw it out unworn, I've wasted only my own resources. (I'm paying for the landfill of course.)
You could argue that my wasting that shirt hurt you because I could have instead spent those resources on productive activity that benefits you, and therefore I had a duty to keep it -- but that's just communism with extra steps.
I am of the opinion that markets and prices, not EU regulators, should tell us where scarcity is. We're bad at optimizing manually for the same reason we're bad at guessing where program hotspots are. The market is a profiler.
Do you honestly believe this? Where did you study economics? This regulation is not about scarcity. It is about over abundance.
Overproduction is a failure mode in capitalist systems. The market can’t correct for this because negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
Actors in a capitalist system have an incentive to maximize profit. How is it profit-maximizing to pay to produce an item and throw it away unsold?
> negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
What is the unaccounted externality? Clothing makers pay for material inputs and labor inputs. They pay for transportation. If they discard goods, they pay for more transportation and for the landfill. What specific externality is unaccounted?
And you presume to know better than they do what to do with that energy? Do you think you have a general right to override people's resource allocation decisions when you believe they're being wasteful?
1. In this case, not using the energy at all would have been better.
2. The legislature of a sovereign polity would have, and be able to delegate, that right. If and when the legislature should make use of that right is a political question.
If disposing of my own shirt in a landfill I pay for is an "externality[y]" justifying state intervention, then every domain of life is subject to top down control. I don't want to live in a society in which resources are allocation in general by edict instead of the market.
Look it's not that hard. Is <problem> (in this case, pollution) a problem that needs solving? If the answer is yes, then it needs to be regulated even if you personally don't like laws. Sorry!
But why are you lying? It's not about you, no one is stopping you to go and throw everything you own in a landfill, this is about the companies that act environmental in their marketing, but then go ahead and destroy new and unused products.
Are you a high-information voter? If so, could you please provide information about any consumer industry that comes even close to the apparel industry in terms of a) ubiquity and market scale and b) destruction of unsold but undamaged items while still producing equally functional equivalents for market?
Is there such a thing as fast-cutlery? Or fast-furniture? Maybe fast-book or fast-vehicle? Fast-whitegood perhaps? I'm at a loss here, I've only heard of fast-fashion.
I feel like there is a lot of waste in packaging specifically. Like way, way more colorful plastic polymers go into the trash way faster making products look appealing on the shelf than from clothing. Don't have the numbers to back it up though.
Uh, yes? Food and consumer electronics are larger or similar scale to fashion and undamaged goods for both are landfilled at massive/similar rates to clothing.
Books are the same logic as apparel, "print more than needed, pulp what doesnt sale". Its just much smaller.
> micro-targeted
> mandated USB-C on Apple devices
There is no law that states specifically Apple must specifically use USB-C. IIUC, the law is that all brands/manufacturers should use the same type of charger, an industry standard. That was apparently USB-C. Apple was the odd one out and had to change.
If something better comes along, the industry as a whole can upgrade.
I dont really care about waste too much as I think it's a non-issue blown out of proportion, but mandating standards and interoperability creates a lot of value for consumers and prevents anticompetive behavior.
> I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?
"Don't attempt to in any way address the problem unless you're willing to go for an absolute maximalist solution" is a pretty weird stance.
I agree wholeheartedly, seems to be a symptom of bureaucracy. Rules upon rules that end up as the status quo without consolidation and a good refactor.
There's a bilingual relationship between the responsibilities of the state and the rights of the consumer. That point you describe - where they'll tackle the root problem - isn't coming. In truth, these are feel good measures anyway - naive attempts to fix a downstream problem that won't pan out. That's my opinion, anyway.
People will say something needs to be done about waste and microplastics then complain when actual action is taken.
One of the largest contributors to microplastics in our world is clothing. If companies need to start taking responsibility and reducing their supply, that's good for everyone. If companies feel pressured by regulations because they can no longer produce endless shit and artificially inflate prices by destroying half the shit they produce, then I'm in favor of it. I'd even be in favor of governments shutting down corporations that massively overproduce. It's the 21st century and these companies measure every single little aspect of their business. If they need to trash a bunch of their clothes, it's because they're being actively wasteful. Cost reduction is one of the most fundamental aspects of capitalism, and if companies aren't even concerned about that aspect, then they deserve to be crushed.
I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor.
But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no."
And what if there's genuinely no demand? For example, suspenders went permanently out of style at some point in the 20th century. If this law had been in effect at the time, there might be an "orphaned" truckload of suspenders somewhere, getting wastefully shipped from warehouse to warehouse for decades because they're impossible to sell and illegal to destroy.
Fashion is fickle, prone to fads and flights of taste. Suspenders are by no means an isolated case.
An efficient economy needs a means to delete an item when its current owner doesn't want it, nobody else wants it either, and it imposes ongoing storage costs on whoever holds it.
If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.
What evil? I think it would be very hard to have a system of law without corporate personhood. Every time you wanted a law to eg ban x, you would need a separate law for corporations.
Your reasoning makes sense only if it's just as easy to sentence the group to jail time as it is to sentence the individual--and pretty much everything else about a corporation is set up to make it harder to do that.
If it's an unlimited partnership or something, _maybe_. Approximately no companies implicated are, though; they're typically limited liability companies of some sort. A limited liability company demanding human rights feels a bit like having your cake and eating it.
This argument might have made sense when property rights were assumed to trump all other concerns, but at this point, that isn't logical. We live in a world where "owning" everything has led to complete lack of responsibility for the effects of corporate behaviours serving short-term profit while all living systems are paying the price. At some point we need to introduce more tension between property rights and common welfare if we plan to make it through the next century.
> If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no."
Are you, personally, a large textile company? If not, then you have no need to worry; see the article. If you are, then argh a textile company has become sentient.
Surprisingly enough you doing what you want with your stuff in your own home is different from operating a business at scale, and we can make different laws for the different situations.
Ignoring the fact that they will just ship clothes overseas to be destroyed, could this plan otherwise encourage brands to favour staples rather than aggressively push fleeting fashion? e.g., maybe next time they are a bit more cautious on suspenders or a gaudy t-shirt with huge brand stamped across the front?
you own a business that owns the inventory, rather than owning the inventory yourself, no?
if you want to be doing all the things you could do otherwise, you should have full liability for it.
if youve got a boatload of suspenders, you should give them away, pay people to take them, or invent a new use for them. you could turn them into belts or waistbands or something.
even without the major market, there's still going to be niche market for suspenders
We aren't talking about "an item." We're talking about an industry that deliberately over-produces because it's better for their balance sheets, which has significant climate implications. This is precisely the sort of scenario where it makes sense for government to step in.
Even ignoring that "you" as an individual are not affected by this, there are plenty of things that "you" as an individual cannot do with your own property. For example, a lot of places in the US live under a HOA, and they often restrict what you can do with the frontage of your property. Many people live in places where trees have some form of protected status.
And in pre-industrial societies, peasants (almost entirely women, ranging from children to the elderly) commonly spent around 100 hours of labor to produce a single square yard of fabric to clothe their families (fabric was too expensive for peasants to buy, so most spun it at home).
So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.
There has to be a sweet spot between someone hand spinning wool for 100s of hours and an automated factory spitting 80% polymer based clothing directly into a trash can.
So you are telling me that quoting the time spent to build a single square yard of fabric in the pre-industrial society is a contextualized comment to the % of co2 emission for the fashion industry?
Right, textiles are much bigger than fashion - bedding, furniture upholstery, curtains, some types of shelter, practical items like footwear, protective equipment, medical equipment and dressings, vehicle interiors... pretty much all aspects of human life depend on textiles. It ain't just cheap t shirts and dresses.
There is a brand in my country that I liken to a physical Shein. The clothes are a similar style, and basically everything is polyester. When I walk into it, it smells like a carpet store.
Getting common goods less expensive is good, making them too cheap is not. Imagine you are optimizing a math model, but nothing actually has prices. You just get a garbage point as optimum. You need to have scarcity, so that a system that optimizes the allocation of scarce goods actually works.
i think its made people less independent than when we could maintain and produce our own textiles, and treat them well. Now we're dependent on markets and slave labour
I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).
The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.
Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.
This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.
Shredding is the first step in most recycling processes (ie excluding reusing). Like if they were going to make them into this seasons fashion, I think the first step is shredding. The cut and color of style changes, and I don’t think you can do either without shredding first.
It means they’re still using the fibers, which is an upside. It does waste some CO2 for the original cut and dye.
I’m sort of dubious of the value of trying to limit CO2 like this, but that might be the goal. Whether they burn them now or sell them, they end up as atmospheric CO2 either way. It’s the same as lumber; it ends up back in the atmosphere (although not burning them does reduce PM2.5 particulate).
That is not what they should do according to microeconomics because luxury goods are Veblen goods. Decreasing price would lower demand, at least until they lowered it enough that it was no longer a Veblen good.
Basic microeconomics is just that: basic and thus an oversimplification.
Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.
My wife worked for a cloth upcycling association (finding sustainable future for discarded clothes).
Reality is, there is just 10x more thrown out clothes in the west that any third world country on earth could need, same for shelters.
Associations distributing clothes to developing countries / shelters are filtering tightly what they accept.
In short, the vast majority of thrown out clothes in the west are just crapwear that not even the third world want. There are entire pipelines of filtering and sorting to only keep and distribute the good quality clothes.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
That is a slightly different scenario than taking cheap "fast fashion waste", compressing it into bales, shoving it into shipping containers, transporting/dumping it and flooding local countries/markets.
(And many of these large shipments do not end-up as donations by the time they get to their destination, but are actually sold by weight and then resold again)
But yes - distribution/logistics of donated goods needed to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".
Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.
(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)
Perhaps not but in the context of this discussion and legislation it is pertinent question to ask, perhaps not of you specifically but of the wider audience.
Brand value particularly for commodity products is usually just a form of information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers, and creates economic inefficiency since it diverts expenditure from other products that can materially improve lives. It also allows enshittification to happen since it creates inertia (brand loyalty) to switching, and the positive brand image sticks around for longer than the actual good quality products.
OK. We were told creative destruction is good, if some companies exit the market and are replaced by others that offer better value then resources are being allocated more efficiently, no?
It does appear that people prefer the convenience of internet shopping, though I also see that other firms still successfully apply the catalog model in specific markets, eg Harbor Freight which does this for construction tools.
People don't voluntarily lose money. Understand that and the world will way more understandable.
But nobody is arguing that they do. Rather, I'm saying that if some companies lose money on selling clothes and exit the market, there's nothing wrong with that.
Any name brand would rather send their unsold clothes to a landfill in India rather than allow their wealthy customers to see poor people wearing the clothes.
It's very very easy to spend much less on clothes. Buying a new handbag every 6 months vs maintaining a bag for 20 years isn't that much different in terms of effort, but one is unbelievably more expensive.
Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.
Well one link deeper says "Restrict the export of textile waste" but I'm still unclear why they preferred these measure over a carbon tax.
Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that
involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to
destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following
operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive
2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that
Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the
recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to
destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
Clothing has a huge profit margin (when manufactured overseas) especially at the higher end (for brands which do not invest in local production, which is most, because it is also hard to beat Chinese quality). It's better for these brands to over-produce on some items and lose the low-cost inventory, than to under-produce and not meet market demand, to not offer a range of sizes and varieties to meet individual taste, and not achieve wide distribution that's necessary to grow market demand. That's why regulation is needed here.
> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
> Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
You mean something like, to signal to voters they're trying to solve a problem voters want changed? Or a problem voters say they have?
I didn't mean to imply it would fix the problem, or that the problem would be fixed. Just that there's desire for [thing targeted], is something enough people would want to change.
I also said "assume that" for the sake of the argument/discussion given you started by saying you didn't understand. I say it's trivial to understand if assume there are other incentives where destroying the product is desirable. Thus making the incentive you mentioned, not very strong, (in context).
EU regulations aren’t set by people who are directly elected though, so the incentives are really weird. It seems like largely a non-problem, the likes of which gets obsessed over by the types of also ran politicians who end up as members of the European Parliament or filtering into the Brussels bureaucracy.
maybe this will force factories to change their process. with manufacturing getting cheaper, smaller batches become affordable. at the extreme we can now print books on demand, and improved 3D printing allows one-off items in many more areas. that's the trend we need to push. to get away from wasteful mass production.
through demand at first. clothes designers are hopefully going to demand smaller batches to avoid getting punished for overproducing. but if that doesn't work, then yes, maybe regulation is necessary. tricky though because manufacturing is often outside of the EU.
overproduction needs to be made more uneconomical than smaller batches. if that is really the issue. i really doubt that large batches of production are actually the problem here.
Overproducing is often cheaper than losing sales because of the fixed costs of producing a batch and the externalities of destroying your inventory not being priced in. Some brands also find it more interesting to destroy stocks than reduce prices because it protects their brand values. Well, now, that's illegal.
Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.
They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
You can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes?
from TFA
> companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
This kind of reply is so cliché it's tiresome. "Someone makes small step to avoid waste and environmental damage" -> "if it's not perfect it's no good at all, let the free market sort it out at t=infinity".
Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.
Where even are all the people wandering around naked for lack of clothes? There's so much donated clothing already out there. And the homeless here mainly 'need clothes' because they have no way to wash their clothes. It'd be less wasteful to get them access to laundry facilities. And the developing world always gets the "PATRIOTS - Super Bowl LX Champions" gear and a ton of other cast-offs - I doubt they need more.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
If I had that kind of hustle, I'd be finding out who exports the losing teams T-shirts and reimport them. I'm sure some Pats fans would pay $50 a shirt to live in an alternative reality.
Won't fungi and bacteria eat (cellulose-based) the clothes, releasing the same amount of CO₂, only a bit slower?
Synthetic fabrics can likely be buried as a form of carbon sequestration though.
Carbon is not the only concern here, it is also excessive water use, excessive land use, higher logistics pressure on ports and such which can be reduced if these are made to a higher quality and a reduced quantity.
For the same reason tax codes are complex. If you have a simple law, there's no way for a politician to say to a group of people: "If you vote for me, I will get you a special favour".
I suspect this end up like US "recycling" of plastic: pay another country to "reuse/recycle" the waste, and that country then dumps it in a landfill, dumps it in the ocean, or burns it.
This already happens a lot for used clothes with the thrift store->poor country->landfill pipeline. That third step will likely be a lot less rare with new clothes.
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise:
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
This doesn't address my point though. You're talking about how it's okay if we lose all our factories to make the cars, computers, and whatever else is in the Crates. And sure, if all those workers can find new careers like they did when we industrialized farming, that's all well and good.
I'm talking about how our usage of the "Crate Goods" makes us incredibly vulnerable to a disruption in Crate delivery.
this is not destroying things to create jobs. this is about globalization negatively affecting local culture. clothing especially represents culture. if people can not afford to create their own clothes then that has a negative effect on their culture as a whole.
nobody buys the local style because it is more expensive than the imported stuff. as a result the local style dies out, or it doesn't get a chance to be developed in the first place.
that's how you protect your local economy. that's pretty normal everywhere. in europe people go on strike if imports threaten their livelyhood. dumping cheap clothing on an economy that can't handle it is not really helping. it's going to make the local stuff even more expensive because there is less demand for it.
local development simply does not happen if outside products are allowed to dominate.
if we were talking about a part, say less than half of the market, that would be fine, but the import of cheap clothing is so massive that there is no more room for a local market.
Yes, I know this practice is commonplace. What it does is "protect" a specific industry, but that results in less choice for consumers and higher prices.
Protectionism has value when applied to strategic industries, like chip making, that you cannot afford to have cut off.
Making local garments is not a strategic industry.
P.S. Every businessman believes in the free market for everyone except his own business, which the government should protect from competition. The same for unions.
this is not about protecting businesses. this is about providing jobs for locals. many african countries are struggling with that.
providing an income for everyone is important. keeping everyone satisfied is too. not to mention not loosing your cultural identity. and if the clothing industry is able to provide jobs by keeping cheap low quality products out of the country, why would that be bad? clothing is not the biggest expense people have, so making clothing a bit more expensive is not going to hurt that much.
We have had that in Argentina for 40 years. The result? One of the most expensive countries to live in the world. The PS5 you can buy for 500 dollars in USA? it is 1000 here in Argentina. The Samsung Galaxy you pay 800 in USA? It is 1600 in Argentina. The Levi jean you pay 100? It is 250 in Argentina. Or, if you want to pay the same price for a jean, you can, but the quality will be 1/3 of the one you can buy in USA/EU.
we are not talking about banning the import of regular products, but about donated or second hand items that are sold for next to nothing, half of which is useless junk. the point is to not allow these inferior imports to undercut local products, not to make any imports more expensive than local ones. the latter happens too, and it's stupid, but just because that is bad, and we should be allowed to sell our products, that doesn't mean that we should also be allowed to dump our junk that we don't want in those countries too.
sure there may be some that can benefit from these donations, but there are others that are hurt. it's up to them to decide what they prefer. it's not up to us.
Whether or not is a net loss for the planet as a whole is irrelevant. Africa countries need jobs to sustain a middle class so they no longer accept donations of clothes.
"Just send them money" implies that we don't use them as a dumping ground for the imperfect/unwanted goods, implying that we do destroy those goods.
If you want to compare this to broken windows, the controversy is: the developed countries produce so much glass that we don't know what to do with it. When we have extra and irregular pieces of glass, we can either melt the extra panes down, or we can just ship boatloads of "free glass" to Africa every week (likely result: Their glass factories will eventually shut down). Doing the former is simply not the same as breaking windows to make work for glaziers as in the analogy you're referencing.
The intended effect of the law is that they get better at planning. It requires supply chain innovation similar to what happened in the automotive industry decades ago with JIT manufacturing. They can borrow from fast-fashion but now there’s a penalty for over producing.
Just because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
What country has a clothing shortage? Be specific.
The most desperate povert I've ever seen was in India. You know what people were using to make tents to live in? Clothes.
Poor people have been making clothes for thousands of years without any help from heavy industry, and it's incredibly cheap to produce long-lasting cotton clothing.
Clothing isn't really a perpetual need the way you frame it. A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
I’m not suggesting that any countries have clothing shortages.
However, countries don’t wear clothes. People do. People sometimes have shortages of clothing in many places.
For example, here in the United States people sometimes experience poverty and may sometimes experience a lack of suitable clothing. This happens at the same time that there are also people in the US throwing away clothing that they do not use. This is because those people are different people in different immediate locations.
The reasons that people lack clothing is not because there is not enough clothing in existence. It is because the clothing is not distributed universally to every person who needs it.
If I have seen this with my own two eyes in the US, then I am sure it happens in other places.
> A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
So? A person with the ass ripped out of their jeans or a hole in their shoe doesn’t give a fuck whether other clothes last 10 years.
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
The answer is simple: despite so much money given and forgiven, and people going over all the time to build toilets and basic human-scale improvements, most countries with real deprivation have a massive corruption problem, mainly culturally induced, that stops real improvement. Saying "it's not people stepping up" elides the cultural issue.
There is poverty in 100% of countries. I live in one of the richest places in the world and I can go outside and find people struggling to meet their basic clothing needs.
Most clothes are manufactured in countries with cheaper labor costs to cut costs - the reality is clothes are cheap to make in terms of raw materials- and dumping unwanted clothes will just destory the local economy
I wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean)
What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...
I'm not particularly big into fashion (I think my newest clothes are 4-5 years old), but why is the thing you want "common [expletive] sense" and someone choosing to spend their money a different way, by extension, nonsensical?
What they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently.
Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society.
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
Fashion changing all the time (on the order of seasons rather than years) contributes to a lot of waste. Your claim that it "factually something that provides value to society“ is unsubstantiated. Just as unsubstantiated as "You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing".
All fast fashion does is waste money for consumers who buy into the craze, compared to buying quality that lasts. I have used the same two pair of jeans for over a decade at this point for example, and they are in close to mint condition (apart from the colour on the knees). Some T-shirts that I own have survived as long, many have not (it is very hard to tell the quality of the fibers up front unfortunately). In all cases, I use clothes until they are so worn through that they are past my repair skills.
So yes, some people are "invested" in fashion, but I'm saying that is akin to being "invested" in gambling or shopping for the sake of shopping. Addictions come in many forms.
The problem is not fashion, the problem is fast fashion, and the enormous amount of waste created. You really need to keep those separated in the discussion.
It's just boring for consumers. Business provides value to customers. Customers dictate what gets produced. And there are customers (e.g. me) who do keep things for a longer amount of time - there's a reason why generally men's clothing makes up around 20% of the total clothing shopping floor space in any given city.
Sure? It seems to me that the companies dictate what I consume. Many many times I wanted to buy exactly the same clothes item or shoes to replace an old one (because I know exactly how it'd fit and wear) only to discover it has been discontinued with no obvious "heir". Sometimes only 6 months later...
Whats the percentage of people chasing "fashion", especially after mid 30s?
Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug:
"Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."
Selling clothes is hard and annoying and most people can't be bothered. I've had to dispose of a number of clothes, and not once have I sold them; I think a slight majority ended up in the garbage, with a few turning into rags and a decent number landing in a donation bin when I lived in a building with one.
A few years ago a family member passed away and I tried to donate their clothes to a charity store. We threw away the worn out ones, so these were just good quality and most of them were good brands or at least looked high end. They took maybe 20% and said the rest we should just throw away.
They aren't, but the problem is even worse for bulk quantities. A local charity operation or thrifty individual might find a use for a couple random articles of clothing; a pallet carrying 2,000 copies of the same unpopular skirt is worth less than zero to anyone but a large clothing distributor.
It's not that the manufacturer can't sell their product, it's that they don't want to do so. They want to get rid of last season's perfectly good product to make room for next season's lineup.
They could sell old stock ay reduced prices and still make profits, but they want to maintain their vain exclusive image, so they inflate their prices by destroying stock.
That doesn't sound like ban, you have to disclosure yearly the amount of stock you have demolished, but there is no mention of penalty or anything like that.
Don't be surprised if products are sent abroad for destr^Wrecycling.
No I am not joking, some german company hid an airtag in a old computer that went to recycling. It ended up somewhere in Thailand, being not very environmentally friendly taken care of.
By investigating said recycling process? I mean, if a company can figure out that vendo X is a shadowy cloth-destruction syndicate, that state can as well, then that vendor can be banned from doing business in the EU or the companies dealing with them can be fined.
And when all those unnecessary increases in the cost of living lead to increasing vote share for the far right - eventually maybe even a far right government - what then? How sustainable will that be?
Have you actually read the science on microplastics? [0]
If that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model.
Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying things like "you must stop a machine before putting a person inside it".
Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
We have something like 200 years of labor laws around this point. You should probably read some history and ask yourself why every government on the planet has been compelled to force legislation on business to protect the interests of the people.
> Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
This is an odd thing to say. Governments will happily shovel the taxes of people's entire working lives into pointless spending. They'll also happily shovel young men to their actual deaths in wars. Now you know this, will you be hyper-cynical about governments, or are you just blaring your bias?
A good way to understand this is to think about Apple and how they refuse to run Black Friday or any other type of sales. They just don't. If they do, they're very modest.
This helps to maintain the value of the product and for consumers to not defer purchase until sale event.
Clothing companies are similar. The actual product is worth pennies, but they'll refuse to sell for 10% of RSP because who would be buying them at the full price? They'll do 50%, maybe 70 discount and that's it. They destroy whatever they don't sell. Rinse, repeat, four times a year in this crazy, fast fashion reality
It's a known practice and they've been going on like this for ages.
Fashion is vain by definition and this whole industry is very wasteful of our resources. This legislation is meant to help mitigate this.
What's gonna change long term is manufacturers will be keeping more items on sale for longer and the fast fashion cycles will slow down. Hopefully they'll start competing with quality and workmanship thus, in turn, giving EU textile industry a new chance to survive Asian competition.
I think it's a reasonable idea. It's mostly going to affect the "luxury" brands who attempt to limit price reductions.
Perhaps it might encourage producers to do smaller runs to confirm interest before massively increasing volumes. The real issue is to get the lowest price you need to hit minimum volumes. It's cheaper currently to burn unused stock than store it for next year. This may change that model. If it doesn't work it can always be changed.
> The ban on destruction of unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear and the derogations will apply to large companies from 19 July 2026. Medium-sized companies are expected to follow in 2030. The rules on disclosure under the ESPR already apply to large companies and will also apply to medium-sized companies in 2030
5 months is a pretty short timeline for a large company to change literally its entire business to handle one class of products differently. This affects returns, sales, shipping, contracts with disposal companies, etc.
The weirder part is that they're granting medium and small size companies 4 more years to figure it out. It will take any company a long time to deal with this. So why shaft the large companies? Spite? The difficulty this imposes on them, and any fines from their inability to comply, will be passed down to the consumer.
Seems like policy ripe with unintended side effects. At the very least, it'll likely raise prices for consumers because the companies aren't allowed to manage their inventory as efficiently as they wish.
Now of course this might be a totally acceptable price to pay, I'm not necessarily arguing against it. It will just be conveniently omitted from public communications on the topic by the EU. For regulators, there never are tradeoffs, after all.
Brand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.
Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.
I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
Parent painted a very logical sequence of events that concluded in reduced prices. Can you provide similar reasoning for why you believe this law will increase costs?
The main risk I see is things getting shipped overseas to where it isn't properly handled and this policy not having any effect at all.
If that can be avoided somehow (I haven't looked in detail at the legal text) I think the outcome you mention would be good. Slower fashion cycles, higher quality and higher cost per item would all potentially synergise. Another thing that could happen is less overproduction, which would also be good.
Thinking about what else could be done: I would like to see some mandatory marking indicating fiber / weaving quality. I have had T-shirts that lasted a decade, and those that lasted a couple of years. And it is very hard to tell up front which is which. As a consumer I would like to be able to tell.
> I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.
They didn't. You can look at the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) yourself. It's fairly long but it should be easy to scroll until you find some of the lists.
Why don’t they do the same with food then? There is a similar issue where truly vast amounts of food is destroyed every year. Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint. Countless tons of e.g. wheat straight to the landfill, not even used as animal feed. The demand for the product is unpredictable and they need to produce and sell enough to cover the investment in producing it at all on average. There is also a fuzzy limit on how much the market can absorb.
The underlying dynamic is simple: the value of the product in every market exceeds the logistics cost of moving the product to that market. In other words, the market clearing price is globally negative. Because most of the cost of production is in the logistics, and destruction can be done close to the point of production, the resource and environmental footprint of destruction is smaller than every alternative.
People don’t produce excess inventory for fun, that is a pure loss. The production is highly optimized to eke out a thin average margin in an unpredictable business. If the product is not destroyed, it necessarily increases the average cost of those products because either logistics costs go up or supply goes down.
Are you arguing against yourself to provide an example of why this law is bad…or do you actually want to force people to eat rotten/spoiled food?
You seem to provide a great example of why Eurocrats regulating a highly efficient market will not cause the desired outcome…due to reality.
> Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint.
Yes, keeping 8 billion humans alive does have non-negligible energy costs. Again I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or if you’re an anti-human environmental terrorist.
If you actually care about agriculture emissions though, population decline will cause this to go down faster than any Eurocrat will with silly laws based on some clickbait news article they read about an industry they understand nothing about.
considering H&M (Sweden), Zara (Spain), C&A (Netherlands) etc.. have lead the way into the clothes-that-self-destructs-in-a-year fashion, it was about time europeans did something about clothing waste, well done.
Every single country should follow suit, apply to food also.
The reason these companies get so greedy is because they can control the demand.
Companies have been found destroying their goods to keep the price high.
The whole Europe is pretty broken right now government wise, but they sure know how to have some decent laws in place when the politics aren't being an arse.
This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.
Very tongue in cheek: In the latest fully analyzed year (2024) Sweden was CO2 net negative. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.
I anticipate a lot of unintended consequences lurking.
But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.
Unsold apparel is a headache, but banning it probably won't work.
Something still has to be done with the stuff.
In the first dot-com era, I knew some startup people who were trying to create an online secondary market in used apparel, called Tradeweave. It flopped. You can see their web site on the Internet Archive up to 2004.[1] Then, suddenly, it's gone.
There's a Stanford Business School case for this company.[2] Amusingly, the Stanford case study is dated 2000, before the collapse, and makes it sound like a success.
As a EU citizen it is really frustrating to watch that they just can't stop themselves from introducing new regulation.
And we don't have non-hallucinating AI yet that can help businesses keep track of all this legislative diarrhea.
Might be to hinder large companies of moving fast-fashion storages into EU, so they cannot circumvent the 150EUR free import limit when it is dissolved, as that would move them into the supposed jaws of this "ban of destruction of fast-fashion" act.
Waste isn't automatically a social loss. It only becomes a problem when the cost is pushed onto other people. If burning excess goods pollutes the air or fills landfills, charge for the pollution or disposal. Once the real cost is priced in, companies will naturally waste less without needing thousands of permutations of actions being restricted in an attempt to micromanage them. You still hold them accountable for harm — you just do it through prices instead of micromanaging behavior. And again, don't just assume waste is net-harmful
If you look at the backyards (so called garden) of homes of the advanced countries, from satellite maps, they mostly became junkyards of things. Inside homes are full of things that are rarely used. I have seen Amazon boxes going into bins unopened. Basically, homes are overflowing with goods, and throwing things away is going to become expensive. Advances in manufacturing, supply chains and online shopping have accelerated the saturation of markets.
Destruction of goods can't be stooped due the pace of inflow of inventory. This is like a conveyor belt jamming, where the downstream belts are draining slower than upstream ones.
Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.
>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.
It's a great idea, but this seems incredibly hard to enforce. Shipments sometimes go missing, products can be damaged "unintentionally", etc. I hope they can achieve what they intend.
I think I've heard this isn't as much of a think in Europe, but by me sometimes when companies have a bunch of items they can't sell to regular consumers, they sell them for cheap to large thrift stores. Though often this stuff is kinda marked up because its new which sucks but is still better than just burning it.
A good chunk of unsold clothing destruction happens because the brand considers fire sales to be brand damage. I have to wonder if they'll comply with this regulation willingly, or if they'll do some stupid workaround to make sure they can continue to pointlessly destroy clothing for the sake of a brand image.
A strange decision considering that high fashion is one of the few lucrative sectors of eu. LV cannot afford to give away their branded items , and i doubt they are willing to remanufacture or reuse. They may be a tiny fraction of the industry, but equally affected.
For some of these things I wonder if there are missing recyclable options. Like could you economically run a pile of defective clothing through a blender and and use it as fiber reinforcement in some kind of construction material or insulation?
What I don’t understand is, why are these being destroyed instead of being donated? Is it just because businesses don’t want their brand to be devalued because the poor people will wear their brand?
donated to who? in the past they would typically send them to africa or something but this actually has negative effects on local african economies for example
even within the country, to those in need. At least in the UK, there are collection points, as well as many charities that accept clothes such as oxfam and cancer research UK
This is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules.
The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.
Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.
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The linked page has this text:
"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."
Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.
The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.
I don't think that is very believable.
(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
"The Outlaw Sea" is a book about the long history of the complexity of responsibility, ownership, in international shipping and the ships themselves. It's very good, it should be on the HN standard reading list, much like _The Box_.
I'm only interested in comments here from people who have an understanding of the complex world of outsourcing responsibility.
TL;DR: International cooperation isn't at a level where ANY country/bloc can have an impact on how their own waste is disposed of. The idea that magically that will happen with clothing is an admission of ignorance of this fact in decades old industries.
We need more and stronger international laws. The opposite of the current US administration's influence.
I mean, most of the destruction is recycling that I am aware of. Turning into rags is the fate of most unwanted clothing. Do the euros burn it instead?
Give a man donated clothing and they will have clothes ... teach a man to become and indentured servant on minimum wage and they will be able to buy clothes every year for the rest of their lives.
That they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.
This is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell.
So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.
Every time again when it's about Europe, there are lots of commenters here complaining about the Eu or the rules, probably a lot of US commenters aping MAGA sentiments. Of course without solving the problem this law tries to solve. It's soooo easy to complain about something you know nothing about. As if the US is perfect
Hopefully, what this should motivate is the emphasis on products which can be _disassembled_, taken apart, other than through destruction.
It may also become less costly to take products with flaws and fix them up: Right now, it's not profitable; but if one can't just chuck them away, then the cost-benefit analysis changes.
It's still ok to destroy products if (among many other reasons) "the product can reasonably be considered unacceptable for consumer use due to damage, including physical damage, deterioration or contamination, including hygiene issues, whether it is caused by consumers or occurs during the handling of the product [...] and repair and refurbishment are not technically feasible or cost-effective;" but cost-effective means "the cost of repairing or refurbishing a product not outweighing the total cost of destruction of that product and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product."
So essentially, they have to offer all the clothing for donation first, if nobody wants it, it can still be destroyed (that's one of the other exceptions).
Unfortunately another exception is if "it is technically unfeasible ... to remove ... labels, logos or recognisable product design or other characteristics that are ... protected by intellectual property rights". So a luxury brand can probably still go "well our design is protected and we don't want the poors wearing our fancy clothes".
Fashion is a deeply irrational market that preys on the worst of human nature. There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. You might say ok, if people are dumb enough to buy that then that's not my problem. So now there are companies creating the environmental cost of destroying viable products just to sustain this kind of grifting.
On top of that I think that society, as a general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product.
The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.
"There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. ..."
I used to be very tolerant of people's idiosyncrasies but with the internet, social media etc. that brings out the worst in people I'm now much less so.
Agreed, fashion is deeply irrational but it's always been with us. The real problem now is the degree to which the fashion industry exploits the excessively 'vulnerable'—you know, the oddballs who were once ignored. It's why a $5 can now cost $500.
Moreover, something in fashion one day is out of fashion the next, and it's a damn nuisance. It's gotten completely out of hand. Recently, I bought a pair of cargo-style work pants and they were fine. About a month later I bought another pair of the same brand, size and type (going on the label they were same model and style, and there was only one type--supposedly). Got them home and the cut was not only different and they were less comfortable but the legs were cut narrow (they were now too tight).
Took them back and the sales assistant said "oh that's normal, styles usually change with every new shipment, you're supposed to check them first".
For fuck's sake they are ordinary utilitarian work pants—not something you'd expect to see on the catwalks of Paris. I ought to be able to buy exactly the same product time after time like I used to be able to do with Levi jeans by just by looking at the tag/label (nowadays you can't even rely on Levis being the same fit).
> “If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice,” Pesca said, but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI “slop,” a term for spammy, commodified content. “They have banter, but it’s very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they’re always saying, ‘Yeah, that’s so interesting.’ It’s really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?”
Totally disagree. NotebookLM isn't always right, but it can go deep on complex scientific and other academic content. It is absolutely not "surface-level" unless you're feeding it shallow content.
I have never heard this Greene fellow, but I can say that all of the summaries generated by NotebookLM for me have been more nuanced and higher quality than the content created by NPR in recent years.
Makes sense. You’d rather burn a birkin than let a poor person get their grubby little mitts on it. So the only way to stop them burning them, is to force them to do something with them.
As a European, it seems absurd to me one would celebrate the short term benefits of being one of the by far most destructive (per capita) countries on earth regarding global climate (challenged only by a few oil states).
Is a temporary advantage worth destroying the planet forever?
Whenever the EU does something positive towards a collective action issue, this forum gets filled to the brim with nitpickers who know everything that is possibly wrong with such action, and yet don't provide any meaningful alternative to solve actual problems.
So, I guess it's only innovation if you can make your own startup solving menial or useless first-world issues in order for the PG and YC of the world to share a little piece of their billions with you and maybe get fuck you money from an exit.
We would have been better served by setting minimum clothing standards instead of this bs to get at the fast fashion. Also educate young people about the cost of their cheap clothes to the world especially young women who are the majority consumers of fast fashion.
It always annoys me when shops have more XXL clothes than regular M clothes.
Not destructing is good but why produce them in the first place? Sometimes it looks like they're not even trying to get logistics right.
hopefully the free plastic feedstock from oil will go away soon. if polyester cost as much as cotton or wool, it wouldnt be wasted by these scum sucking bottom feeder manufacturers.
Thank you China for forcing the world into the solar battery future.
That this is an actual rule that other versions of have been a thing for years makes further convinced we are on the falling edge of capitalist society.
Typical Eurocrat meddling in people's affairs. The owners of those items should be free to do whatever they want. If the government is concerend about environmental damage, they should raise landfill fees or tax carbon, not limit what firms are allowed to do with their own things.
Just another case of the EU being focused on unimportant things while looking away from real issues like cost of living crisis or energy costs. Though on the other hand, it may be for the best since they only make things actively worse.
It's regulation from the previous European Parliament and the first von der Leyen Commission. The new parliament from 2024 has a lot fewer red/green members (still enough to cause trouble, though) and the second von der Leyen Commission has a different agreement with the current parliament. The current Council is also a lot different than the council of just a year ago -- not in terms of members but in terms of opinions. A lot of the craziness is being rolled back, maybe this will also be rolled back.
The link is not about the 2024 framework regulation (from just before the elections) but about some new supplementary regulation that the 2024 regulation allowed for and required -- in order to provide clarifications and fix some of the mistakes of the initial regulation.
EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic).
in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee.
rayon is a regenerated cellulose fibre: it biodegrades.
polyester is a thermoplastic polymer synthesised from petrochemicals: it doesn’t.
that’s the dividing line. one breaks down in the environment, the other persists for centuries and sheds microplastics into waterways every time you wash it.
rayon has its own environmental problems (deforestation, chemical processing), but “is it plastic?” is not one of them. the chemistry here isn’t ambiguous.
Those 'On Sale' racks are going to take up half the shop now. Maybe they could have a deep discounted section where clothes are set at cost value. Should find an equilibrium and someone will buy them
Incredibly, unbelievably stupid law. Waste is made when something unwanted is created, not when it is thrown out. Destruction or landfill is often the best option for all involved and modern landfills are very safe and sustainable. I worked in recycled clothing for a few years and it is not always or even often efficient.
This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
> Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.
It's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
Related note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company.
My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited supply they control - is inherently predatory and should be restricted. Not because I'm the morality police and want to stop people from buying a bag that says "I spent $2000 on a bag", but because there is nothing that stops the company from cost-reducing that to oblivion. If you are going to sell a $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.
Counter point to the counter point: also all of human existence.
The "fuckton of failure and waste" which has brought technological advancements to humanity didn't come from destroying unsold clothing, and the risks involved in actual technological advancements are orders of magnitude larger than the risk of not being able to destroy unsold consumer products without penalty.
Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.
IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
So many clothes are already shipped to poorer parts of africa that it ends up being essentially indistinguishable from a landfill.
There are more clothes produced worldwide than there are people to wear them. Shipping unwanted refuse to poor counties is treating them as a landfill and patting yourself on the back.
I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
Oh no, poor fast fashion companies won't be able to continue maximizing their profits by using slave labor to manufacture ginormous amounts of garbage that goes out of fashion in a week. Guess they'll have to reduce their garbage output or switch to manufacturing quality stuff that can hang out on a store's shelf for a bit longer. The fucking horror.
Fuck them.
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
Edit to clarify: things can't be put on sale, except for a few times during the year? I guess this is not every country, although I'm not sure which and when.
> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
Nonsense. They can.
> In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.
> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
To clarify, this is a consumer protection law which is set in all EEA countries. Discounts are regulated to prevent stores from tricking their customers into thinking they are getting a product at a lower then usual price. You can only claim a product is on discount if the price has been lowered from a previous price less then x-days ago (I think 2 weeks is not uncommon), after which this discount becomes the new price.
As a European immigrant to the USA, it infuriates me to no end that American stores are allowed to use the words “price” and “discount” interchangeably. When I get things “on a discount” I expect to be paying lower then usual price.
Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.
Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.
> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?
Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.
I agree that "sardonic" is a better word. It’s just not used much, and it didn’t even come to mind. It's similar to how people misuse "ironic." But people usually understand what is meant.
The general thrust of the underlying messagr is not dishonest just because you say so. The general pattern is that there are degrees of governmental control over people's lives at the core. I don’t think it’s dishonest because my point is that bureaucracy has no limit on what it tries to control given enough time, even though my framing is vulgar.
and should we do stuff to reduce waist and help the environmen? Absolutely!! should we do this? if this worked, it would be a good thing. But if you just want to virtue signal without caring about reality, I think we disagree on more than just definitions.
My reference to "Freakonomics" is a collection of real contradictions to your theory. Since you didn't consider it, here are the expanded findings:
Most of the "recycled" material collected under these new laws is being "downcycled" into insulation, mattress stuffing, or industrial rags—markets that are already saturated and low-value. Reports show these organizations were overwhelmed with low-quality fast fashion that they could not sell. Instead of companies paying to burn it, the charities now had to pay to store or manage it.
The fines are real. France has set fines of up to €15,000 per infraction for companies caught destroying unsold goods. This is why companies are dumping the stock on charities rather than risking the fine. I’m giving how you speak about corporation. I’m guessing you have absolutely no empathy for people who run small single person or small team business and our overwhelmed by all the regulatory traps they can fall into at any point in time.
Then The Freakonomics data (Sanford, Maine case study) showed that when you charge people for trash, they generate less trash, but illegal dumping often spikes, forcing the city to spend more on cleanup patrols.
To pay for this new collection and sorting system, brands pay an "Extended Producer Responsibility" (EPR) fee. In 2025, this fee for textiles in systems like France/Netherlands ranged roughly from €0.12 to €0.50 per kilogram of clothing put on the market. In other words, the cost ultimately falls back on consumers.
So in general, no, I don’t agree at all. I think you are discounting the massive cost to not just corporations but also individuals when it comes to micromanagement. On a second layer, I’m not even against micromanagement, just bad micromanagement, especially micromanagement that is at best naïve regarding effectiveness, and at worst purely virtue signaling.
In short, we should focus on what works, not what you feel is righteously good.
> In short, we should focus on what works, not what you feel is righteously good.
These are not mutually exclusive. But i'm glad you're considering shareholder value!
> I’m guessing you have absolutely no empathy for people who run small single person or small team business and our overwhelmed by all the regulatory traps they can fall into at any point in time.
Sigh... yeah, lack of empathy is the core problem here.
> The general thrust of the underlying messagr is not dishonest just because you say so.
Comparing suicide of an individual to administrative fines on a corporation for needlessly destroying textiles is rhetorically dishonest. There's so many disparities and meaningful differences that trying to equate them without discussing any of them is counter productive to a beneficial conversation. It's a cheap impotent shot trying to stir up an emotional reaction where one doesn't belong. Or given how strongly you seem to feel, a completely different reaction is deserved. Making a misleading or inappropriate comparison is dishonest, not because I say it is, but because being misleading, even carelessly, lacks rhetorical integrity, or honesty.
Four more examples, of rhetorical dishonesty suggesting I'm acting in bad faith, and lack empathy, or sympathy for the balance of weight for smaller companies (without cause)
Saying again without argument or evidence that my position is a self righteous one devoid of pragmatic function.
Mischaracterizating my opposition to your comments as shallow or opinionated rather than a different core issue you've been unable to identify or reply to.
And then my top reply to yours, suggesting that all you care about is shareholder value. But at least I'm only saying so because it's become a common joke, but also because your first comment feels irreverent towards S/SI, or humans. And the sum total of your next reply ignores the core point of my objections, and drones on about the financial cost towards companies. So maybe it's not that dishonest.
you’re correct. I was just using it to emphasize how all encompassing regulation sometimes feel. I was annoyed and didn’t think; when seeing just another European regulation piling on then endless sea of things you can get fined for here.
Cypress was the last placed in Europe to remove laws against suicide in 2021 it seems.
Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes.
If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this.
I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got.
The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.
The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out.
Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.
HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.
GLP-1's solve this, now you're basically only losing weight and eventually (i.e. the 2030s) most people won't fluctuate much in weight. So, try again on "changing sizes". Yes I'm aware that children grow up rapidly and need new clothes. Don't buy goodyear welted boots for your 7 year old.
The best fashion is timeless, and that's why heritage fashion is far superior to trends. Coincidentally, it's why the brands I listed above are exclusively heritage brands, who have basically no regards for trends.
There's a reason HN is poorly dressed. I'd rather take the "only dresses with startup T-shirt" guy over the "I've gotta have the Sydney Sweeney Jeans" person, and especially over the sneakerhead crowd which now thinks Hoka and NB is superior to Nike.
I was curious why I no longer was able to wear pants I wore in my 20s. I could not get them over my hips. It wasn't because I was getting fatter, my weight is about the same.
I was also intrigued by young men looking slim in the hips, and older men not.
So I looked it up.
Turns out that your hips grow wider with age. I'd never heard of this before! Though I did know one's ears got bigger.
Too bad my shoulders never get wider, and my height shrinks :-/
My feet have gotten considerably wider with age, too.
I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only. This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches. In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that most of it are produced in small sets anyway.
Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea? My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
Here's how this law is actually going to work.
Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2.
The disclosure paperwork and the s/contracts/bribes/ needed to do this will also serve as a nice deterrent for anybody trying to compete with H&M.
"So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2."
The world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.
That EU regulators actually saw need for such regulations makes me both sad and annoyed because they ought not be necessary. What's wrong with clothing manufacture, commerce and trade, and fashion that brand-new clothing can be just trashed and destroyed? Right, we know it's a rhetorical question but we must continue to ask it.
What's happening is sheer madness! If aliens were to witness this from a holistic perspective they'd arrive at conclusion the inhabitants of this planet are de-arranged. Why would any species take effort to gather resources/grow raw materials such as resource-hungry cotton then take time and more effort to manufacture it into useful products then move it holus-bolus to another part of the planet only to discard and destroy it unused—and harm the planet’s ecological systems in the process? That is unless they’re mad.
In a nutshell, why not do something more useful and productive and less wasteful?
What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste is that when I was a kid clothes were expensive, my parents struggled to send us to school neat, tidy and well-dressed. When I ripped holes in the knees of my grey school pants through rough play rather than buy new ones necessity meant my mother would spend hours at the sewing machine mending them.
What’s happening with these clothes is unnecessary waste and vandalism on a grand scale, and the fashion industry along with unethical marketing practices are largely responsible. People not only have too much disposable income but ‘fashion’ has convinced them their clothes are out of fashion almost from the moment they’ve bought them, these days, the notion of actually wearing one’s clothes until they’re worn out is almost inconceivable.
Little wonder megatons of discarded barely-used and new clothes are polluting the planet.
> What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste
To the degree ethics (which I am using here to mean, accounting for negative externalities) are not incorporated into economics, with very few exceptions, every company will optimize their profits with no thought to externalities.
Shareholders might care about waste as individuals, but are not coordinated in anyway that moves corporations. And any corporations that would like to be more ethical still have to compete with those that are not. Some with large margins can do that, but most cannot.
Asking/convincing companies or individuals to be voluntarily ethical, one at a time, is not a solution. It is asking the wiser people to de-power themselves, in a way that just increases the opportunity, profits and incentives for less-altruistic actors.
What the EU is doing is good. But I would like to see a consistent economic governance effort to avoid all significant negative externalities. Both the environment and the economy's value creation and net wealth, are better off without colossal destruction of value happening off the books.
Dealing with each externality as if it were an isolated problem fritters away resources and time, and throws away the clarity and commonality that would allow consistent reforms to happen. We don't have that time to waste.
"Asking/convincing companies or individuals to be voluntarily ethical, one at a time, is not a solution. ...just increases the opportunity, profits and incentives for less-altruistic actors."
Exactly, it's why we need to reintroduce regulations many of which were removed or weakened from the late 1970s onward. Moreover, we need intelligent regulation not just gut reaction to an immediate problem. That's proving much more difficult (reigning in the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism that were let out of the bag ~50 years ago with deregulation won't be easy).
> we need intelligent regulation
Absolutely. Poorly thought out, too strict, performative, or obsolete regulations create opposition for any regulation.
I also think we need to co-opt the “enemy” to be regulated, in their terms. E.g. get all the major fossil fuel CFO’s in a room, and figure out the financials encouraging green energy, and away from polluting and geopolitically complicated energy, that would make cold business sense for them.
Include and involve the military, insurance giants, large food security/supply chain companies like Cargill, reactor companies, big enterprise customers that want rapid energy growth, and all the other major sectors that take climate change and energy expansion seriously and will get value out of a more stable world, with better energy technology in practical terms. The people that CEOs respect.
Once the biggest resisters can profit off not resisting, you will see a genuine change of heart. That can sound very cynical, but it’s just how people are. “First, I shall do no damage to my own turf.” But once they take a new position, their power doesn’t just cease it’s friction, but becomes another rocket for progress.
Whatever tax breaks and other incentives it took, to make green their best move, would be worth it. Bribe? Maybe. Better understood as the cost of faster consensus and coordination. Where the price of waiting for everyone to change due to the hardship that is being locked in, is so much higher.
On the other hand, after consensus, change itself needs to happen smoothly, not suddenly. Incentives and disincentive need to operate slower than we might want to make change practical. The most important thing is that those reinforcers are credible. Companies are forward looking. They will naturally move their investments today where the profits will credibly be tomorrow. They don’t need to feel pain, just know what to do to avoid it, and most importantly, prosper.
> include and involve the military, insurance giants, large food security/supply chain companies like Cargill, reactor companies, big enterprise customers that want rapid energy growth, and all the other major sectors that take climate change and energy expansion seriously and will get value out of a more stable world, with better energy technology in practical terms. The people that CEOs respect
Oh yeah let the corpos and MIC rule the world even more than they already do, great idea :)
We should really reform the "free market" IMO. It is way too free now. They get all the benefits and none of the responsibilities.
Nowadays, "Free Market" mostly means its actors are free of the consequences of their externalities.
I am talking about getting support for regulations or even law that constrain damage.
Maybe you didn’t read what I wrote? Thats not more market “freedom”.
To make big changes, good changes, you do need both widespread grassroots support, and the cooperation and competencies of big players.
The military has labeled climate change a global destabilizer for years. Insurance companies and farmers are dealing with the fallout already.
Despite growing corruption, there are still competent people in these organizations to work with.
Neither surrender by blanket cynicism, or the incompetence of apathy, are going to solve anything.
> Despite growing corruption, there are still competent people in these organizations to work with.
This is the part I strongly doubt. Well, not the competence exactly. But the motives. These people don't make their own decisions, they do what the board and shareholders want. And all they want is money. It's the only thing that counts for them. So the only solution is making these externalities have a cost. Business won't collaborate on that because it's only a negative for them.
I don't believe in public/private collaboration anymore. In Holland that was tried way too long.
> The military has labeled climate change a global destabilizer for years. Insurance companies and farmers are dealing with the fallout already.
Yet they continue to run full steam to meddle in oil-producing countries. I doubt they will keep this climate change classification up anyway as it is directly in contradiction to the dogmas of the current administration.
> Yet they continue to run full steam to meddle in oil-producing countries.
That isn't military strategy. That is the politicians choosing oil over alternatives and delegating action accordingly.
The military can warn about the threat of climate change or China's growing technical, manufacturing, scientific and potential AI dominance. But it can't (and shouldn't) set the elected leaders' agenda, or refuse to implement it.
A non-governing military is an anti-corruption firewall.
> This is the part I strongly doubt. Well, not the competence exactly. But the motives
There have been streams of people in power resigning as their particular role gets pinched between corruption or resisting. When that stops, maybe there won't be anyone competent with good motives left. But many people are quietly doing the best they can in the meantime, and hoping for a turnaround in the future.
> And all they want is money.
Yes, for those directly profiting from damage, we are going to have to address that directly if we want to acheive change.
But large segments of the economy are being financially hurt by that damage. So there are many natural allies.
For social media, I think we need some hard laws, to give regulators some teeth. For energy, where the damagers are also value producers (we can't just cut off fossil fuels instantly), whatever financials it takes to straighten that out will result in a net benefit.
People on the right often want companies to be able to do whatever they want, ignoring the damage. People on the left often want to eliminate damage, without any cost. Neither of those viewpoints leads us anywhere but off a cliff.
Boldness here is our friend. The sirens of making little changes, or imagining a big change won't take tremendous coordination or cost something, are mirages.
> I don't believe in public/private collaboration anymore. In Holland that was tried way too long.
That leaves a coupe, which isn't going to produce any improvement. "Tear it down" rarely morphs into building anything. "MAGA" as a soft coupe (democratically elected, undemocratic policies) is a mild example.
It's easy to shoot down the potential for change. But that isn't a plan, a step, or a mindset that has any chance of achieving anything.
Although I 1000% relate to the many reasons we have for cynicism and apathy.
Since the 1970s, some industries were deregulated, but overall legal and compliance complexity has still grown over time, according to all studies that I'm aware of on the subject of the regulatory burden.
The studies indicate that a few large early regulations aimed at clear externalities — like major air pollution — delivered substantial benefits on the balance, but many of the smaller restrictions added afterward, especially as they accumulated, mostly generated paperwork (huge compliance industries) and fixed costs (that made smaller firms less competitive) with diminishing returns.
The sensible goal should be to massively reduce the regulatory thicket, while keeping the small set of restrictions that have clear, major benefits and are straightforward to enforce, and replacing the rest with simpler standards or pricing mechanisms that prevent negative externalizations without dragging down productivity through top-down micromanagement of the economy that regiments the actions of private citizens.
"So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2."
> The world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.
I don't see any cynicism here, only pure realism. The real question is why EU law tries to create a utopia on paper while ignoring real-world situations. That's what has always frustrated people in the EU about the institution: its lack of decisions that are close to the people and grounded in reality. Yes of course, everyone gets the idea and the good intentions behind it, but good intentions alone are not worth the paper that they are written on.
For quite many years I saw EU as something mostly good. Since ten years back I'm hesitating. Enforcements when it comes to cars (like the (EU) 2018/858) where the manufacturers are forced to implement "safety" features that customers don't want/need and "environmental" features (such as AD blue) that makes worse products. Regulations that perhaps were good on paper, but that will backlash on manufacturers and consumers (as the cars since then became way more expensive).
Regulations on sorting out textile (such as worn underwear, textile diapers) created huge issues in Sweden to take care of the textile waste to a big surprise for the politicians..
I believe we (the citizens of EU) deserve better
I see this response as the exact same one about tax cheating and how the rich will just move away or be better at cheating taxes.
Did we forget how to discover and punish bad actors? Do you think we should just do nothing and let casual bad behavior go because some people are gonna be abusive? No. I refuse to accept that. It is not your false dichotomy.
If people abuse the system, fine and punish them. More than they profit off of the bad actions.
> Do you think we should just do nothing and let casual bad behavior go because some people are gonna be abusive? No. I refuse to accept that.
I'm with you, and I also give a clear: No.
My criticism is about how it is handled. If you introduce a new law and already know there is an immediate workaround that makes the situation even worse than before, then you should close that loophole in the first place. If you can't close the loophole because of strong resistance from lobbyists, then it's obvious this is just about "good intentions on paper" so the EU can say they've done something.
That extra step mean selling what remains at low cost might be more financially interesting than if they could destroy it 'on site'. Not a perfect solution, but it push the incentives in the right direction.
In fact, there is precedent for this kind of thing too.
Plastic used to be shipped to china and burned there, until china decided to stop accepting everyone else's trash
bad guys do bad things and will try to get around these laws.... so we shouldn't have laws and should just let bad guys be bad.
What's wrong with clothing manufacture, commerce and trade, and fashion that brand-new clothing can be just trashed and destroyed?
The industrial process (and, to add, global economy relying on slave-cheap labour in a far enough country) has become effective enough that it literally costs less to make surplus items than to scrap them. Not exactly the level of cost in duplicating copyrighted bits but low enough that the sales effort to find buyers for the clothes after the season is more expensive than the profits from it. Often the price of items doesn't even warrant paying for returns: many online shops just tell you to keep the product if you claim a defective product and want your money back.
But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets alone: when it comes to cheap items any reasonable business would source a bit extra in the hopes of selling more. If you source fewer items than what will sell you'll be losing money. Given the profit margins it makes sense to just source X percent extra and calculate that it's cheaper to pay for them but not sell, rather than pay for too few and limit your profits by running out of stock. It's like insuring yourself by taking a slice of your profits today to prevent a rainy day from happening.
Us consumers of the modern commercial wonders are not without guilt either. We support this by buying new, crap quality garments that last only so long we'll soon be buying more. The price is low but the value is even lower, and that's the profit of the clothing industry. Buying new again and again is what enables the industry to operate. You can still have your clothes handmade by a tailor with lasting quality and for prices astronomical enough that you'll surely won't be (nor afford to) throwing them out too soon. Few people choose to do that, of course.
The exact same thing is happening on varying scales in: consumer electronics, appliances, cars, houses...
"...it literally costs less to make surplus items than to scrap them."
Right, my rhetorical point somewhat expanded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031527
"But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets..."
Nor stupid consumers, but watering down blame will weaken resolve to fix the problem. Perhaps it should become fashionable to criticize those who buy too many clothes by asking "do you really need that item?". Criticizing and ostracizing works, it greatly reduced cigarette smoking.
It's far easier to ostracize cigarette smokers (because you can see them smoke). You don't really know how many clothes somebody has unless you really pay attention to them, and nobody does.
There are multiple ways to tackle the problem, once we had competitions such as 'Miss World', 'Miss America', etc. that were popular but which now are very much seen as sexist.
The message would soon get across if being seen browsing in a clothing store wasn't the best look (like being seen in a porn shop is embarrassing). Or imagine the impact it were embarrassing to be seen at a fashion show or buying fashion magazines. Throughout history there have been bigger changes in social attitudes than that.
A rowdy mob picketing a few fashion shows would attract world attention to the problem.
How is imposing your worldview on them any better… than them imposing their worldviews on possible discount buyers of those unsold products?
You haven’t actually written the argument yet.
> but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.
It’s what already happens with recycling in Europe, it’s resold several times to companies claiming to recycle it and ends up shipped to the poor parts of South East Asia and burned or dumped.
Is Europe punishing these companies when they get discovered?
> What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste is that when I was a kid clothes were expensive
Clothes used to be more expensive and that makes you upset now?
But go back before the mechanized loom to see ACTUAL expensive clothing. When people were robbed, they literally took their clothes. People were murdered for the clothes they wore.
Now let's rethink this. Should you be angry that you didn't get beaten for destroying your clothing when you were a kid, because actually clothing was insanely cheap compared to pre-industrial ages? No, we should know our history and be glad that things are cheaper now.
> Why would any species take effort to [...]
Because Market Forces said so :(
Its the invisible hand of harvard MBAs at work.
The invisible ass
the ass trickles down
Why not regulate thrift stores and force them to have 40% of their inventory at fixed prices? $3 for shirts and $7 for pants/shorts? Part of the problem, at least in the US, is that thrift stores are filled to capacity. But just like everywhere else, their prices are high as well. If we want to interfere with a free market, why not start there, to force higher turnover and keep them from rejecting donations?
They’d be filled to capacity even if they literally gave everything for free, because the unsold stuff is mostly the kind of things that people don’t want in the first place. The good stuff would be snatched, and the things nobody wants would linger there forever.
The only thing that can objectively reduce waste is well, simplifying access to people's data/surveillance capitalism. This way corps will have a better idea of what people want to wear and at which price they are willing to buy it, and products will be wasted less. They are making the best decisions based on available information. No one trashes products for fun.
This is a fantasy.
No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.
So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.
lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now. It took China putting on regulations on their side to disrupt that industry. Now you have to find other smaller economies to do that.
You appear to be agreeing with the person you’re replying to.
I'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law says we must do this. Please contact your representatives you dumb fucks"
The original comment says "sell them to «resale» companies". Selling goods means being paid for it, while you and the parent comment are both saying money goes in the opposite direction.
When you negotiate the price to ”sell” at, it’s perfectly legitimate for that price to be negative.
Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.
Selling for a negative price is completely different from buying, because the flow of 'goods' is in the other direction.
Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.
There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.
They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.
The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.
You're buying a service, and the service is getting rid of goods.
I don't think you can sell at loss in Europe (not sure, happy to be corrected), so might be small but it'll still be positive. The bet is it will be high enough to be a deterrent. The other bet is that at some point the rest of the world will push back being a corporate dumpster.
This particular thread of the argument can go on for a while. I can't well articulate the doubts I have because I'm not in the industry, but many such well-meaning laws have a tendency to backfire once given enough time for bad/poor actors to game it.
Brings to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.
The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.
The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.
Oil companies have been doing this for over a century in US. Sell abandoned well to a small llc, llc files bankruptcy, big OilCo off the hook! Everyone happy!
Are you referring to this case? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/17/swedish-queen-... Thanks
>The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner.
This is what these countries get for having weak laws that allow people to do illegal dumping and then hide behind a corporate veil to avoid accountability.
Trouble is if democracy worked properly then corporate entities wouldn't be able to lobby and influence governments to weaken laws out of self-interest.
Read their comment and yours? What great advice. I would suggest you do the same, but I think you'll continue to misread it.
> No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.
> lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now.
They are saying that paying to dispose of the clothes/waste is how it's done. And then... you said the same thing. Perhaps you're assuming they're just taking a guess, rather than coming at it with understanding that this is how it has been done for a while.
There's already strong financial incentives to not over-produce. Nobody wants to dump cash into inventory that can't sell. Trying to force them to sell it all is going to reduce choice and availability for consumers, unless the businesses find a workaround. I'm pretty sure they will find a workaround, and it won't be to sell at a steep loss to the same market that refused the products to begin with. But these workarounds will cost money, and consumers will pay for the fantasy that waste is being reduced.
One man's trash is another man's treasure.
They will be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar so that some fraction of them can be resold for cheap in Africa or somewhere else poor. Those companies can then dispose of them however they wish.
The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever.
And, as usual, EU regulations achieve absolutely nothing -- if anything, this is worse than nothing.
1. Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.
2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.
3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.
1. You can buy a cotton tshirt from LIDL for 3 bucks and it'll hold for years. It won't be cut perfectly or have the softest material but it's definitely not bad.
Of course, if I get it from Temu for 6 cents it'll probably fall apart in a week, but modern clothing isn't really covered by "the cheapest thing I can find".
Same for ultralight fabrics, that, while lovely in summer, usually get trashed in a season or two simply because the thing weighs fuck all.
I'd even say we're in a golden age for clothing. I can get a motorcycle jacket that can slide at 80kmh for 40 bucks with shoulder and elbow protectors and a thermo layer insert.
Cheap cotton cannot hold for years, the fiber length and yarn quality makes it simply impossible. On top of that, cheap cotton is bleached and fast dyied which makes the clothing change after few washings.
I mean if you mean "hold" like, you can't still wear it albeit it looks nothing like it did two washings before, of course it does.
But then you look exactly like what you buy, someone with worn low quality clothing which looked nice in the shop and first wear.
The 3 buck LIDL tshirt isn't really intended for casual business attire tbh.
If you want good looking (symmetrically cut, better stitched, etc) tshirts long term I then raise you Uniqlo with 7 bucks per DRY synthtic tshirt and 12 for a supima cotton one. I pretty much daily them and in over at least 3 years they haven't shown significant aging. Only the supima ones have mostly lost the "supima" text on the inside at the back of the neck area.
Comically enough I also have 3 shirts from Primark for 1$ each that are now at least 5 years old, probably more like 7 that still look fine. I still wear them to work without worry. The shaping of them was all over the place though. No two in the pile were identical.
Dying could be an issue, I wear gray and black ones so your mileage may vary with colored washing. I also don't blast them at 90 degrees C but rather 60 for black/gray, 40 for everything else.
Or your standards are just ultra high compared to mine, for better or worse. From my perspective tshirt quality ends at Uniqlo and I then go to Olympus business/casual shirts. From there the only option I have to look more businessman-y is the wool suit.
Same with my Jack and Jones T-shirts. 3 for 20€ and last for years.
> 2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.
The market for regular second-hand clothes is on the verge of collapsing in Germany though. Charities are flooded with low quality and unsalable stuff ever since it was made illegal to throw away clothes in the regular trash. You must bring them to recycling facilities instead now. It not profitable for charities to sort through them because of the volume. There is a market for quality vintage clothes but that's a totally different thing.
> 3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.
That's probably the only thing that motivates brands not to overproduce. But lets be real, they will rather find loopholes for destroying them instead of selling them for cheap.
> Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.
Hard disagree. Live in Central Asia, buy locally produced relatively cheap clothes and they have been lasting years so far.
You're not really describing fast fashion, aren't you?
No I am describing "modern closing", as in GP post.
modern clothing that is not made in the EU -- which is mostly fast-fashion.
and the ones usually making it outside of the EU are tied to large European corps.
"I eat apples grown down the street, so EU apple law is bad"
What about Uniqlo and Muji? They make exactly what you describe: mid-budget solid apparel. Their clothes last for years and resist multiple washings.
Both of those situations sound like a net win.
Isn't it a thing that poor countries can't get their own textile and clothing companies going because of donations or cheap used clothes? I'm fairly certain that's a thing.
There seems to be 3-4 other issues colluding with that. If customers prefer or can't afford new domestic clothes, then it would make it hard for a business to succeed.
a firm isn't going to sell them to reseller in the third world as it will cause brand dilution, additionally current customer base will feel shortchanged and shop elsewhere.
Much more likely is as the op said: selling to a company that will dispose of the stock.
How is achieving the exact goal worse than nothing?
Retailers don't want their excess inventory to be sold at a discount. They'd rather it be destroyed. A small fee to have someone else destroy it is just a business expense. The OP should have put "sell" in scare quotes.
> A small fee to have someone else destroy
They just write it off, Jerry.
All these big companies, they write off everything.
Donate it to some charity which will ship it to Africa for you, so you can get the tax write off, _even better_
China for decades paid the U.S. and Europe for their "recycling", this practice was only banned in recent years. Clothes seem more valuable than plastics waste.
clothes is plastics waste
Can be, but there are also natural fibers from e.g. cotton, wool or hemp. But yeah many fast fashion products are polyester..
That was because you could make money by turning old things into new things. Not so with garbage disposal, a service for which you almost always have to pay.
> Not so with garbage disposal
There is already a healthy trade for second-hand clothing to 3rd world countries (see pics of kids with "<Final's losing team> World Champions 2022"). The prices will be better for brand new clothes. The gray distribution channels already exist and will readily pay for new clothes - at steep discounts, but pay for them nonetheless.
Describing it as a market is not entirely correct. The clothes these people wear are garbage. As a species, we produce more clothes than we could ever wear. I am reminded of a story of a charity that accepted clothing donations for the victims of an American hurricane, and immediately had to stop because their warehouse filled up. Many clothes are not even worn once before they're thrown away, and one of the cheaper ways to dispose of them is dumping them on 3rd worlders. It's quite dystopic really the underclasses who dig through our trash.
… and put local African cloth producers out of business. The same happened with shoes sent to African countries by NGOs. Well intentioned, but local shoe manufacturers went out of business. The local population did not really benefit, because traders would get a hold of the free shoes and sell them on for just a bit less than locally produced shoes.
I’ve heard there’s a practice of selling bundles of clothes to Africa and then the purchases pick through the bundle for what’s good and what’s useless. The impression I was left with is that this used to be more lucrative but now you’re almost as likely to get complete garbage as something good. So it’s like a sad loot box.
It's a big issue in Africa, as it completely destroyed to local clothing industry. As a side effect, you see people wearing westerner style clothing even in the midst of Africa, which is quite unsettling.
Now that you mention it, whatever I was watching that talked about this, also addressed the negative impact on the local textile industry.
So do you expect this law will increase the amount of dumping? Sounds like it might.
That's not really true.
Some places sell their cardboard scrap. I'm guessing that places with the right sorts of metal scrap get paid for their waste.
And folks have to pay for much of the rest. Some of the issue with dumping waste in a business's trash is that the business pays directly for waste removal in many places, unlike a lot of private folks, which pay through taxes.
This is the current state of things. What has changed is the sort of service that they need to pay for. Instead of destruction, they'd be paying for recycling or resale. Like now, they have the option of donation or reduced prices.
> a) not over produce
Forecasting demand is hard. If you will produce less than needed you will sell less than could have sold (lost revenue) while overproducing is relatively cheap.
> b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.
The main reason unsold items are destroyed is to avoid price depression - giving unsold items for next to nothing will reduce future demand for full priced items. It's wasteful and harmful for environment but as others noted it's hard to fight with this given that destruction could be outsourced to other countries.
"financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing."
That's not how it works in practice, with the economies of scale/production it makes more economic sense to produce goods surplus to requirements then destroy remaining stock so it will not detract from/devalue sales of next/forthcoming product.
It's an old trick and applies not only to clothes but many goods. There are variations such as destroying trade-ins, used equipment etc. rather than sell it to remove it from the market (thus only new equipment is available).
Some companies took this to extremes in that they'd only rent equipment which would be withdrawn from the market and deliberately destroyed at the end of its service life so it couldn't be sold or ratted for spare parts (photocopier manufacturers were notorious for this). IBM used a cleaver approach with its computers, they'd sell off old computers as 'valuable' scrap (some parts could be still useful to others) but anything deemed as spares for their existing machines would be partially disabled (still useful but couldn't be used as a spare part). For example, they'd break the edge connectors off circuit boards but leave the electronic components intact.
>So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.
I think now the incentive is to produce less.
They won’t “sell”. Imagine LV selling originals in Africa , Africa would immediately resell them in Europe and us and Asia for much higher price and dilute the brand. It will be officially sold to a reseller, not officially they will pay a special African company to destroy it.
So same shit as before. Slightly more expensive. No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap.
> No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap
This is just inherently incorrect. In Europe we have a load of outlet villages which is where big brands do exactly that. It’s where I do most of my shopping. Last year I bought two pairs of Nike Dunks for £25 a pop. I bought Salomon hiking shoes for £60 instead of £140. A pair of Levis 501s for £20. Just an example or my most recent purchases.
Nike yeah, but not luxury brands usually.
Not sure what you’re considering luxury but it definitely is not just Nike et al: https://www.mcarthurglen.com/en/outlets/uk/designer-outlet-a...
> Levis 501s
Ewww, those are last years 501s
You are right. What will happen is somebody will pay “x” for the clothing, but the same company will charge “2x” for transport.
You have to pay to burn them, at home or abroad, and the cost is likely a few % of a clothing piece, where the margin is already >70%.
Tl;dr the EU will say "Mission Accomplished" because no clothing has been burned in the EU since 2026(tm), while all of the emissions are produced abroad.
The same show has been going on with industry, where the dirtiest parts are done in India or China, so that we can say that we are "clean".
The big brands should be penalized for doing the burning or destroying themselves, enforcing such destruction through contract laws or any formal communication, or even through punishment by denying future contracts.
The receiver on the other end should defect and renege on their contract and sell the goods in the open market for pennies on the dollar. While they won't be able to bring it back to western countries, they should absolutely be able to sell them locally. It should be legal for them to renege on any illegal contracts.
At least that's how I see it.
An unexpected consequence of such drastic rule is that sizes on both tails (xs/xl) may disappear as they become unprofitable for the producer.
I live in a poor country. People here buy "American clothes" which importers get inside "pacas" (random bundles). Those clothes come USED from rich countries.
My assumption is these clothes are dumped to someone to get rid of them, and then that person bundles them and ships them to poor countries. Once here, someone buys the bundles, sort the content according to their expected retail price and sells them to resellers.
There is junk that can't be sold and is destroyed. Except in some cases, like in Chile, where they are just dumping the used junk "intact" in the desert.
Prohibiting destroying new clothes is a net positive. There is market for clothes in poor countries, but it is already being exploited. Some clothes will always be dumped in poor countries, but not all of it can be resold. The manufacturers will make less clothes, there is no way around it.
> manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes?
Surely these companies aren’t paying H&M for the privilege of destroying their surplus clothes, so by reselling them they’ll be getting paid to take the clothes and paid again when they resell them. Why would they ever destroy them?
Which is why this scenario won’t ever happen.
They would destroy clothing because it is not sold. This already happens to second hand clothing that is shipped to Africa. Part of it is sold, part of it is dumped. This is well documented.
If part of it is sold, isn't it better than if it had all been destroyed? It's literally what that law is for.
Define what you mean by "better". Putting them on a giant CO2-burning ship to transport around the world to find every last person who wants a $1 shirt is much more harmful to the environment than just throwing it into a hole in the ground and making another one.
Given how absurdly efficient shipping stuff in container ships is, I don't believe its actually worse. Specially if the company can just save money by being slightly more conservative in terms of how much they manufacture in the first place.
Sure, let's conveniently not count the horrifically-polluting trucks in <3rd world country with zero environmental regulations> to distribute them across the interior.
You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?
The point is to change what companies believe is the optimal number of products. Right now companies produce what they expect to sell, with errors in both directions being valued equally. In the future they will have to produce only what they are certain they can sell.
And other cloths they could buy don't use trucks?
The point is increasing the cost of over-production. Its not about the EU knowing better, but imposing a higher price for waste. Not sure how you are confused about that.
The additional shipments aren't going to drastically go up over a few more companies throwing second hand clothing on ships. Large crate ships are relatively efficient for what they tow.
As basic napkin math, if there's 1000 cargo ships moving in and out of the EU in a year, and this law adds 10 more. That's 1% increase. It's a bigger 1%, but I wouldn't be surprised if the emissions are less than the 9% of discarded clothes talked about in the article.
I'm going to speculate that it won't "add" ships at all
As you say, ships are moving in and out of the EU each year - the question is, how many have "back loads" - if some percentage of the ships leave Europe empty to return to Asia for more manufactured goods, then it seems very likely that they can have the containers of unwanted clothes as part of the trip.
Oh cool, so I can fly commercial all I want at zero marginal CO2 emissions just because they don't have to build an extra plane just for me? I can burn that jet fuel and not feel bad because they were going to burn that gallon of fuel anyway?
Some of these arguments are so silly that I'm starting to understand why the EU thinks regulations are a free lunch to improve the environment with no costs whatsoever.
>Oh cool, so I can fly commercial all I want at zero marginal CO2 emissions just because they don't have to build an extra plane just for me?
If they would have flown the plane there anyway with an empty seat, your added CO2 is negligible yes.
The analogy doesn't hold.
Airlines adjust capacity to demand — empty seats represent foregone revenue and future flights get cancelled or downsized.
Cargo ships don't work that way. A container ship returns to Asia whether it's carrying 1000 containers or 5000. The marginal emissions of an additional backload container are genuinely close to zero, not as a rhetorical trick but as a structural feature of how bulk shipping economics work.
Yea they will, they'll resell what they can, and destroy the rest, probably by throwing them into a giant burn pit in a place with zero environmental regulations.
Ok, let's say that happens. Seems like a net win over throwing all of them in a burn pit.
Not quite when you are burning a ton of fuel to ship them overseas to arrive in the burn pit.
I live in the US, but I would hope the EU doesn't have "burn pits".
But the 3rd world country they are about to be shipped to definitely does have burn pits that will incinerate both 1) any remaining unsold inventory, and 2) the older clothes that are replaced with the fancy european stuff.
Or better yet, they'll just be thrown into the river like most other things in Africa and SE Asia...
All you're doing is outsourcing your own pollution to make yourself feel better. It's idiotic.
A lot of the apparel being destroyed is unsold inventory of up-market brands to protect their pricing power. If they shipped that to less affluent countries for destruction, it's unlikely that they'd be destroyed, because those items would fetch a good price on the black market.
This is also how plastic "recycling" goes. Stuff gets collected, sorted, baled up, and a checkmark for "this is recycled" is placed. Then it gets loaded onto a ship and exported and ends up in landfill or incinerated anyway. And every step in the chain gets a ton of money, ultimately from taxpayers.
I'm sure some plastic gets recycled / reused. But as long as it's cheaper to just produce new plastics, the problem will remain. Recycling plastic is only viable for goodwill points and marketing (e.g. if people actively seek it out) and with government subsidies or rules.
Same as when the EU puts a ton of restrictions on farmers within the EU countries -- Co2, fertiliser requirements, etc. -- making food so expensive to produce many go out of business and the remainder become practically luxury food, and then countries just end up having to import food from countries outside the EU _without_ those restrictions, simply offloading the environmental burden on "some other countries somewhere".
It's a farse.
Food is actually pretty cheap in the EU (in absolute prices compared to the US and relative to income compared to most other places), so I don't know what you mean.
You're not contradicting me. Read it again.
EU is a net food exporter and the only agricultural products the EU isn't self-sufficient in are animal feed, sugar, and tropical fruits & vegetables.
So, no, EU farmers are struggling at the moment because they aren't as competitive on the global markets as they used to. Not because Europeans aren't buying their food anymore.
Now why do you think they’re not competitive? Think about this more than one layer.
Australia currently bans the sale of "recycling" plastic and e-waste to certain countries in South East Asia because of this problem (dumping to companies that have no qualms about throwing the waste into waterways etc)
The waste is still making its way to those countries, and the way that we know is that NGOs are tracking it[0]
I suspect that clothing will get similar treatment - initial illegal dumping as you predict, followed by determined NGOs holding the supply chain to account.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-30/gps-in-e-waste-from-a...
Regardless of whether they respect the law, why would a business pay for goods just to destroy them? How does that make money?
And if they're NOT destroying the goods but are instead using them, then the law is doing exactly what it is intended to.
It's about maintaining exclusivity - if you sell your $100 T-shirt for $50 instead of $100, then it's a $50 T-shirt now. Even if they always cost less than $10 to make.
It's degenerate bullshit so I'm all for the EU banning it, but there is a business rationale.
I understand why a the original manufacturer might want to destroy their remaining stock to keep up an inflated perceived value. What I don't understand is why the business buying the remaining stock would want to do the same.
If this was the US, yeah I'd agree with you, but it's not. EU values the spirit of the law, which changes things drastically. Before anyone comments otherwise, please search online what spirit of the law is and how it's different from the US (I want to avoid fast answers here, enable your "thinking" functionality before answering).
I'm no expert and don't know the full extent of what's already happening and what this ban would change, but I would say there is evidence that this is already happening.
In a recent episode of Clive Myrie's African Adventure where he goes to Ghana, he "heads to one of the world’s biggest second-hand markets to meet the designers giving discarded clothes a second chance".
They show a lady that bought a "crate" of random unsold clothes for around 500 USD, and she prays before opening it hoping it will contain clothes in good condition she can resell. The show claims that on a "good day" she can make something like 50 USD on such a crate.
They also (very) briefly show a huge landfill of what appear to be discarded clothes.
Keep in mind that this is only an entertainment show, so this is most likely only the tip of the iceberg.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002q72g
>Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
Until one of them gets the bright idea to resell the clothes, which should take all of 30 seconds.
Your theory presumes the existence of a sketchy african company which will nonetheless remain scrupulously honest.
> manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia
Look, I fully agree with what is going to happen in reality. But isn't it a bit misleading and ironic to accuse the recipient countries as disrespecting the "rule of law", when the companies selling them there are fully/partially aware and doing business with them to bypass the exact (proposed) law being discussed? As with historic examples of waste management, recycling, etc as well, where everybody in the chain knew and wanted what was /actually/ happening.
I thought you were going to go somewhere else with that. With excess clothing they'll unload it in Africa and Asia for cheap, weakening local clothes manufacturers. A bit of what happened with Tom's Shoes
Without knowing any details and thinking about this for just a min, i dont think this actually makes sense.
Most of this stuff AFAIK is destroyed to keep brand value or as the cheapest solution to oversupply.
Oversupply is less likely because it costs more, and the cost of removal now at minimum is the cost of a shipment.
For actual good clothes, the company can now decide if they want to pay more to destroy it elsewhere in an attempt to hold brand value, or simply not put in a destruction clause in the sales contract before it is shipped off and maybe make a bit of profit.
Alternative story: they take these still-perfectly-functional finished products and find other markets for them. This isn't second-hand, damaged clothing, it's unsold new product.
> Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
This isn’t going to happen. But if it did, they would 100% sell them in local markets, not destroy them.
Yea, I'm not sure I understand how destroying the items would benefit these "resellers" ? What's in it for them?
They don't have to pay to warehouse them or maintain a storefront. Space and people aren't free.
Have you been to a poor country? Say you'll sell a pile of clothes for a dollar. You'll have 100 people rushing in offering to buy it off you because they know they can resell it. And if it's brand name stuff, demand will be higher. That's something they could even sell to tourists.
Warehouses aren't really necessary for clothes outside of rich countries where people can afford to just throw away literal tons of it.
This is already how it works today. If there demand curve shows an increase in desire for the same items in another jurisdiction, rather then make more and ship for <x> location, they are reshipped from your geography, even store to store.
Secondly, disposal is one of two things:
1. Donation to a company that collects clothes, who in reality sell these clothes by the tonnage. Most of the clothing recyclers are companies of this nature.
2. Sale at a low value to the company above.
> Those companies will then destroy those clothes,
I disagree. Suppose that this is even allowed, What's the incentive for these off-shore resale shops to destroy the items? Do they get paid per ton of ash produced? There is a stronger incentive to re-sell it, it'll create more economic value. I could care less if it's sold off-shore or within EU; as long as it's not being destroyed.
Why would they destroy the clothes instead of selling them to consumers? Developing countries already have huge markets for selling, altering, and repairing second-hand clothing that gets sent by thrift shops in developed countries.
If anything this would be displacing lower quality used clothing (often graphic t-shirts) that currently makes up a large part of the textile markets in developing nations.
Because at some point it becomes cheaper to ship and destroy than to store and sell.
Inventory is "dead money" in accounting books!
Money has been converted to Obtainium and Obtainium just sits there until it is converted back to (hopefully more) money, taking valuable space that could be filled with more Obtainium as soon as it goes away.
At some point that Obtainium sitting there unsold just becomes un-space and destroying it becomes the cheapest move.
But what about ship and sell? That's what I'm talking about. Storage is very cheap in developing countries.
My hope for more reasonable pricing so they sell all units is then perhaps naive?
The kind of clothes we're talking about are not regular clothes. It's the unsellable kind. When H&M is doing a big sale, order the clothes by price, lowest price first. You will find stuff so hideous that they can't even sell it for four bucks. That's what I would expect most of the disposed clothing to look like.
Then maybe this will make it more expensive for them to do that (which would be good because it's a bad thing to have been doing)
Why wouldn’t these non-EU then just sell the goods in those countries? It would mean they turn a cost (destroying) into revenue (sales).
It’s not like there isn’t already a massive industry selling counterfeit goods. So in your hypothetical scenario, if those companies are already shady then I could easily see them selling those surplus stock in the same shady markets.
Because the cost of doing business in those markets is probably more than what they could get for the product. And if they lower the price in that market, it might devalue the product line as whole and potentially causes brand damage.
The brand isn’t the one doing the business. It’s the 3rd party who we’ve already established is unscrupulous. So why should they care about the brand value?
Spitballing here, why not shred these clothes as filler for insulation instead of literally burning them? PFAS and fiber inconsistencies as these clothes are probably a hodgepodge of all sorts of chemicals, so they probably need to be characterized. I think chemical recycling is also being looked into.
Modern insulation is likely several times more efficient (R-value) than shredded polyester and cotton.
It seems like your view boils down to “why bother trying to regulate businesses when they’ll just be evil anyway?”
Well, they’re guaranteed to be evil without regulations.
Any flaws with the regulation can be worked out and adjusted in the future. These things are not set in stone forever.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/chile...
>Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
I think those companies might just actually sell them, and report to the company is being destroyed.
Wild how random, just getting by people can manage to recycle their motor oil and try to make better choices but businesses can only do the most shitty thing possible.
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Even if this is how it goes, it's a good first step that just needs a follow up with sanctions and fines if they cheat on the spirit of the rule
> Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe,
they are already being sent to Chile or Ghana to be destroyed there.
I feel like you accidentally flipped a minus sign in your equations and then doubled down on your conclusions. Who would pay you to take something away and destroy it for you?
It's fine to come up with creative solutions using an LLM, but you have to apply some critical thing before throwing your weight behind the conclusions!
What's stopping the price from being extremely low? Plenty might pay $1 to take a bundle of 1000 items of clothing, pick through it and find 20 items they like, then destroy the 980 other items.
Isn't that still better than it all getting destroyed?
Also if someone is buying new goods for pennies on the dollar, I'd expect them to find some value in more than 2% of the stock.
Except being destroyed locally in a controlled or regulated process and shipped to be destroyed overseas with more relaxed regulations are not equal footprint wise
sounds like an improvement on the current system, no?
980 items being shipped then destroyed versus 1000 items being destroyed.
It's 980(x+y) instead of 1000(x)
I have no knowledge of the tradeoffs, but I might also imagine that the method of destruction could be worse: incineration vs landfill vs thrown in the ocean, etc
Or they could sell them in Africa, driving local producers out of business
We should not have rules because bad people will break them absurd.
H&M is great though, why the shade?
What is going to happen is that what is left of European manufacturers in the sector are going to move production and warehouses abroad, and from there they will move to EU only about what they need. They will continue to operate as they used to, the only difference being less business (and less jobs) being done in EU.
cheap clothing is for the vast, vast majority not done in the EU, so this does not matter.
But also, this regulation applies to the company _selling them to customers_, so it's completely irrelevant.
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring.
Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at.
Serious change is afoot, that much is undeniable.
People used to ice skate on the lake near my house during Winters up until the 70s. Now they're swimming there throughout the winter. We had a ski lift fifteen minutes from my house 20 years ago. Now in a good winter, we have a week where there's enough snow for kids to go sledding.
Very similar pattern here (UK): circa 1900, ice skating on the local pond every winter. The ice was thick enough to walk on the pond twice in the 1980s. For the last decade, the pond hasn't completely frozen over once. We got about two days of 30% coverage this Jan.
As a kid (I was born in the 80s), my home town would get 3ft of snow almost every winter. We even saw 10ft some winters.
By the time I hit highschool, seeing a 3ft snow in the winter was pretty rare.
Over the last 4 years, there's never any snow on the ground. They are lucky if 1 inch sticks around.
https://xkcd.com/1321/
sure, though New York has gotten a real honest-to-goodness winter this year. There's been a foot on the snow on the ground continuously for the last month, and it's been cold enough that the pipes in one of my bathrooms froze. I think it's easier from the West Coast to bemoan the end of East Coast winters than to live through one :)
This has been a decent, classic winter. It’s an important part of the regional character. We need to have snow occasionally, remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.
Sorry about the pipes.
> remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.
Are they still doing it?
I had a few "proper winters" in the UK during my early 20s. The roads are gritted (and ploughed if necessary) by local councils in lorries, but the footpaths are supposed to be done by residents. The first proper winter, after the snow had refrozen a few times overnight, the paths were lethal. We have these yellow grit bins scattered everywhere that residents are supposed to use to get grit to do the paths. But nobody was doing it. Anywhere. As a pedestrian you just had to walk in the road. This was a real "society has failed" moment for me.
Not that it matters any more, though. Such winters seem a distant memory. The last I can remember was 2018's "beast from the east", but that was more of a freak event than a normal winter.
> the footpaths are supposed to be done by residents.
For public footpaths, unlike in places like Germany [0], there are no such enforceable rules in the UK.
[0] https://www.ergo.com/en/newsroom/advisory/2025/20251222-verb...
I think that's a purely German thing. I doubt it's the law in the US and Canada either. Shouldn't have to be.
In the US it is often law, but like everything here it varies state-by-state.
Just based on what I’ve seen waking around: yes, New England still does a pretty good job of snow removal overall. I’m actually not sure how it’s handled in major cities (maybe the city hires people), but I’ve lived in small cites and college towns where the locals are responsible for this, and the paths are usually clear.
We all have in Europe and the US - but it too is a sign of harsh climate change, because the reason it is cold "down here" on our latitudes is that the arctic is super hot, pushing the cold down to us.
Perhaps some added details would be nice?
In Nuuk they have had 11 degrees celsius. January has been, on average, 8 degrees above the norm. They are having the highest temperatures since 1784.
It is warmer in Greenland than in Denmark.
They now have to close down ski-slopes in Greenland.
It has been brutal, and very cold, and we have not seen the sun. Send help!
The problem is that one cold winter doesn't mean we fixed the problem. We need to look at the average change throughout the years, and that's very worrying.
No disagreement there!
> Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer
This is something that's scared me ever since I learnt about air conditioning and how it works in the 90s when I was like 10.
Air con heats up the outside, so air cons are fighting with each other to cool down their respective buildings. So, more air con, using even more power, all heating up the outside a little bit more. The snowball effect is going to be enormous.
I guess I thought as a 10 year old that some adults would have this under control. Or maybe I realised, even back then, that the only thing really separating adults from children is big bodies and that you don't get told off for being greedy any more.
Unless you're in a dense urban area, the effect of your air conditioners on neighboring houses is negligible. There's so much other thermal reservoirs around (like the ground and plants) as well as circulation from the wind that the extra heat from the air conditioner has only a small effect on the environment.
Compare the volume of your house to the volume of area around your house (including several hundred feet vertically, since that is easily part of the circulation). If you're cooling your house 20 degrees then that would correspond to heating an area 20x the size by 1 degree. How many times bigger is the circulating area around your house (100x? 1000x?)?
It’s honestly terrifying. I’m in the PNW and we haven’t had winter yet. Extremely low snowpack in the mountains and not even a single day below freezing where I live.
I’ve been observing the change for the past 10 years or so here and this is the first year that’s it’s been so “in your face” obvious instead of just subtle changes and effects.
If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.
Climate change needs to be the number one focus and policy for every nation on earth right now. Not AI, not economic growth, not wars.
Here in the Seattle area, plenty of sub-freezing days (which is itself unusual for the area, in 25 years of living here), just no precipitation. And you know what Seattle is known for, especially in the winter? But when we do get precipitation, it’s warm enough in the mountains that it comes down as rain, not snow. Rough year to be a ski area.
>If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.
This is a certainty.
Scientists have been ringing the bell since at least the late 60's and our only reaction was to laugh at them and floor the accelerator pedal and continuously increase our emissions over 5 decades. It is unlikely to change with the AI boom.
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There are many things in the world that happen slowly right up until they suddenly don’t. It’s very possible the climate is one of these.
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Climate change will probably solve itself within 10 years due to exponential growth of solar panels, batteries and electric cars.
That is delusionnal. The growth is globally way too slow and too late to have a major impact, especially when the climate is already provoking chain reactions like the large emissions from melting permafrost.
Check this comment in 10 years!
Apparel firms exist not to clothe people as common sense would suggest but to make a profit, and this practice of erring on the side of overproduction is more profitable than under production. The perfect solution would be to produce exactly the number of goods they will sell, but forecasts aren't perfect so they overproduce. Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste, so this adds another incentive and removes the pollution externality they have been enjoying. So now either they err closer to under-production and risk missing out on sales or secondary market supply of their goods increases leading to possible brand dilution. So in the end the value of these companies ends up lower than before, less pollution, and apparel is cheaper. I'd like to know more about the equity and carbon effects of the process they will need to now follow. So they trade destruction with shipping a crate to Africa. What is the difference? Firms will be less profitable, manufacturing is reduced, who is impacted by that?
> Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste
Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt cheap to produce, that they have less of an incentive to let it go to waste. When I buy socks they get holes after wearing them 7 times, and then they go in the bin too.
If you can make a shirt for $1 and sell it for $10, you can throw out literally half of your inventory and still make $5 per shirt.
Update: I made a silly math mistake. That's $9 profit per shirt. So if you make 100 shirts but only sell 50 and burn the rest, that's $450 profit. You make $4.50 per shirt manufactured.
Stated another way: you can total up the manufacturing cost of the shirts you destroyed ($50) and distributed evenly among the ones you sold (50/50=$1 each) and just add that to the cost of each shirt you sell when calculating profit. Same result.
This would been that more competition would be good for the environment because it would drive down prices and margins, and thus the incentive to overproduce. But this rule actually decreases the competitive pressure and increases margins because market exit barriers = market entry barriers
If you throw some plastics into a coal fired power plant it is almost the same as if you would burn oil.
There are anecdotes about trash incinerators requiring less kerosene to finish the burn, because of the plastic content.
I have a feeling nobody is paying particularly close attention to capturing usable energy from this process
There is in France a kind of shared network of hot water used to heat up our homes (well, those that are connected and paying into the system at least). Part of the system works by burning trash and capturing the heat in the process. Supposedly they also work on using renewable energies to do the work.
Some people argue that the whole system is going against the objectives of recycling stuff but at least it's better than just burning it to get rid of it.
How will apparel be cheaper? When they lower production runs, it'll be less available, which will mean prices will go up.
This isn't exactly a supply and demand situation that might cause prices to increase by restricting supply, like what you sometimes see with global commodity cartels such as oil.
What's happening in this case is that they are overproducing because profit margins are high enough that they can overproduce and still be happy with the profit after discarding the extra, in the hope of capturing the stochastic upside of extra sales from never being out of stock.
This might cause various random fast fashion junk items to occasionally go out of stock when they wouldn't have in the past, but it's not like you're going to see long waiting lists or high aftermarket prices. People just won't buy that stuff because there will be lots of alternatives, are they just won't buy anything at all and realize they don't need it.
So yes, in an abstract textbook sense, the price might go up in the sense that you might experience some probability of your desired items selling out when that probability was lowered before. But I don't think anybody in their right mind would argue that's a serious economic detriment.
Maybe there's a case to be made that this is a crude way to address what is essentially an allocation failure. But that alone doesn't mean that we shouldn't try it or that it's bad policy.
Economically, producing less to start with is not very different from what is currently done, destroying excess inventory. Therefore I don't think it's at all a given that prices will go up.
Destroying the inventory has a cost though.
Setting up the production line is the expensive part, firing things off it once it’s running is what’s cheap.
Storing stock is very expensive too.
This incentivizes what’s happening if you’re making cheap clothes.
The only error in the whole post. I think it's more productive to ignore that and focus on the important stuff... which is about why this kind of market interference isn't going to work out the way a naive optimist would hope.
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Overproduction is not an issue. The issue is that they damage unsold things instead selling them for a market price dictated by supply and demand.
This is not only clothing and apparel, also sporting goods and many other items.
This should be forbidden across all industries. Unsold stock should be delivered to non-profits at no cost for further distribution.
If you can't prove that you either sold or transfer to non-profit an item you manufactured then you should be fined for each unaccounted item proportionally to their market price.
And suddenly the EU becomes #1 in private non-profits, the first ever non-profits to turn up revenue and reinvest them into stock from Gap and H&M.
Also the first non-profit to build gigalandfills in Africa.
Obviously there would be some rules for non-profits eligible for those donations.
> so this adds another incentive and removes the pollution externality they have been enjoying.
Displaces it. And adds other externalities like C02 to do so.
If they ship unused crates to Africa then they get cheap clothes. Win win all around.
Not always a win. There have been a few reports that sending large numbers of clothing donations to areas that don't specifically need them has the result of harming local industry that would otherwise be able to produce and sell clothes.
OK, send them somewhere else or sell them at a discount
but brand dilution
I don't care. If you over produce then you made a bad economic decision, tough luck. Destroying goods for accounting reasons is an abhorrent policy driven by greed.
This is kinda the real thing at play here... and the 'wave' in the economics;
After all, the company could have arguably instead produced fewer product, sold what they have already sold for the same price, paid their workers the same amount of money to do less work, they wouldn't have to pay for the destroyed goods, and wouldn't have had to pay for the wasted input materials...
All in the name of profit FOMO.
The appearal industry is among the most exploitive in the world. It's good to kill it before it springs up. Bangladesh is not anyone's example of a model country.
You seem so certain despite having it backwards as likely as not.
the western ordered cheap quality overproduction solution of swamping developing countries with it, where much also ends in a trash heap, means they can continue the exploitive and environmentally destructive mass production.
Smaller local industries would be economically better for the countries, supply more aligned so less waste, and there’d be less of the bad factories in Bangladesh.
I read this as "We've had our industrial revolution. No, we don't want you to get yours."
Note specifically that I said local industry. I don't mean some factory owned by a global chain.
I'm specifically talking about local, small business. Giant companies usually have better labor protections in the 3rd-4th world than small buisness does.
people making clothes for themselves to and to sell in a subsistence living style isnt quite comparable though, and not working exploitatively to extract the wealth from labour to a different country has a value of its own
Assuming there was no /s there:
The US and I assume Europe have laws against "dumping" - selling a product for below cost - because it drives local competitors out of business. That is exactly what shipping containers full of clothes to Africa does.
I think GP was referring to donations, which are not subject to dumping rules AFAIK.
People living in the tropics don't need clothing suited for temperate climates.
People who live in temperate climates wear tshirts, underwear, and socks, if I'm not mistaken.
Then they won't take the donations, problem solved?
The problem is that they do and leave massive piles of winter clothing laying around as garbage.
The effect is the same though (well, worse), that was GP's point.
more market economics framing of life, as if numerous very smart people haven't already tried to make this paradigm work for society, and failed.
The funny thing is that textbook economics has all of the answers about why laissez-faire market economics doesn't work as a foundation for economic policy. It's almost as if it's never been about making good policy and always about doing whatever is best for big businesses and the small number of wealthy people who stand to gain the most from minimizing consumer surplus.
totally. In fact the current monopoly-coddling dispensation is antithetical to market economics, which clearly espouses real competition. It's kinda been coopted and hijacked.
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If firms prodice less, prices will be higher.
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It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
You should check out "Ascension" (it is on Paramount unfortunately). It gives a pretty close up look at China and factory culture and how their entire country is mobilized to push maximum consumption. The corporation's don't view Americans high per-capita consumption as a problem but instead wonder how to drive the rest of the world to consume the same absurd amount. It gives you a sort of fly on the wall view of the whole thing and it really makes you question what kind of psychotic road we are barreling down.
I agree with you about food though. I care about food and healthcare, very occasionally transportation. Can we focus on those instead of all the bullshit "amenities" corporations are churning out, are we really gonna decimate the planet for clothes, cosmetics and plastic conveniences?
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
It's good exactly because of this. Every company is pushing us to consume more, and Wall Street is at the top of this, growth at all costs (including human lives, mental health, just anything)
Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.
We should be making shoes which lasts 4 years, clothes which last at least 2 years with no "fashion" industry pushing us to change it every 2 days.
Where are the 8% annual returns going to come from to pay for all the defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare plans?
Not trying to pick apart your point but I rotate a small set of staple clothes and they’re in fine condition after two years (haven’t had much time for clothes shopping since toddler arrived), despite me abusing “quick wash” and “drycare 40c” constantly on Miele W1/T1 stack for “90 minute, good to fold” laundry.
I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.
Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)
Plus, I may be deluded but I’m of the opinion that polo shirts and jeans/neutral trousers are a multi-decade winning combination.
I might add, I've had some pretty long lasting clothes with Gildan heavy weight 100% cotton, and a few wool shirts I rotate. I think there are a few tricks that I accidently stumbled on to making my clothes last a long time: Firstly, I use mild detergents, and usually set the machine to "tap cold". I haven't noticed that my clothes are less clean. Secondly, I usually air dry on a rack instead of a dryer. I was forced to do this when I lived in an apartment, and suspect that this is a big factor. Thirdly, and maybe the most important, I spent some time learning what colors I look best in. Turns out there is quite a rabbit hole you can go down in terms of styling your clothes to match not what you "like" but what compliments your skin tone, body shape, and so on.
I actually think the last point has been profound, because I rarely _feel_ like buying clothes, because I look good in whatever Is in my closet.
For reference, I cycle through about 7 t-shirts. I wear the same one in the gym. I have a pair of rotten clothes for when I'm farming or hunting, but my daily clothes endure more daily wear and tear than urban living for sure.
> Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.
Wall Street here is a boogie man.
Using resources to make life better is actually good. And we keep getting better at it, and doing so in more sustainable and efficient ways.
And if it’s not - you fundamentally believe technology is not beneficial. Then all of industrial society needs to be reversed.
making low quality items that wear out quickly and influencing people to over consume just so big businesses profit more is not "using resources to make life better"
wall street != technology.
exactly. wall street here is a personification of "bad effects of industrial society"
Shoes which last 4 years and clothes which last 2 years are widely available, if you want them. They're not particularly expensive. But many consumers prefer to buy less robust items that won't hold up to daily wear and then complain about longevity.
It is ok companies think like that. It is not ok we let them do it without any limits or regulations. We just need to be careful with unintended side effects and tighten the controls carefully
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
This regulation is not about consumption but about production. Yes, this would not solve the potential over-consumption (I agree generally with what you say) - people actually buying shit they use once - but imagine how bad it is if for each shit used once the company produce 3x that shit...
It isn't just "companies" that want you to buy more, our entire economic system encourages it.
+1 to Ascension, one of the most fine piece of filmmaking that tries to explain the world of today
Reduced consumption of non essentials is a good thing not a bad thing
> most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
It shouldn't be cheap. The world got used to the luxury of cheap meat by being unethical and harmful to the environment (humans' environment) and animals.
Cows are insanely resource-intensive to farm, bad for the air, bad for the water, bad for the land. Factory-farmed chicken meat is infamously inhumane, using genetic mutants to produce more meat faster, as well as being bad for the environment. They require more land and water use just to produce the feed for the animals. Both produce toxic runoff that goes into our water and land. Drugs pumped into animals land in us or our water, causing cancer or breeding superbugs. And we accept all these negatives so we can buy a cheap burger we don't need (we have plenty of other food).
Pigs are actually pretty sustainable, as are rabbits, goats, and venison. We used to eat a lot more of them, before the factory animal farms changed our diets to prefer cow and chicken.
How are pigs, rabbits, goats and venison more sustainable? Unless you mean eating meat twice a year.
I live in a farmer family; our cattle needs around one hectare each, because we don't feed them processed food, only grass; because concentrated food is even less sustainable, and more importantly, more expensive than letting them roam (fenced areas)
Rabbit is not sustainable. There were some people trying to commercially rise and sell them and it didn't work. They would need concentrated food, which is expensive.
Goat meat is much more expensive than cows because they are less efficient than cows and pigs and chicken. I know two people who rise goats to sell them, and it doesn't make them money; really, they do it because they kind of like the critters as a pet project.
Only pigs and chickens are more sustainable, precisely because of theirinhumane(?) short life and their genetics. They are very efficient meat producers.
I know poor people who rise chickens and pigs; those animals take longer to reach "maturity", and the meat is not tender; but since the animals are eating whatever they scavenge, it can't be done at scale; again, we would eat meat like twice a year (This might be an exageration, but chicken pig and cow farms really produce all the meat we eat; of those only cows eat grass under the sun)
By sustainable I mean its impact on the environment, animals and humans. I don't mean how profitable or easy it is.
Rabbit is one of the most sustainable livestock. It requires less food to produce more rabbits and they don't need much land. A single female produces ~50 kits per season, taking 8-12 weeks to come to market. Ironically, they aren't considered livestock by USDA, so you can skip most of the red tape. As far as feed goes, there are many options that will depend on the farmer; pelleted feed is the best but most costly, so you can mix in either foraging or supplement with various other feeds like different hays, oats, etc. Whether it's economical depends on a number of factors, but there's over 3,000 rabbit farms in USA right now.
Same with goats, very sustainable. In many places like islands, goat is the preferred livestock as it requires less land and feed. And obviously you can forage goats in places most animals won't since they'll eat nearly any plants.
Pigs (and other livestock) historically were raised through the year and only slaughtered in winter. It's the last 100 years that has completely changed how and when people in the West eat meat, people's assumptions about how we must farm, how we must eat, etc. Our diets don't have to remain the way we are. For example, since Chinese people prefer to eat pork, they actually have half the world's pig livestock. We like beef so we have a lot of cows. It could've been reversed if our cultural tastes were different. Similarly, we could just eat less meat, and our tastes would develop towards the whole universe of non-meat foods.
Pigs are huge blobs of meat.
Families would raise one pig they would slaughter once a year and it would be a regular source of preserved meat and fat over the following year.
All of this was pre "green" revolution so it has to be carbon neutral at that level of consumption(which is admittedly lower than that of most people these days).
Eating meat once a year is an exaggeration when it comes to pork.
They’re not and the idea cows are environmentally unsound or a bad use of resources doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.
For all the grievances people made against food pyramid, this is actually the real reason why it was instituted. Meat has always been expensive, and with limited money people had, they'd rather spend it all on grains and save the money for something else. Food pyramid encourages people to at least add some proteins in their diet. And it works, people's height had been increasing decade-by-decade.
In a way, the movement to disparage food pyramid because it institutes too much grain really seems like a first world problem. Especially any that encourages more meat.
It’s not expensive for the reasons you want it to be expensive it’s expensive because your currency is inflating out of control over the past 5 years.
You have already gotten two answers showing why this causes the manufacturer to lose money. A third: I hike, enough that pretty much all my gear out there is the good stuff. I do not care one bit about brands and would prefer not to be an ad for the outdoor companies--but I am anyway because it's not just a name.
Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. People like me don't want that big X on our stuff, if we learn Y is the same thing we are going to buy Y. And next year their sales of X drop because people like me waiting for the secondary stuff. Thus even if you do not consider brand dilution it's still in their interest to not sell the technical stuff in the secondary channels. When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
> Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y.
Does that actually happen? What I see happening instead in the bike clothing market is that either after the season, or if a new design is to be unveiled after several seasons, the items gets heavily discounted (often more than 50%). It's just your decision if you need the most expensive newest items right now or you buy possibly older or out of season designs much cheaper. But the branding is also very much integrated, so it would be hard to change the branding on an existing item.
There are a few brands that try to limit this and keep the discounts in check like Assos, but that only means it's harder to find a heavily discounted item, still possible.
> When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
Sure, if you can find customers that accept that, why not. In that case just manufacture fewer items.
50% discounts on technical stuff are basically only the very last ones that are unlikely to be your size. Real world, you're not likely to do better than 20% off. It's in the manufacturer's interest that I know it's unlikely I can find a better sale.
Note that I'm talking technical stuff, not designer stuff.
Am currently riding in an Assos winter jacket, midlayer and pants that were about 50% off and far from last pieces. Also a 7mesh winter jersey with 50% off but that was indeed last piece of that color.
This feels like the argument for why not deflationary currency. Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary. Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.
That is inflationary. Goods costing more monetary units is inflation. In deflation same amount of monetary units buys more goods. So you would want to sell your house now if you have other options and then next year you could buy similar house and still have monetary units left over...
Deflationary currency is like a highway that you're allowed to park on. People will park their car on the highways and then charge you a fee to let you through.
>Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary.
Uhm, if money is deflationary, your house will be worth less than X denominated in the deflationary currency. This means if the money grows in value faster you'd sell all your assets as quickly as possible and replace it with a useless scrap of paper.
>Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.
Again, if money is deflationary, you'd hold onto money and wait for house prices to drop with the aforementioned mechanic.
You might say this is appealing, but the problem is that your income depends on other people's spending and they have the same incentive as you do, which is to earn more than you spend. That's something that is not possible in aggregate, where total aggregate spending and total aggregate income must always be equal. This is a zero sum game purely mathematically and this is not a moral judgement but an explanation how the rules work.
When people follow the rules of the game, something weird happens. The promised outcome of a wealthy society from everyone being prudent savers doesn't emerge. The reason is as follows: If you have 1 million paper notes that represent the wealth of the entire nation and the value of the paper notes goes up, the represented wealth of the entire nation goes up, but the nation still has the same 1 million paper notes. No matter how much value people try to save in the form of money, they will still only have paper notes.
Those paper notes do not have intrinsic value and that is for a good reason. Giving the paper notes intrinsic value doesn't change the fundamentals, it just makes the tokens more expensive to produce. It's like having a golden toilet.
If money is worthless, then trying to give it non-transient value is a fools errand. Trying to say that a house is equally as valuable as a small bundle of cotton fabric is only acceptable for the purposes of accounting, but saying that the same bundle of cotton fabric (whose value is decreed) ought to buy more house next year is batshit insane. You couldn't come up with a better system to reward laziness and idleness.
Yeah, I had it swapped around. "Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is inflationary."
This is a big blow to High-end Luxury Branded Companies, Many of these companies willfully destroy unsold inventory to not devalue their Brand. Manufacturing costs are just 1/20th of the marketed price.
Most probably, the returned items just sit in the warehouse of the companies than selling to ordinary customers. Golden times for warehouse companies.
I think these rules should have a pre-determined shelf life. They are not bad at the current state of the world - they push in the right direction - but they complicated law, and I bet there will be many second-level outcomes that are hard to predict now. Besides that - once the capabilities for reuse are built - they should be sustainable - so the second level outcomes will actually dominate.
I'm guessing EU bashing
Italy?
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
How is it you dont have winter anymore but when it gets cold it gets stupidly cold?
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
> The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.
Your anecdote may be true, but doesn't hold at a global scale, and science is not on your side:
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/
I can't believe I'm debating climate change on HackerNews. What happened here?
Where I currently live has about the same climate as it did 20 years ago. More variability, I think (people started complaining about weird harvest times about 10 years ago, and we're now all used to chaotic year-on-year yields), but roughly the same averages. Flood infrastructure needs maintenance, but not a redesign. However, the behaviour of the migratory wildlife has changed, and you only have to travel a few dozen miles before you reach somewhere that has needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure.
"A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
Where’s that, out of curiosity?
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.
If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust.
This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.
It's a terrible idea because approximately 90% of the cost of clothing is not in producing it, but in the supply chain - keeping it in stock, transporting it to and from warehouses, the manpower needed to organize and sorting and inspect it.
So by saving the 10% of the cost of the clothing, you end up wasting way more in labor and transport and inventory costs. All of which ends up way worse for the environment than had you just shredded it and treated it as compost.
The clothing that ends up in the landfill also needed to be transported, stored and organized. So if you don't produce those clothes to begin with you not only save the pollution and resource usage that would come from producing it, but also the pollution and resource usage from transporting, etc. It may _cost_ the company more, but only producing what can be sold will be strictly less polluting.
There's no way to perfectly forecast demand; all things equal I'd prefer that companies overproduce and we live in an age of plenty with a bit of waste (which companies are already incentivized to avoid), rather than face shortages in goods.
I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet.
The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.
Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.
It's partly explained by all the non-US contributors here. That's my theory.
Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.
Most software developers are not founders, but they like to hang out here for the news and community anyway. It used to be a lot more libertarian back when I joined (even more so when I only occasionally lurked) but things have shifted rather dramatically over time.
I don't think this forum has significant costs of running, especially considering it is not in development.
They switched the backend to Common Lisp in 2019, and at the time had two seperate Arc-to-JS compilers in development. [0]
The site may feel less changeable than many, but I would be very surprised if it is not "in-development".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550123
It employs two full–time moderators.
It didn’t use to be this way but through evaporative cooling, most of the founder types stopped posting here.
Can you explain the connection to evaporative cooling?
It refers to evaporative cooling of group belief - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
In evaporative cooling, the warmer particles are more prone to evaporate and escape leaving the remaining substance cooler than it was. Likewise, as individuals with more of a libertarian or founder-sympathizing mindset stopped contributing to HN as much, the overall tone of the site turned more negative against business and successful founders.[1] I don't want to speculate too much on why they started leaving--I hope it's because they all got too busy being successful founders--but once the effect started to happen and HN turned into less and less of a site for founders to discuss their startups and turned more and more into the proverbial peanut gallery, I think a feedback loop started pushing more of them away.
mftrhu is probably correct in attributing the origin of the analogy but I don't specifically remember where I got it from and I think some of the examples EY gives in that essay would be uncalled for to apply as a direct analogy to HN. HN was never a doomsday cult and I'm not even trying to say that all of the smart and reasonable people left HN, but rather that there was a specific attitude and mentality that's not well represented here anymore.
[1] This is oversimplified. Classic HN still had lots of people complaining about big tech companies, it's just that the criticism was usually voiced from the perspective of another founder rather than from the perspective of a progressive critic. For instance, I remember lots of complaints about Apple's arbitrary and capricious App Store policies, but then that directly affects the startup founder who wants to build an iPhone app.
Why would it require becoming a billionaire to benefit? A lot of big companies are able to purchased by the public. There are even fractional shares which lowers the bar even further in being able to get exposure to these companies.
> The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services
Some of us like the intent of the law but are wondering what the consequences of the law are.
We have already seen all the schemes that corporations use for greenwashing. We have already seen all the recycling that isn't. Most of us assume that these corporations will simply do the absolute minimum they have to do to comply with the letter of the law. That likely means "selling" crates of these clothes back to some country willing to discard or destroy them.
In addition, we already have a ton of problems from Always Late Inventory(tm), and this seems like it's going to add to that. Are you even slightly outside of the normal body shape? Sorry, no stock for you evermore.
I think the law is a good idea, but, sadly, laws mean nothing without implementation. The devil is in the details.
I am not against this in spirit but what are the higher order effects and unintended consequences?
The only thing that is more annoying to me than market fundamentalist, neo-liberal bullshit is emotional appeals that sound right on paper but have a total disregard for higher order effects and unintended consequences.
all that said.. most of the clothes are not so "branded"? Who cares if a GAP or something ends up in outlet or wherever..
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." - (probably not) John Steinbeck
I guess with inflation we can update the quote to “temporarily embarrassed billionaires”
Socialism never took off in America because Americans know that disincentivizing work shrinks the economy and makes everyone poorer.
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
I was in the bar in Revelstoke (where I lived, at the time) chatting with an old-timer the other year, and I asked him "is it just me, or did it used to snow more?"
He laughed, and told me that when he was a kid growing up, they weren't allowed to play on the tops of snowbanks because you'd get electrocuted by the high tension power lines. At the time, mid-winter, it was raining outside with a sad pile of slush maybe 1 foot deep.
Even when I was a kid in Revy, snowbanks were 10' deep mid-winter, every winter. It's been raining in town for the last 5 years, all winter. Winter's over. Time to start surfing, I guess.
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"Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare."
What an over exaggeration.
Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.
If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.
If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it!
But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some winters are colder than average. This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
So they externalize the cost of their own incompetence and you’re suggesting it’s bad to internalize that cost.
Failing to predict cold winters is not incompetence in the normal sense.
This rule isn't internalizing an externality.
Could they overproduce and keep unsold stock for next winter, and if unsold stock gets too high, stop producing more until it reduces?
They mostly do keep unsold stock, only a fraction of it gets destroyed. See the EEA's full analysis from 2024 (https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...).
They could, but it’s a tradeoff. Inventory costs money and if you cut production, that means laying off workers and possibly selling productive assets, at which point it becomes more expensive to scale production back up.
Every business decision is a tradeoff. Smart government interventions in the economy add weight to that tradeoff to reflect externalities not otherwise accounted for; this is how cap-and-trade on SO2 emissions works. Hamfisted government interventions set hard and fast rules that ignore tradeoffs and lead to unintended consequences.
It seems to me that is exactly what could be enabled by this law. It is forbidding the destruction of last year’s winter coats.
I don't think this is accurate. It's more that the textiles are produced in Asia and transported in containers.
Due to the high shipping costs, they err on the side of filling up the containers to cover the fixed cost. After selling the clothes, there might be enough clothes left over to fill shipping containers to return the clothes, but they will be clothes from different brands and manufacturers.
It would require extraordinary coordination on both the origin and destination country to return the clothes to the manufacturer where they could add the left over clothes to the next batch that is being shipped out to a different country.
Do we really need warehouses full of "just in case" inventory? It's not life or death, it's just slightly more profitable for companies to overproduce than it is for them to attempt to meet demand exactly.
Climate change is coming, fast and brutal. I'm okay with these multi-billion-dollar revenue companies making a few points less in profits, if it means slowing climate change by even a fraction of a fraction of a point.
They don't need those profits. But our children need a viable planet.
Companies can't meet demand exactly, no matter what profit margin they take, because it's not possible to predict demand exactly. Biasing towards overproduction is how you minimize the risk of shortages when there's a bit more demand than you expected.
as far as a market clearing problem goes, we should be forcing them to sell it at lower and lower prices, or even going to negative and payoyng people to take it off their hands.
supply and demand is that an oversupply makes prices fall, rather than driving artificial scarcity
Well, it sounds like that's what the EU is going to try. My guess is that the manufacturers are mostly destroying stuff for economically rational reasons, and will respond with production cuts leading to that same artificial scarcity from a consumer perspective.
(Although the original commenter would say, I suspect, that it's perfectly OK if there are minor consumer shortages in luxury goods for the sake of the climate.)
> This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
Clothes are something extremely overabundant in the EU. And even if they weren't, the unexpected overdemand will result in just using your old coat another year or buying one you like less. Workers are being unnecessarily exploited and resources are being unnecessarily wasted... so I think nudging companies in the right direction is way overdue. Will it work the way EU thinks? Probably not. Just like GDPR was well-intended, but the result is higher entry barrier to new companies and a bunch of annoying popups. But I'd argue that's a result of "not enough" regulation rather than "too much". Companies caught abusing our data should have been outright banned IMHO.
In this case they aren't destroying the unsold winter coats so they can keep doing this under the new law.
What about cases where 2 pieces of clothing when bundled together have value due to making it more efficient for people to find the right size, but over the right size is found the other becomes waste? A company can't prevent a consumer from ruining the wasted clothes.
How low is your population density, that there is no other person, who might have this size?
> A company can't prevent a consumer from ruining the wasted clothes.
When a consumer ruins clothing during try on he needs to buy it. I have always expected that rule to be the same everywhere.
I personally I don't want to wear clothes that some unclean person or weirdo tried on before. I get value in being the only person who wore it.
But that is how physical stores currently work, where you can try the stuff on, before you buy it? If you care about this, you can of course take the upper one to try on, like all do and then buy the lowest one. But you wash the clothing anyways before actually wearing them, so it doesn't really matter. Honestly I don't get your point.
The worth is zero because the producer doesn't pay for the externalities (pollution, landfill usage etc). So essentially it is "free" because it is subsidized by everyone.
The "headache" is just : produce what you sell, sell what you produce, don't fill the world with your shit.
What landfill doesn't charge fees?
The Pacific Ocean, I think.
That is not a landfill.
I think they misspoke - they likely meant the north atlantic ocean: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ghana-becomes-dumping-grou...
Since you seem to have missed the point:
tell that to the people putting the waste into it.
Almost no plastic waste in first world countries ends up in the ocean, thankfully
Source?
Also, you probably meant to say "developed" countries and not "first world".
Or rather, since we know fast fashion is horrible because of the things you just said - it forces a more thoughtful approach to production.
Discouraging superfluous production is not nothing.
If the headache causes companies to improve their product pipelines so that there is less waste then surely there will be less recycling.
Also: this will lead to it being harder to find clothing in your size in the EU (since each size is a new sku and must be inventory managed per the law)
In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.
What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.
It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
I buy mostly from liquidators, where everything is sold as-is, but that doesn't stop end users from trying to make a claim, so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty. For example, Ryobi brands the items with a plastic welder, leaving a tell-tale wavy mark.
A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who participate, so finding ways to allow products to be truly sold as-is is vital, otherwise the next most logical option is to put those items in a landfill.
It's also important that there's no legislative hurdles to seelling items as-is, or there may be no legal way to sell a salvage products without completely overhauling them, which is usually not cost effective.
> so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty
With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.
But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as not eligible for warranty. They just want that coverage
We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products they bought through gray market channels.
> ... the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer...
Maybe this is the problem. Retailers should cover the statutory warranty on any product they sell.
This is mostly how statutory warranty works in most countries. It’s actually the retailer who bares the responsibility, but good/big manufacturers will just provide the same direct to consumers.
What do you mean, 'statutory warranty'? At least in the US, aside from a few specific circumstances (door to door sales for example with a '3 day cool off' period) there is no mandatory return policy or timeline.
There is a U.S. federal law which gives warranty of merchantability among others (not sure about E.U.).
A major store sold me an expensive item that didn't work, and the store's return policy didn't cover it, so the store said file a warranty claim with the manufacturer. I just did a credit card charge back instead, because the store has to sell me something that works.
If for whatever reason the credit card charge back didn't work, I could use the store in (small claims) court and win.
AI: "The implied warranty of merchantability is a legal guarantee that a product will function as expected for its ordinary purpose, such as a toaster toasting bread. It is automatically applied to most consumer goods sold by merchants and does not need to be in writing."
Typo, should be: "could sue the store"
I swore I fixed that earlier.
Is it the iOS keyboard?!
That sounds like another problem then :)
In the EU (or maybe just my country of origin?) there is certainly statutory warranty. Length and coverage varies per product category.
Resellers fraudulently claiming a liquidated item is new, or that they are an authorized distributor allowing for the product to be warranted, is its own problem. It's usually not a large enough fraud that it's worth it for law-enforcement to follow up on, but generally online marketplaces, like eBay, have their own enforcement practices to keep traffic away from fraudulent sellers.
On the author hand, Amazon has made it difficult to avoid fraudulent sellers, but they also don'e even sort items by price when that option is selected, so I avoid buying through their site.
It's not like you wouldn't have this problem anyway though? Like customers have a % of crazy people regardless.
I mean the "ididnthaveeggs" subreddit exists purely to make light of people who post reviews on recipe sites where they overtly use the wrong ingredients and then downvote the recipe as a result.
Hah, I just read a one-star review on Goodreads, because the narrator was boring. Goodreads is reviewing the book itself, not an audiobook adaptation.
Also, all I could think of was the Seinfeld episode where George wanted audio books, because he couldn't stand reading in his own voice, but the narrator ended up sounding exactly like him.
Goodreads also has listings for audiobooks. Reviewing the narrator in an audiobook is like reviewing the font choice in a paper book. Both are legitimate. (If someone's posting a review of an audiobook to the listing of the main format, that's wrong)
> We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products
These days this is often the only recourse you have, because going the legal route you get stonewalled unless you are willing to spend serious money on pursuing a case. And it'll cost you gobs of time. An example is my mother buying new pants for 220 bucks from a reputable seller, the stitching starts to disintegrate after 7 months, and both the retailer and the manufacturer tell my mother to go pound sand.
So please do not portray customers trying to get their due as "ragebaiters".
I like the double entendre where "liquidator" can also mean that you hired a hitman to acquire the goods.
> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
(all assuming the product is not sold as "new")
> Isn't that good though?
It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.
Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling.
If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:
1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.
2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation
3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
>and sends them for recycling.
>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then
the recycler will have undoubtedly violated a contract they have with ExampleCo and will lose in civil court and pay significant penalties greater than the money they made selling never worn ExampleCo jeans and also, undoubtedly, suffer from not having ExampleCo as a customer for their services in the future.
But the recycler has all the papers and documentation that they lawfully contracted an overseas company for wholesale recycle of the product. What's your civil court's jurisdiction? You might be able to play wack-a-mole with ebay, temu, alibaba express sellers through civil court in your jurisdiction assuming you have the money of course.
I'm supposing ExampleCo's civil court's jurisdiction covers the recycler's location, otherwise ExampleCo would have really stupid management.
I'm supposing the contract with the recycler would hold the recycler liable, and whatever third party contracts they made with another company would not matter one bit. If ExampleCo contracts with RecycleCo to recycle pants and they do not get recycled then RecycleCo is liable to ExampleCo, yes RecycleCo has contracts with OverseasRecycleCo and it is up to RecycleCo to sue OverseasRecycleCo to recoup the losses they had to pay to ExampleCo; ExampleCo will probably not be suing OverseasRecycleCo, they will take their pound of flesh out of RecycleCo. All of this of course implies that they have some way of verifying that pants they find out in the world are in fact pants that should have been recycled.
What jurisdiction will the suit between RecycleCo and OverseasRecycleCo be taking place in? Depends on the location of the two entities, and possibly also on contractual conditions.
I totally admit that it is not ideal to sue over breaches of contract, it is almost always preferable that breaches not happen because when breaches don't happen it means that things are going the way you specified that they should go and you should be happy.
But let's go to another point here:
what is it about recycling that means that clothes will be taken and resold instead of recycled in greater numbers than clothes that were supposed to be destroyed? Nowadays clothes that are meant to be destroyed are sometimes not, and sold and ExampleCo suffers in the same way as they would with recycled clothes. I suppose ExampleCo must be able to tell if clothes that they find out on third party sites are among clothes that should have been destroyed nowadays otherwise this whole thing is moot and exactly the same as it is now.
Sometimes clothes are stolen from trucks and trains and sold, will this stop happening because of all these clothes that were supposed to have been recycled destroying the market for stolen clothes?
Most non-authorized sales of ExampleCo pants are not actually lower quality ExampleCo pants destined for destruction but fake ExampleCo pants, because ExampleCo as a brand is just so exciting that there are lots of fake ones made, because most pants that are sent for destruction are destroyed and only some are diverted to resellers.
Will the surplus of pants from ExampleCo that were supposed to be recycled but for some reason are not because "oh no, it is impossible to sue people in this new world with recycling going on" going to be so great in amount that instead of completely fake ExampleCo pants there will instead be only ExampleCo pants of lower than normal ExampleCo pants quality?
Why exactly will lower than normal quality ExampleCo pants destroy the brand value of ExampleCo more than counterfeit ExampleCo pants? Are counterfeit ExampleCo pants better than real ExampleCo pants that failed some part of QA process?
Frankly a lot of the argumentation as to how recycling opens up the doors to destroying the value of ExampleCo seems specious, in that it seems like it would not damage ExampleCo any more than it can currently be damaged by breaches of contract where destruction of inventory is concerned or other civil and criminal acts.
What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels? Or why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?
I suspect this will need to be a cultural change. If ExampleCo does it but not RandomCo, of course your reputation will suffer. But if the law is for all of EU, it gives everyone an equal footing.
> What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels?
They can. Doesn’t help with the reputational damage though. People who think they bought an ExampleCo jean will still think that the company quality has slipped. They will still tell all their friends that the “new jeans made by ExampleCo are not like they used to”. Not all of them all the time, but some of them some of the time.
> why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?
That doesnt help with their reputation.
How feasible is to remove tag, scratch serial number?
Especially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.
> ExampleCo's quality control does its job,
Then this will be the pressure that is needed for the company's quality assurance to be improved.
The problem is the eBay sellers always label defective stuff as simply new product.
People buying it may or may not be ok with the defect.
Think bad welds, usually they're fine for a while and then they're very much not.
Had this recently, bought a dehumidifier for a good price, marked as new - arrived and had obviously been opened and didn't work. Out of a desire to have a dehumidifier sooner than later I was about to open it up when I saw it already had been, so I opened a return instead and sent it back.
I can only assume it is worth it for the seller to sell untested goods as new, a good number must work long enough for the buyer to be happy.
I still remember Fry's Electronics and trying to find anything that hadn't been opened-returned-reshinkwrapped. Often it was impossible. Not sure why they had so many but eh whatever, it mostly worked fine.
It’s not hard to mark things as defective, liquidated, etc. so those eBay sellers can face fraud charges. We shouldn’t be sending stuff to landfills just to save a few pennies in permanent marker.
fraud charges for ebay sellers over stating the condition of their items?
hilarious fantasy
There are people in jail for this right now who presumably don’t find it funny, and in this scenario the volume would be high enough that prosecutors would definitely be interested.
Show me one person in prison for this
Here’s the first hit on Google:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/us-attorneys-office-secur...
Counterfeits isn't selling used/defective as new.
> all assuming the product is not sold as "new"
And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.
The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.
No, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.
I think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.
If I donate something on the premise that it's going to be used for some charitable cause and then it just ends up on some skuzzy listing on ebay, that would, at best, be deceitful. It's "good" insofar as the item is not being dumped in some landfill but it's not "good" insofar as it was obtained through deception.
Beautiful insight into processes that most of us never see, thanks!
My initial thought was "reusing an item is even better than recycling" but then realized that a warrantied item is quite likely to have flaws and get warrantied again very soon.
I have recently been trolling eBay for used computing equipment rather than buying new, after it was suggested I sell my old hardware that I don't think anyone would want. And man has that been a great experience, it's way more fun than browsing Newegg or doing pc part picking from new catalogs. I need neither the compute hardware nor the cost savings but it's a fun activity on its own, not unlike so many computer games where you do deck optimization or similar.
I heard that the clothes especially from high end brands are destroyed to keep the value of the brand high ie not to cannibalize sales. Which doesnt seem like good enough reason to burn 300.000+t of clothes (that created untold emissions)
Do high-end brands even produce 300 kilotons of clothing? Assuming, very generously, that a piece of clothing, with packaging and all, weights 1 kg, it would be 300M pieces of clothing; that could be an entire production run of something very ubiquitous (say, Levi's 501), but definitely not high-end.
I think that tonnage is for all textiles, not just high-end clothing.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
Not covered by this regulation in spirit and (probably, haven't read it yet) in text. The spirit of the regulation is targeting fast-fashion on-prem retailers (think H&M, Primark, Zara and the likes) and online retailers like Shein, who have heaps of products that just aren't sold because they're not wanted - and also the occasional luxury brand trying to maintain scarcity [1].
> but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.
[1] https://theweek.com/95179/luxury-brands-including-burberry-b...
They have exceptions for manufacturing defects
> aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
I think some brands destroy the items to create an artificial scarcity that keeps their stuff 'exclusive'.
This is also very detrimental to buyer experience. When you search for a specific new product, prices from different sellers can vary widely. Most often there is no way to tell what is the reason for the difference. Is the cheapest offer simply the best deal, or is it a refurbished product, or even a fake?
>but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out.
I used to work in IT Recycling and I feel like I was for some time, this process.
We would take stock to be destroyed from refurbishment/replacement pipelines, fix it up "just enough" and if we werent worried about serialisation, it would go out via eBay, otherwise it would be gifted to clients who would say it was for their kids but I had suspicions that sometimes it was going back into retail eventually.
I still have a lot of shit that should have been destroyed.
> had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Couldn't this be prevented by, say, sticking it on a drill press and drilling a large hole in it, and then recycling it?
This does happen: for example in Macbook repair, it is common to buy defective motherboards, in order to salvage the chips off them (which are apple-specific, hence not purchasable elsewhere). Those boards often come from China, and often have holes drilled in them, I guess exactly to prevent them from being repaired.
It's a shame, because some of those boards could (and would, they are valuable enough) be fully repaired by a skilled repair person. Instead, the chips are picked off and the rest goes to waste.
I did buy a batch once that didn't have holes drilled, and they all turned out to have all sorts of strange, often random issues, so I suspect those were RMAs that somehow "fell off the back of a truck" and escaped the drilling.
Why do you think the ones with holes didn‘t have the same defect?
There is this insane video where someone actually does repair one of the prototype boards that have been drilled
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q
Probably, but part of the point of outsourcing the recycling was that you wouldn't have to set up infrastructure, process and people for that. If they weren't crooked, you could even have customers ship the products directly to the recycler. To drill it first, then you are paying for shipping twice, on an item that is already worthless to you.
If the choice is between destroying the product and giving it away you give it away. End of story. Stop trying to make it more complicated than it is.
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
If you had bothered to read TFA, you'd have understood that the rules only apply to products that have fully passed QA, were being kept as stock but ended up not selling. They don't apply to experimental batches, to defective or damaged items, etc...
From the site guidelines:
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere.
Isn't this TKMaxx's entire business model?
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
Isn't this why Ross exists? It's where I first heard the phrase "slightly irregular".
What became of the relationship with the recycling company?
It’s shocking to see this legislated.
As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.
They quite clearly are. Burberry was caught a while ago https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983, but it's well known that every major upmarket brand was doing it to avoid the loss of prestige of sending the items to outlets.
you can try to reason with the people who post comments like the one you're responding to, but the truth is they are just there waiting for anything a regulator does to desparage it, defend corporate and capital, and change nothing about the status quo. The worst part is that they do it thinking they are so edgy for knowing exactly why just another piece of regulation will clearly not work. Funnily enough, the EU track record proves that, apart from some exceptions, these type of regulations work really well. USB-C. Data Roaming across all of Europe. Laws on single use plastics. Etc. But yeah, it's just another regulation! EU BAD!
It’s a fair criticism, but note the Draghi report:
“The regulatory burden on European companies is high and continues to grow, but the EU lacks a common methodology to assess it. The Commission has been working for years to reduce the "stock" and "flow" of regulation under the Better Regulation agenda. However, this effort has had limited impact so far. The stock of regulation remains large and new regulation in the EU is growing faster than in other comparable economies. While direct comparisons are obscured by different political and legal systems, around 3,500 pieces of legislation were enacted and around 2,000 resolutions were passed in the US at the federal level over the past three Congress mandate: (2019-2024). During the same period, around 13,000 acts were passed by the EU. Despite this increasing flow of regulation, the EU lacks a quantitative framework to analyse the costs and benefits of new laws.”
> pieces of legislation were enacted and around 2,000 resolutions
I'm wondering if this includes regulatory agencies which in the US operate under the executive
I would guess it's included but the wording (act, resolution) is very "legislative" coded
That's a fair criticism, but a far cry from the blanket anti-regulation reaction that we get from some people here.
I agree with Draghi 100%, he’s a genius and I would love to see him take Von Der Leyen’s place. That said, the original comment has a very different intent.
> you can try to reason with the people who post comments like the one you're responding to, but the truth is they are just there waiting for anything a regulator does to desparage it, defend corporate and capital, and change nothing about the status quo. The worst part is that they do it thinking they are so edgy for knowing exactly why just another piece of regulation will clearly not work. Funnily enough, the EU track record proves that, apart from some exceptions, these type of regulations work really well. USB-C. Data Roaming across all of Europe. Laws on single use plastics. Etc. But yeah, it's just another regulation! EU BAD!
How about extending others some good faith?
These are political disagreements with decades (sometimes centuries) of history, and unless you're fifteen years old, there's a better explanation for the fact that others disagree with you than "I am the single smartest person in the universe, and all my political opinions are so irrefutably correct that anyone who disagrees must be doing so in bad faith and out of ignorance".
The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.
> The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.
I'd personally disagree with that assessment. I think the vast majority of people want what's best for them and the cohorts they're in. Which is quite different from wanting what's best for society as a whole.
> These are political disagreements with decades (sometimes centuries) of history, and unless you're fifteen years old, there's a better explanation for the fact that others disagree with you
The better explanation is that they have acquired their political tastes mindlessly and are now defending them in an equal manner. The presumption of good faith is wasted on them.
> The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.
That's incorrect. Just take a look at the housing situation in the US: what's best for society is to build, but a majority of the people (the current owners) are blocking that because it suits them.
> The presumption of good faith is wasted on them.
That's just assholery masquerading as enlightenment.
> That's incorrect. Just take a look at the housing situation in the US: what's best for society is to build, but a majority of the people (the current owners) are blocking that because it suits them.
Maybe if you call the majority stupid some more, that's famously convincing in a democracy. You'll definitely build sustainable coalitions for the policies you want this way.
Capital loves this kind of left wing politics. Off-putting and impotent.
Who did I call stupid (except for you personally ?). The current owners are not stupid, they're self-interested, hypocritical and parassitical.
And they love your style of politics for being profoundly unthreatening to them.
What politics ? We're talking on an irrelevant site here.
The comedic irony of your personal attack and smug dismissal isn't lost on me.
Let's try to stay focused on the subject matter and leave personal jabs aside.
No people were named. There was no personal attack.
LOL paranoia much? No idea who you are.
I don't doubt that some luxury organizations destroy unsold inventory rather than allow it to diminish the status of their brand. My claim is that if they could have sold that inventory at a profit, they would have.
It's theirs to do with as they please. They paid for it to be made.
If you don't like how they run their business, don't buy the overpriced garbage they sell.
People seem to be so concerned about externalities like CO2 emissions, but it's difficult to believe this problem represents a scale even remotely meaningful in that area. It feels like the plastic straw bullshit that took over the US for a few years. A useless, symbolic gesture that causes far more harm than good.
As a side note, it's a weird feeling to jump to the defense of an industry I generally despise, but the regulation just seems so ludicrous.
>It's theirs to do with as they please. They paid for it to be made.
This is not how that works. You have to pay for things within a legal framework setup by the government. If the legal frameworks changes then you have to deal with that.
Indeed. The government represents a legal framework for us all to operate in together. Sure.
If I pay for something to be made, that something belongs to me. It becomes private property and (at least in the US) I'm free to destroy a thing I own.
If you want to talk about options for protecting the environment, that seems great. There are ways to destroy textiles without fouling rivers or the air.
The OP article raises the spectre of "CO2 emissions" and "pollution" but doesn't provide any meaningful data (units or scale) related to these concerns.
My claim is that there is no way this activity represents any reasonable scale of impact relative to those separate concerns and that we already have lots of regulation related to keeping our water and air clear.
We can discuss ideas about how to do even better on those fronts, but this does not seem like a great way to have a large impact, if the environment is the actual concern.
How about all the laborers who were able to feed their families making these products that were destroyed? What happens to them when the company decides next year to be more conservative and make less stuff?
I'm not advocating for waste, I'm just pointing out that legislation like this often (almost always) comes along with unintended consequences that wind up causing more harm than good.
> It becomes private property and (at least in the US) I'm free to destroy a thing I own.
Only within the confines of the law. If I buy a skyscraper I can’t blow it up without permits. I can’t burn trash in my yard in the middle of the city. I can’t tear down a landmark in a historical district, even if I own it.
Right, but these are unlawful activities and I haven’t seen any claims that these companies are engaging in unlawful behavior.
Instead, the legislators are making currently lawful behavior unlawful.
That’s what I find upsetting.
And everything I described was at one point legal.
> Instead, the legislators are making currently lawful behavior unlawful.
That's how progress happens. Welcome to the real world.
Yes, these laws have unintended consequences. I think at the continental scale the EU operates every law or decision has that.
But the current incentives in the fashion market also has unintended consequences: companies producing a lot of garments only to destroy them to protect perceived intellectual property value.
And here's the thing: this brand image value is relative. So by forcing all companies to comply no one has to take the negative brand image hit that would be required to unilaterally decide to do this.
> My claim is that if they could have sold that inventory at a profit, they would have.
That's utterly incorrect. They don't just want profits - that would be easy to obtain by sending the merchandise to an outlet - they want high profits in a way that maintains high profits in the future too. Any discount "cheapens" the brand by giving customers the expectation of low(er) prices in the future.
> It's theirs to do with as they please.
Only within the bounds of the law.
Agreed. A good business will take both short and long term profit into consideration when making a decision. They will strive to maximize profit (within reason) in whatever they do.
I don’t presume to know anything about the fashion industry and generally find it uninteresting.
My point is that I assume the people running those businesses know what they’re doing. Many of them have been around for many decades.
I’m admittedly surprised to find so many people here with so much confidence in their own ability to effectively constrain an entire industry they obviously also know nothing about.
> My point is that I assume the people running those businesses know what they’re doing.
I agree, but their profit-seeking is myopic and there's no reason why it should be allowed.
>As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
They are...
Many brands prefer to burn their clothes than to send it to thrift shops or outlets for brand damage.
The EU is now putting your brand image a notch down compared to 'not wasting shit'.
Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.
It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies.
One can speculate that this is an easy way to force the companies to pay for their externalities - given that production in third countries are much harder to touch for the EU.
Clothing items are so cheap to make it's hard to believe. I used to work in a distribution warehouse for a national baby and children's clothing chain. Containers would arrive from China and we'd enter items into the warehouse stock system. Cost basis for most items was under 10 cents.
> Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.
No they shouldn't. Sometimes it's not a matter of paying for the externalities. If you're doing harm at scale the only sane option is to stop doing that, period.
When we figured out that leaded gas was bad we didn't make companies pay for their negative externalities. We banned that shit and that was it.
> As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I remember watching a documentary in which they tracked a package of coffee returned to amazon (unopened). It traveled through half of Europe to end up in an incinerator in Slovakia, which is funny because amazon doesn't even operate there.
Big companies are doing a lot of weird shit because at their scale if it's even 1ct cheaper to burn 10 coffee pods vs reprocessing them back in their store it's going to make a huge difference in the long run.
Of course they're not. They're destroying goods that they can't sell at a profit because, for example, the cost of processing some unworn but returned goods outweighs the potential profit from those goods.
In TFA it's estimated that between 4% and 9% of clothing put on the EU market is destroyed before being worn. An admittedly high uncertainty, but even 4% of all clothing sold in the EU is still a heck of a lot of clothes.
Luxury brands do in fact intentionally destroy old stock to make sure their value doesn't drop due to excess supply. I suppose the next step is making everything extremely limited like hypercars?
However hypercars are not purposely limited. It takes an enormous amount of time and labor to build them unlike a handbag where the limit is artificial to sell more.
If you think Piero Ferrari isn't above playing the same games as Bernard Arnault, you're not paying attention.
> However hypercars are not purposely limited
Are you serious? Pricing theory includes both supply and demand, and limiting supply makes the remaining items more valuable by dint of rarity. Companies absolutely limit supply on items to maximize profits. How is this even a question?
Are they harder than ordinary cars?
Singer used to do this, they'd give favorable trade-in deals for old sewing machines so they could be destroyed and kept off the second hand market.
I personally know that L’oreal will buy back and destroy products of theirs from outlets, just to keep the prices up. These items are often bought in bulk on grey markets by discount outlets. Not only does L’oreal destroy the products, they pay for them to do so. None of this is shocking IMO.
They're wontonly destroying and or dumping shitty goods that they got for cheap by externalizing costs.
> I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand
if a manufacturer finds it too complex to not overproduce and not add all kinds of negative externalities then their business model is flawed or they’re not up to the task.
either way, it isn’t “the bureaucrats” fault they’re overproducing, and they absolutely are overproducing.
It couldn't have been easily sold because brands establish a floor below they don't want to go with value to maintain their perceived premium.
It's been known for ages that they operate like this. Some more ethical ones cut off the labels from the garment before they sell it in bulk. Most will destroy the items altogether.
This legislation targets this vanity and I applaud it.
Shocking? Why such drama? Is this AI text?
I don't see anything shocking here. Corporations doing corporatey things, which is maximizing profits and that can easily literally mean destroying unconsumed stuff since it would cost them 2 cents more per tonne to ship it and sell someplace cheaper. Ever heard the term economies of scale for example? Those distort many things in money flows.
Those corporations don't give a fuck about mankind, environment, future, long term stuff etc. Any approach to similar topics which gives them benefit of the doubt is dangerously naive and misguided from the start. It's up to society to enforce rules if its healthy and strong enough. Some are better off, some worse.
Major fashion houses have been caught destroying clothes to prop up the value of the brand.
It's about preserving brand image. Destroying a product is favourable compared to selling it at a discount and making the brand you spent so much marketing appear "cheap".
They absolutely do, source: warehouse job where you occasionally just opened boxes of unsold merchandise and smashed them. Something something tax write off. I never understood it. US based personal experience from almost two decades ago so take it was a grain of salt.
Luxury brands destroy their items to prevent their clothing from losing value.
Companies can and should participate in law drafting. If they have some not yet mentioned insight they should raise it or just take it to their grave.
Yeah, it is shocking. And that's why it needed to be legislated. Companies prove time and time again that they will take the easiest route to minimise losses and maximise profits, even if that means destroying the environment or wasting perfectly good merchandise to do so.
They're not destroying clothing because it's inherently unsellable, or hazardous, or damaged beyond repair. They destroy it because it's easier to dump excess stuff than it is to set up responsible channels to get rid of it.
Many "high fashion" shithouses intentionally destroy excess stock so that their precious branded status symbols can't get into the hands of the filthy proles, which would dilute their brand recognition.
These "regulatory burdens", as you call them, are the only thing holding back companies from further messing up the planet and I welcome them with open arms.
Not sure if sarcasm or cluelessness.
I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?
I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in.
It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.
You have an odd perception of what constitutes "micro-targetting".
Why apparel specifically? Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles.
Why was USB-C mandated specifically on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: it wasn't. It was mandated on smartphones in general, and Apple was the only company that specifically tried to fight the regulation because apparently they're special.
Slight correction: it wasn't even for smartphones alone, it was for portable devices in general [0]. As a consequence, all ebook devices like Kindle etc, vapes and other devices had to switch from Micro-USB to USB-C.
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-common-c...
> As a consequence, all ebook devices like Kindle etc, vapes and other devices had to switch from Micro-USB to USB-C.
Finally, I can charge my book and my cigarette with one cable!
(This statement would have been extremely confusing in the 90s.)
> Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles
If that's so bad, why is doing so the cheapest option? What makes you think you know better than the market what's wasteful?
What makes you think that what's cost effective (in terms of money, of course) for a given company involves optimally conserving resources?
The obvious counter-example is that polluting is very cost-effective in an unregulated environment there are others - such as this.
> What makes you think that what's cost effective...involves optimally conserving resources
The words "cost" and "effective "perhaps?
> Polluting
Pollution is an economic externality. If I buy a shift and throw it out unworn, I've wasted only my own resources. (I'm paying for the landfill of course.)
You could argue that my wasting that shirt hurt you because I could have instead spent those resources on productive activity that benefits you, and therefore I had a duty to keep it -- but that's just communism with extra steps.
Are you under the impression that the planet has effectively infinite carrying capacity and ability to support an "optimal market" indefinitely?
I am of the opinion that markets and prices, not EU regulators, should tell us where scarcity is. We're bad at optimizing manually for the same reason we're bad at guessing where program hotspots are. The market is a profiler.
Do you honestly believe this? Where did you study economics? This regulation is not about scarcity. It is about over abundance.
Overproduction is a failure mode in capitalist systems. The market can’t correct for this because negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
Actors in a capitalist system have an incentive to maximize profit. How is it profit-maximizing to pay to produce an item and throw it away unsold?
> negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
What is the unaccounted externality? Clothing makers pay for material inputs and labor inputs. They pay for transportation. If they discard goods, they pay for more transportation and for the landfill. What specific externality is unaccounted?
The unaccounted externality is the wasted energy to create a thing and destroy it without ever using it.
This may be profit maximizing because it maintains the exclusivity of the brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
And you presume to know better than they do what to do with that energy? Do you think you have a general right to override people's resource allocation decisions when you believe they're being wasteful?
1. In this case, not using the energy at all would have been better. 2. The legislature of a sovereign polity would have, and be able to delegate, that right. If and when the legislature should make use of that right is a political question.
> Do you think you have a general right to override people's resource allocation decisions when you believe they're being wasteful?
Me personally? No, of course not. But I do think our government has the responsibility to govern.
What if I dump toxic industrial waste in the river upstream of your house? I pay for access to the river. Does that hurt you?
Regulation is not about knowing better than the market. It is about correcting harmful externalities that markets would not solve on their own.
If disposing of my own shirt in a landfill I pay for is an "externality[y]" justifying state intervention, then every domain of life is subject to top down control. I don't want to live in a society in which resources are allocation in general by edict instead of the market.
Look it's not that hard. Is <problem> (in this case, pollution) a problem that needs solving? If the answer is yes, then it needs to be regulated even if you personally don't like laws. Sorry!
Why is <problem> a problem? Because you say so? If it's such a problem, why is it so cheap to do? What cost is unaccounted?
By definition externality is not priced in by the market.
Why should I believe an externality exists in this situation? What is the evidence?
> If it's such a problem, why is it so cheap to do?
Why would you assume it doesn’t based on price when externality by definition is not accounted for in price?
But why are you lying? It's not about you, no one is stopping you to go and throw everything you own in a landfill, this is about the companies that act environmental in their marketing, but then go ahead and destroy new and unused products.
> Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry
Because it is very visible to low information voters who are also red/green voters.
Are you a high-information voter? If so, could you please provide information about any consumer industry that comes even close to the apparel industry in terms of a) ubiquity and market scale and b) destruction of unsold but undamaged items while still producing equally functional equivalents for market?
Is there such a thing as fast-cutlery? Or fast-furniture? Maybe fast-book or fast-vehicle? Fast-whitegood perhaps? I'm at a loss here, I've only heard of fast-fashion.
I feel like there is a lot of waste in packaging specifically. Like way, way more colorful plastic polymers go into the trash way faster making products look appealing on the shelf than from clothing. Don't have the numbers to back it up though.
Uh, yes? Food and consumer electronics are larger or similar scale to fashion and undamaged goods for both are landfilled at massive/similar rates to clothing.
Books are the same logic as apparel, "print more than needed, pulp what doesnt sale". Its just much smaller.
Food is perishable, clearly we can’t force manufacturers or shops to keep unsold perished stock.
Unsold electronics aren’t destroyed on a seasonal basis to make room for a new collection.
Same goes for books… and pulp from booms can create new paper to print new books on
> Are you a high-information voter?
Yes I am.
> micro-targeted > mandated USB-C on Apple devices
There is no law that states specifically Apple must specifically use USB-C. IIUC, the law is that all brands/manufacturers should use the same type of charger, an industry standard. That was apparently USB-C. Apple was the odd one out and had to change. If something better comes along, the industry as a whole can upgrade.
Americans always ask - but who decides - the industry decides. The industry gets to decide what they want to use.
I dont really care about waste too much as I think it's a non-issue blown out of proportion, but mandating standards and interoperability creates a lot of value for consumers and prevents anticompetive behavior.
> I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?
"Don't attempt to in any way address the problem unless you're willing to go for an absolute maximalist solution" is a pretty weird stance.
I agree wholeheartedly, seems to be a symptom of bureaucracy. Rules upon rules that end up as the status quo without consolidation and a good refactor.
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There's a bilingual relationship between the responsibilities of the state and the rights of the consumer. That point you describe - where they'll tackle the root problem - isn't coming. In truth, these are feel good measures anyway - naive attempts to fix a downstream problem that won't pan out. That's my opinion, anyway.
People will say something needs to be done about waste and microplastics then complain when actual action is taken.
One of the largest contributors to microplastics in our world is clothing. If companies need to start taking responsibility and reducing their supply, that's good for everyone. If companies feel pressured by regulations because they can no longer produce endless shit and artificially inflate prices by destroying half the shit they produce, then I'm in favor of it. I'd even be in favor of governments shutting down corporations that massively overproduce. It's the 21st century and these companies measure every single little aspect of their business. If they need to trash a bunch of their clothes, it's because they're being actively wasteful. Cost reduction is one of the most fundamental aspects of capitalism, and if companies aren't even concerned about that aspect, then they deserve to be crushed.
Do you live in the EU? No? Then it's none of your business.
I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor.
But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no."
And what if there's genuinely no demand? For example, suspenders went permanently out of style at some point in the 20th century. If this law had been in effect at the time, there might be an "orphaned" truckload of suspenders somewhere, getting wastefully shipped from warehouse to warehouse for decades because they're impossible to sell and illegal to destroy.
Fashion is fickle, prone to fads and flights of taste. Suspenders are by no means an isolated case.
An efficient economy needs a means to delete an item when its current owner doesn't want it, nobody else wants it either, and it imposes ongoing storage costs on whoever holds it.
If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.
Agree, a corporation can do orders of magnitude more harm than an individual can. It’s called “regulation”.
What evil? I think it would be very hard to have a system of law without corporate personhood. Every time you wanted a law to eg ban x, you would need a separate law for corporations.
A company isn't AI or a bot. It's essentially a group of people. It should have the same rights as an individual when it comes to private property.
Your reasoning makes sense only if it's just as easy to sentence the group to jail time as it is to sentence the individual--and pretty much everything else about a corporation is set up to make it harder to do that.
If it's an unlimited partnership or something, _maybe_. Approximately no companies implicated are, though; they're typically limited liability companies of some sort. A limited liability company demanding human rights feels a bit like having your cake and eating it.
It is not a group of people. It’s a legal entity that represents their economic interests.
There's a sizable logical jump between your second and third statements.
I'm sorry you think that.
This argument might have made sense when property rights were assumed to trump all other concerns, but at this point, that isn't logical. We live in a world where "owning" everything has led to complete lack of responsibility for the effects of corporate behaviours serving short-term profit while all living systems are paying the price. At some point we need to introduce more tension between property rights and common welfare if we plan to make it through the next century.
> If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no."
Are you, personally, a large textile company? If not, then you have no need to worry; see the article. If you are, then argh a textile company has become sentient.
Surprisingly enough you doing what you want with your stuff in your own home is different from operating a business at scale, and we can make different laws for the different situations.
If I were these companies, I would just give them all in truckloads to the CEO's son, and have them dispose of it.
It might surprise some people that courts are wise to this sort of thing. Lawmakers generally empower them to ignore such legal fictions.
People on HN never been wise to any law. For some reason they think that law operates like a set of instructions that a CPU operates.
Ignoring the fact that they will just ship clothes overseas to be destroyed, could this plan otherwise encourage brands to favour staples rather than aggressively push fleeting fashion? e.g., maybe next time they are a bit more cautious on suspenders or a gaudy t-shirt with huge brand stamped across the front?
you own a business that owns the inventory, rather than owning the inventory yourself, no?
if you want to be doing all the things you could do otherwise, you should have full liability for it.
if youve got a boatload of suspenders, you should give them away, pay people to take them, or invent a new use for them. you could turn them into belts or waistbands or something.
even without the major market, there's still going to be niche market for suspenders
We aren't talking about "an item." We're talking about an industry that deliberately over-produces because it's better for their balance sheets, which has significant climate implications. This is precisely the sort of scenario where it makes sense for government to step in.
Even ignoring that "you" as an individual are not affected by this, there are plenty of things that "you" as an individual cannot do with your own property. For example, a lot of places in the US live under a HOA, and they often restrict what you can do with the frontage of your property. Many people live in places where trees have some form of protected status.
Fashion production is responsible for 8-10% of all carbon emissions
https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-s...
And in pre-industrial societies, peasants (almost entirely women, ranging from children to the elderly) commonly spent around 100 hours of labor to produce a single square yard of fabric to clothe their families (fabric was too expensive for peasants to buy, so most spun it at home).
So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.
Citation for the 100-ish hours: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an...
There has to be a sweet spot between someone hand spinning wool for 100s of hours and an automated factory spitting 80% polymer based clothing directly into a trash can.
Man, I really can't see your point. And so...?
Try opening your eyes.
So you are telling me that quoting the time spent to build a single square yard of fabric in the pre-industrial society is a contextualized comment to the % of co2 emission for the fashion industry?
Yes, that appears to be their point.
Fashion? No, absolutely not. Textiles in general? Maybe, but almost certainly not.
This is the actual quote on the page you cite:
"Today, the combined textile and apparel sectors contribute as much as 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions."
Notice the unusual way they spell "fashion"...
Right, textiles are much bigger than fashion - bedding, furniture upholstery, curtains, some types of shelter, practical items like footwear, protective equipment, medical equipment and dressings, vehicle interiors... pretty much all aspects of human life depend on textiles. It ain't just cheap t shirts and dresses.
Cheap clothing is a civilizational achievement and good for human welfare.
So carbon emissions are bad, but then we should price carbon and not micromanage clothing inventory.
Clothing everyone is an achievement, but fast fashion is overshooting that target.
A bit like feeding everyone vs. having an obesity crisis.
Polyester has been a disaster for clothing. I'd love to see countries come up with a plan to cut down on the amounts of plastic crap being pumped out.
There is a brand in my country that I liken to a physical Shein. The clothes are a similar style, and basically everything is polyester. When I walk into it, it smells like a carpet store.
Perfectly summed up
Getting common goods less expensive is good, making them too cheap is not. Imagine you are optimizing a math model, but nothing actually has prices. You just get a garbage point as optimum. You need to have scarcity, so that a system that optimizes the allocation of scarce goods actually works.
is it actually?
i think its made people less independent than when we could maintain and produce our own textiles, and treat them well. Now we're dependent on markets and slave labour
For comparison, crypto and datacenters constituted 2% in 2022 (probably 3%+ now): https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/08/15/carbon-emis...
Can they ship it outside the EU and then destroy it? What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? Why not just put a carbon tax per weight?
I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).
The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.
Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.
This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.
How recycling by shredding is not destroying?
If the regulation specifically prohibits burning, it makes sense, as a measure to limit unproductive CO₂ emissions.
Shredding is the first step in most recycling processes (ie excluding reusing). Like if they were going to make them into this seasons fashion, I think the first step is shredding. The cut and color of style changes, and I don’t think you can do either without shredding first.
It means they’re still using the fibers, which is an upside. It does waste some CO2 for the original cut and dye.
I’m sort of dubious of the value of trying to limit CO2 like this, but that might be the goal. Whether they burn them now or sell them, they end up as atmospheric CO2 either way. It’s the same as lumber; it ends up back in the atmosphere (although not burning them does reduce PM2.5 particulate).
i would think chanel quilts would sell very well
But what do you do with unsold Chanel quilts?
Turn them into insulation! This is what happens with old denim jeans: https://www.henry.com/residential/products/insulation/denim-...
Chanel; the ultimate luxury insulation.
Cut the price, this is basic microeconomics.
That is not what they should do according to microeconomics because luxury goods are Veblen goods. Decreasing price would lower demand, at least until they lowered it enough that it was no longer a Veblen good.
Basic microeconomics is just that: basic and thus an oversimplification.
Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.
My wife worked for a cloth upcycling association (finding sustainable future for discarded clothes).
Reality is, there is just 10x more thrown out clothes in the west that any third world country on earth could need, same for shelters.
Associations distributing clothes to developing countries / shelters are filtering tightly what they accept.
In short, the vast majority of thrown out clothes in the west are just crapwear that not even the third world want. There are entire pipelines of filtering and sorting to only keep and distribute the good quality clothes.
So this law might significantly increase the fraction of good quality clothes that shelters get, which would be a good thing?
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
You can steer where donations go with regulations. I don't see any downsides of warm coats to homeless shelters for example.
That is a slightly different scenario than taking cheap "fast fashion waste", compressing it into bales, shoving it into shipping containers, transporting/dumping it and flooding local countries/markets.
(And many of these large shipments do not end-up as donations by the time they get to their destination, but are actually sold by weight and then resold again)
But yes - distribution/logistics of donated goods needed to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
I would hope that that will also be a policy area the EU addresses as part of this regulatory push.
Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
I think this was predicted in that "documentary"... hmmm, Zoolander... with the fashion-line "Derelicte"...
Why do you want those brands to die?
Why do you want those brands to exist?
Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".
Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.
(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)
The opposite of “Why do you want those brands to die?” is not “Why do you want those brands to exist?”.
Perhaps not but in the context of this discussion and legislation it is pertinent question to ask, perhaps not of you specifically but of the wider audience.
Brand value particularly for commodity products is usually just a form of information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers, and creates economic inefficiency since it diverts expenditure from other products that can materially improve lives. It also allows enshittification to happen since it creates inertia (brand loyalty) to switching, and the positive brand image sticks around for longer than the actual good quality products.
Aren’t there already advantages to donating? I.e. Tax advantages, and a lack of disposal cost?
I think the reason that brands don’t want to donate is because they don’t want their brands to be associated with poor people.
Ive read some years ago that companies do not donate and destroy instead because of whatever wierd tax-regulation
What developing country do you think has a clothing shortage?
What about the poor in their own countries that might not be able to afford clothes?
But then the prices might drop and the shareholders might lose value.
Rather have all people spend all of their money to the cent to buy clothes, to pay rent and to buy water tbh
The shareholders losing value means that either all clothes drop to shein quality or they just stop making clothes.
OK. We were told creative destruction is good, if some companies exit the market and are replaced by others that offer better value then resources are being allocated more efficiently, no?
Just like other companies came along and offered a better Sears catalog when the internet killed their revenue?
People don't voluntarily lose money. Understand that and the world will way more understandable.
It does appear that people prefer the convenience of internet shopping, though I also see that other firms still successfully apply the catalog model in specific markets, eg Harbor Freight which does this for construction tools.
People don't voluntarily lose money. Understand that and the world will way more understandable.
But nobody is arguing that they do. Rather, I'm saying that if some companies lose money on selling clothes and exit the market, there's nothing wrong with that.
If the shareholders are rich because the poor are not clothed then fuck the shareholders and the system that made them rich.
Any name brand would rather send their unsold clothes to a landfill in India rather than allow their wealthy customers to see poor people wearing the clothes.
A perhaps inadvertent but nicely succinct indictment of capitalism.
Which is why you write regulations to ban that. Hence, this thread.
These regulations don't and can't ban that. The companies can say they're "selling" or "donating" them abroad.
It's very very easy to spend much less on clothes. Buying a new handbag every 6 months vs maintaining a bag for 20 years isn't that much different in terms of effort, but one is unbelievably more expensive.
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donations are just an excuse to dump them on poor countries
if you read the article...
Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.
Well one link deeper says "Restrict the export of textile waste" but I'm still unclear why they preferred these measure over a carbon tax.
Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive 2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
I bet there's some price at which someone will happily take that Luis Vuitton bag or Burberry coat.
>What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
That doesn't really make sense, losing your whole investment is already a strong incentive to not produce something you can't sell.
Clothing has a huge profit margin (when manufactured overseas) especially at the higher end (for brands which do not invest in local production, which is most, because it is also hard to beat Chinese quality). It's better for these brands to over-produce on some items and lose the low-cost inventory, than to under-produce and not meet market demand, to not offer a range of sizes and varieties to meet individual taste, and not achieve wide distribution that's necessary to grow market demand. That's why regulation is needed here.
I get he economics, but I don’t think it follows that it’s a problem governments need to involve themselves in.
What’s your big idea
Do nothing here, because it’s probably not a real problem. There’s opportunity cost in spending time on nonsense.
You might not think that, but EU citizens think otherwise.
Did they vote for the bureaucrats in Brussels that wrote the regulation?
Just as much as they voted for the individual government ministers in their own country.
Irrelevant. If you want to put it that way, USians don't vote for their president either.
Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem. Why does that problem exist if that incentive is actually really strong in practice?
I assume it's not actually a really strong incentive in context.
> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
> Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
You mean something like, to signal to voters they're trying to solve a problem voters want changed? Or a problem voters say they have?
I didn't mean to imply it would fix the problem, or that the problem would be fixed. Just that there's desire for [thing targeted], is something enough people would want to change.
I also said "assume that" for the sake of the argument/discussion given you started by saying you didn't understand. I say it's trivial to understand if assume there are other incentives where destroying the product is desirable. Thus making the incentive you mentioned, not very strong, (in context).
EU regulations aren’t set by people who are directly elected though, so the incentives are really weird. It seems like largely a non-problem, the likes of which gets obsessed over by the types of also ran politicians who end up as members of the European Parliament or filtering into the Brussels bureaucracy.
Call me when they stop buying Russian gas.
A factory might have a minimum order quantity of 10000 units for a product. The products cost $1 landed.
You know you can sell 4000 of those products for a total of $15k.
This might become a bad deal if dealing with the 6000 extra units costs you money.
maybe this will force factories to change their process. with manufacturing getting cheaper, smaller batches become affordable. at the extreme we can now print books on demand, and improved 3D printing allows one-off items in many more areas. that's the trend we need to push. to get away from wasteful mass production.
Push how? Through regulation? Unclear how else you’d achieve this if it is still worse economically. Buyers don’t want to pay more either.
through demand at first. clothes designers are hopefully going to demand smaller batches to avoid getting punished for overproducing. but if that doesn't work, then yes, maybe regulation is necessary. tricky though because manufacturing is often outside of the EU.
overproduction needs to be made more uneconomical than smaller batches. if that is really the issue. i really doubt that large batches of production are actually the problem here.
How much longer do you wait to see if demand solves it? It hasn't. The problem has gotten worse
well the laws have just been changed. so i'd say we should observe what effect they will have.
You can produce so little people take anything you give them - like it was in the Soviet union.
Overproducing is often cheaper than losing sales because of the fixed costs of producing a batch and the externalities of destroying your inventory not being priced in. Some brands also find it more interesting to destroy stocks than reduce prices because it protects their brand values. Well, now, that's illegal.
I would think the incentives to produce things no one wants would already be pretty low.
Supplier MOQs can create significant incentives to overproduce. For example, you get 9000 things someone wants and 1000 that no-one wants.
This can be profitable for the customer, if they can't just easily get rid of those 1000 they can't sell, it's presumably less profitable.
Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.
Not really, the EU is just introducing additional weighing in favor of smaller order quantities.
They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
You can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
[dead]
> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes?
from TFA
> companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
Which in many cases is less environmentally efficient than the alternative
European politicians will wear the clothes nobody wants so they can be decommissioned lawfully.
This kind of reply is so cliché it's tiresome. "Someone makes small step to avoid waste and environmental damage" -> "if it's not perfect it's no good at all, let the free market sort it out at t=infinity".
Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.
Where even are all the people wandering around naked for lack of clothes? There's so much donated clothing already out there. And the homeless here mainly 'need clothes' because they have no way to wash their clothes. It'd be less wasteful to get them access to laundry facilities. And the developing world always gets the "PATRIOTS - Super Bowl LX Champions" gear and a ton of other cast-offs - I doubt they need more.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
If I had that kind of hustle, I'd be finding out who exports the losing teams T-shirts and reimport them. I'm sure some Pats fans would pay $50 a shirt to live in an alternative reality.
Unlike virtue-signaling corporations that burn the planet down just to get more shareholder value in the next quarter.
Then fewer clothes will get manufactured, which is exactly the goal.
You sound American, so why do you even care? Have fun in the land of the free.
Same reason you read and comment about America, I guess
Why would you over produce something no one wants?
Also if really no one wanted it, why are companies destroying the items instead of giving them away?
Maybe they could bury the clothes and call it carbon sequestration. I assume that clothes are made of mostly hydrocarbons.
Won't fungi and bacteria eat (cellulose-based) the clothes, releasing the same amount of CO₂, only a bit slower? Synthetic fabrics can likely be buried as a form of carbon sequestration though.
It seems like countries will do anything but tax carbon.
Carbon is not the only concern here, it is also excessive water use, excessive land use, higher logistics pressure on ports and such which can be reduced if these are made to a higher quality and a reduced quantity.
For the same reason tax codes are complex. If you have a simple law, there's no way for a politician to say to a group of people: "If you vote for me, I will get you a special favour".
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/carbon-taxes-europe-20...
I suspect this end up like US "recycling" of plastic: pay another country to "reuse/recycle" the waste, and that country then dumps it in a landfill, dumps it in the ocean, or burns it.
This already happens a lot for used clothes with the thrift store->poor country->landfill pipeline. That third step will likely be a lot less rare with new clothes.
Maybe donate it to poor countries?
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise:
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
Or people do other things.
Around 1800, 95% of people worked on the farm. Today it is 2%. People do different things now.
This doesn't address my point though. You're talking about how it's okay if we lose all our factories to make the cars, computers, and whatever else is in the Crates. And sure, if all those workers can find new careers like they did when we industrialized farming, that's all well and good.
I'm talking about how our usage of the "Crate Goods" makes us incredibly vulnerable to a disruption in Crate delivery.
this is not destroying things to create jobs. this is about globalization negatively affecting local culture. clothing especially represents culture. if people can not afford to create their own clothes then that has a negative effect on their culture as a whole.
I don't see how localized culture clothing styles would be destroyed by importing different styles from other countries.
nobody buys the local style because it is more expensive than the imported stuff. as a result the local style dies out, or it doesn't get a chance to be developed in the first place.
Preventing imports will force them to pay the higher prices for the local stuff.
Maybe it's better to let them decide what they want to buy.
that's how you protect your local economy. that's pretty normal everywhere. in europe people go on strike if imports threaten their livelyhood. dumping cheap clothing on an economy that can't handle it is not really helping. it's going to make the local stuff even more expensive because there is less demand for it.
local development simply does not happen if outside products are allowed to dominate.
if we were talking about a part, say less than half of the market, that would be fine, but the import of cheap clothing is so massive that there is no more room for a local market.
Yes, I know this practice is commonplace. What it does is "protect" a specific industry, but that results in less choice for consumers and higher prices.
Protectionism has value when applied to strategic industries, like chip making, that you cannot afford to have cut off.
Making local garments is not a strategic industry.
P.S. Every businessman believes in the free market for everyone except his own business, which the government should protect from competition. The same for unions.
this is not about protecting businesses. this is about providing jobs for locals. many african countries are struggling with that.
providing an income for everyone is important. keeping everyone satisfied is too. not to mention not loosing your cultural identity. and if the clothing industry is able to provide jobs by keeping cheap low quality products out of the country, why would that be bad? clothing is not the biggest expense people have, so making clothing a bit more expensive is not going to hurt that much.
We have had that in Argentina for 40 years. The result? One of the most expensive countries to live in the world. The PS5 you can buy for 500 dollars in USA? it is 1000 here in Argentina. The Samsung Galaxy you pay 800 in USA? It is 1600 in Argentina. The Levi jean you pay 100? It is 250 in Argentina. Or, if you want to pay the same price for a jean, you can, but the quality will be 1/3 of the one you can buy in USA/EU.
we are not talking about banning the import of regular products, but about donated or second hand items that are sold for next to nothing, half of which is useless junk. the point is to not allow these inferior imports to undercut local products, not to make any imports more expensive than local ones. the latter happens too, and it's stupid, but just because that is bad, and we should be allowed to sell our products, that doesn't mean that we should also be allowed to dump our junk that we don't want in those countries too.
there are people in developing countries where this is a treasure. Trust me, I've been to such countries.
sure there may be some that can benefit from these donations, but there are others that are hurt. it's up to them to decide what they prefer. it's not up to us.
Whether or not is a net loss for the planet as a whole is irrelevant. Africa countries need jobs to sustain a middle class so they no longer accept donations of clothes.
Just send them money, then, rather than breaking windows to provide fake jobs.
"Just send them money" implies that we don't use them as a dumping ground for the imperfect/unwanted goods, implying that we do destroy those goods.
If you want to compare this to broken windows, the controversy is: the developed countries produce so much glass that we don't know what to do with it. When we have extra and irregular pieces of glass, we can either melt the extra panes down, or we can just ship boatloads of "free glass" to Africa every week (likely result: Their glass factories will eventually shut down). Doing the former is simply not the same as breaking windows to make work for glaziers as in the analogy you're referencing.
You can start if you wish.
I don't think these companies want the poor people to wear their brand.
They'll find another way to destroy them.
2018 article reports that Burberry destroyed £28 millions worth of clothes to keep their brand "exclusive": https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983
The intended effect of the law is that they get better at planning. It requires supply chain innovation similar to what happened in the automotive industry decades ago with JIT manufacturing. They can borrow from fast-fashion but now there’s a penalty for over producing.
Poor countries don't need clothes. They have clothes. It's just more (mostly plastic pollution) that fills their landfills and rivers.
https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/the-messy-truth/
Just because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
What country has a clothing shortage? Be specific.
The most desperate povert I've ever seen was in India. You know what people were using to make tents to live in? Clothes.
Poor people have been making clothes for thousands of years without any help from heavy industry, and it's incredibly cheap to produce long-lasting cotton clothing.
Clothing isn't really a perpetual need the way you frame it. A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
I’m not suggesting that any countries have clothing shortages.
However, countries don’t wear clothes. People do. People sometimes have shortages of clothing in many places.
For example, here in the United States people sometimes experience poverty and may sometimes experience a lack of suitable clothing. This happens at the same time that there are also people in the US throwing away clothing that they do not use. This is because those people are different people in different immediate locations.
The reasons that people lack clothing is not because there is not enough clothing in existence. It is because the clothing is not distributed universally to every person who needs it.
If I have seen this with my own two eyes in the US, then I am sure it happens in other places.
> A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
So? A person with the ass ripped out of their jeans or a hole in their shoe doesn’t give a fuck whether other clothes last 10 years.
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
The answer is simple: despite so much money given and forgiven, and people going over all the time to build toilets and basic human-scale improvements, most countries with real deprivation have a massive corruption problem, mainly culturally induced, that stops real improvement. Saying "it's not people stepping up" elides the cultural issue.
There is poverty in 100% of countries. I live in one of the richest places in the world and I can go outside and find people struggling to meet their basic clothing needs.
Most clothes are manufactured in countries with cheaper labor costs to cut costs - the reality is clothes are cheap to make in terms of raw materials- and dumping unwanted clothes will just destory the local economy
This is also a restricted activity: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/...
At least for polyester, etc. As the rule is worded today maybe you'd get away with it for cotton? But the rule can always be changed.
yep, they do https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...
I wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean)
What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...
I'm not particularly big into fashion (I think my newest clothes are 4-5 years old), but why is the thing you want "common [expletive] sense" and someone choosing to spend their money a different way, by extension, nonsensical?
Ah yes, the classic HN hair splitting meta-argument. No.
I'm not sure you know what hairsplitting means, but I am sure "No." is an answer to some question, just not the completely reasonable one I asked.
What they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently.
Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society.
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
Fashion changing all the time (on the order of seasons rather than years) contributes to a lot of waste. Your claim that it "factually something that provides value to society“ is unsubstantiated. Just as unsubstantiated as "You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing".
All fast fashion does is waste money for consumers who buy into the craze, compared to buying quality that lasts. I have used the same two pair of jeans for over a decade at this point for example, and they are in close to mint condition (apart from the colour on the knees). Some T-shirts that I own have survived as long, many have not (it is very hard to tell the quality of the fibers up front unfortunately). In all cases, I use clothes until they are so worn through that they are past my repair skills.
So yes, some people are "invested" in fashion, but I'm saying that is akin to being "invested" in gambling or shopping for the sake of shopping. Addictions come in many forms.
> Your claim that it "factually something that provides value to society“ is unsubstantiated.
Fashion is fundamentally an art form that has deep social, cultural, and anthropological meaning. This is high school level social studies.
> Just as unsubstantiated as "You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing".
Are you saying you might not be entitled to an opinion? Okay...?
The problem is not fashion, the problem is fast fashion, and the enormous amount of waste created. You really need to keep those separated in the discussion.
It's just boring for consumers. Business provides value to customers. Customers dictate what gets produced. And there are customers (e.g. me) who do keep things for a longer amount of time - there's a reason why generally men's clothing makes up around 20% of the total clothing shopping floor space in any given city.
> Customers dictate what gets produced.
Sure? It seems to me that the companies dictate what I consume. Many many times I wanted to buy exactly the same clothes item or shoes to replace an old one (because I know exactly how it'd fit and wear) only to discover it has been discontinued with no obvious "heir". Sometimes only 6 months later...
Whats the percentage of people chasing "fashion", especially after mid 30s?
More accurate to say that it's the other customers that dictate what you consume, by out voting you with their wallet.
They should pay people to wear them.
Outlets could be a key here.
ah yes the Container Ship strategy
Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug:
"Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."
So they’ll donate it to someone who will then destroy it.
As the recipient of that donation, why would I actually destroy it when I can sell it?
Selling clothes is hard and annoying and most people can't be bothered. I've had to dispose of a number of clothes, and not once have I sold them; I think a slight majority ended up in the garbage, with a few turning into rags and a decent number landing in a donation bin when I lived in a building with one.
A few years ago a family member passed away and I tried to donate their clothes to a charity store. We threw away the worn out ones, so these were just good quality and most of them were good brands or at least looked high end. They took maybe 20% and said the rest we should just throw away.
Individual used pieces of clothes are not nearly the same as unsold or returned (~new) available in bulk quantities.
They aren't, but the problem is even worse for bulk quantities. A local charity operation or thrifty individual might find a use for a couple random articles of clothing; a pallet carrying 2,000 copies of the same unpopular skirt is worth less than zero to anyone but a large clothing distributor.
Because that's what you agreed to, that's why they donated it to you.
Then that's not a donation, just some shenanigans to bypass the law, which regulators presumably understands could happen.
Welcome to Planet Earth in 2026 :)
If the manufacturer can't sell their product, why would someone else be able to?
It's not that the manufacturer can't sell their product, it's that they don't want to do so. They want to get rid of last season's perfectly good product to make room for next season's lineup.
They could sell old stock ay reduced prices and still make profits, but they want to maintain their vain exclusive image, so they inflate their prices by destroying stock.
That doesn't sound like ban, you have to disclosure yearly the amount of stock you have demolished, but there is no mention of penalty or anything like that.
Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
Don't be surprised if products are sent abroad for destr^Wrecycling.
No I am not joking, some german company hid an airtag in a old computer that went to recycling. It ended up somewhere in Thailand, being not very environmentally friendly taken care of.
Remember when UK council recycling bags were found in rubbish dumps in the Myanmar jungle?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7070709/Plastic-pac...
Not just that. I have seen Morrisons supermarket bags in some weird places around the world!
sure, but within an EU context, the company should still get fined as if they destroyed it themselves
How do you know was destroyed when all official records say it’s recycled?
By investigating said recycling process? I mean, if a company can figure out that vendo X is a shadowy cloth-destruction syndicate, that state can as well, then that vendor can be banned from doing business in the EU or the companies dealing with them can be fined.
> They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
That just means the business will raise prices.
I'll happily pay more if that means less trash, less microplastics and less CO2. The current consumerism is not sustainable in the long run.
And when all those unnecessary increases in the cost of living lead to increasing vote share for the far right - eventually maybe even a far right government - what then? How sustainable will that be?
Have you actually read the science on microplastics? [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...
Why is that automatically bad?
That would be a carbon tax. This is plain overregulation.
Just businesses being intrinsically incentivised to not produce waste by the loss of profit is already a good motivation.
If that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model.
Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying things like "you must stop a machine before putting a person inside it".
Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
We have something like 200 years of labor laws around this point. You should probably read some history and ask yourself why every government on the planet has been compelled to force legislation on business to protect the interests of the people.
> Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
This is an odd thing to say. Governments will happily shovel the taxes of people's entire working lives into pointless spending. They'll also happily shovel young men to their actual deaths in wars. Now you know this, will you be hyper-cynical about governments, or are you just blaring your bias?
A good way to understand this is to think about Apple and how they refuse to run Black Friday or any other type of sales. They just don't. If they do, they're very modest.
This helps to maintain the value of the product and for consumers to not defer purchase until sale event.
Clothing companies are similar. The actual product is worth pennies, but they'll refuse to sell for 10% of RSP because who would be buying them at the full price? They'll do 50%, maybe 70 discount and that's it. They destroy whatever they don't sell. Rinse, repeat, four times a year in this crazy, fast fashion reality
It's a known practice and they've been going on like this for ages.
Fashion is vain by definition and this whole industry is very wasteful of our resources. This legislation is meant to help mitigate this.
What's gonna change long term is manufacturers will be keeping more items on sale for longer and the fast fashion cycles will slow down. Hopefully they'll start competing with quality and workmanship thus, in turn, giving EU textile industry a new chance to survive Asian competition.
THIS IS GOOD FOR EU ECONOMY!
I think it's a reasonable idea. It's mostly going to affect the "luxury" brands who attempt to limit price reductions.
Perhaps it might encourage producers to do smaller runs to confirm interest before massively increasing volumes. The real issue is to get the lowest price you need to hit minimum volumes. It's cheaper currently to burn unused stock than store it for next year. This may change that model. If it doesn't work it can always be changed.
> The ban on destruction of unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear and the derogations will apply to large companies from 19 July 2026. Medium-sized companies are expected to follow in 2030. The rules on disclosure under the ESPR already apply to large companies and will also apply to medium-sized companies in 2030
5 months is a pretty short timeline for a large company to change literally its entire business to handle one class of products differently. This affects returns, sales, shipping, contracts with disposal companies, etc.
The weirder part is that they're granting medium and small size companies 4 more years to figure it out. It will take any company a long time to deal with this. So why shaft the large companies? Spite? The difficulty this imposes on them, and any fines from their inability to comply, will be passed down to the consumer.
The additional costs will make the people who already are compliant competitive.
You're going to have lot worse return policy.
Seems like policy ripe with unintended side effects. At the very least, it'll likely raise prices for consumers because the companies aren't allowed to manage their inventory as efficiently as they wish.
Now of course this might be a totally acceptable price to pay, I'm not necessarily arguing against it. It will just be conveniently omitted from public communications on the topic by the EU. For regulators, there never are tradeoffs, after all.
Brand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.
Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.
I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
That’s not what will happen. You will not be seeing Chanel at the local discounter.
And for non-luxury brands this law will simply increase costs for companies operating in the EU and therefore cause people to spend more on clothes.
Parent painted a very logical sequence of events that concluded in reduced prices. Can you provide similar reasoning for why you believe this law will increase costs?
The main risk I see is things getting shipped overseas to where it isn't properly handled and this policy not having any effect at all.
If that can be avoided somehow (I haven't looked in detail at the legal text) I think the outcome you mention would be good. Slower fashion cycles, higher quality and higher cost per item would all potentially synergise. Another thing that could happen is less overproduction, which would also be good.
Thinking about what else could be done: I would like to see some mandatory marking indicating fiber / weaving quality. I have had T-shirts that lasted a decade, and those that lasted a couple of years. And it is very hard to tell up front which is which. As a consumer I would like to be able to tell.
Does this apply to Chinese companies too or it is just another measure that disadvantages local producers?
Local producers.
Businesses importing from non-EU countries have to shoulder the responsibility in stead of the manufacturer.
First, seems like a good thing. I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.
Second, in the short term this is going to lower profits for some companies.
Third, hopefully in the long run it will lead to less waste.
Is it perfect? Of course not, no real legislation ever is. If there's a better way to get started on reducing waste I'd like to hear it, though.
> I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.
They didn't. You can look at the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) yourself. It's fairly long but it should be easy to scroll until you find some of the lists.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng
Why don’t they do the same with food then? There is a similar issue where truly vast amounts of food is destroyed every year. Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint. Countless tons of e.g. wheat straight to the landfill, not even used as animal feed. The demand for the product is unpredictable and they need to produce and sell enough to cover the investment in producing it at all on average. There is also a fuzzy limit on how much the market can absorb.
The underlying dynamic is simple: the value of the product in every market exceeds the logistics cost of moving the product to that market. In other words, the market clearing price is globally negative. Because most of the cost of production is in the logistics, and destruction can be done close to the point of production, the resource and environmental footprint of destruction is smaller than every alternative.
People don’t produce excess inventory for fun, that is a pure loss. The production is highly optimized to eke out a thin average margin in an unpredictable business. If the product is not destroyed, it necessarily increases the average cost of those products because either logistics costs go up or supply goes down.
Are you arguing against yourself to provide an example of why this law is bad…or do you actually want to force people to eat rotten/spoiled food?
You seem to provide a great example of why Eurocrats regulating a highly efficient market will not cause the desired outcome…due to reality.
> Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint.
Yes, keeping 8 billion humans alive does have non-negligible energy costs. Again I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or if you’re an anti-human environmental terrorist.
If you actually care about agriculture emissions though, population decline will cause this to go down faster than any Eurocrat will with silly laws based on some clickbait news article they read about an industry they understand nothing about.
Turning the issue on its head, if 4-9% is unsold, then the whole supply chain's success at predicting consumer preferences is 90-95%. Wow!
When I think of unsold, I see that some sizes run out, leaving odd sizes as surplus.
That assumes that they need to predict demand 1:1 which is not true.
They are more than welcome to have an over supply ready, they just need to use it productively is they can't sell it.
Not 4-9% unsold. 4-9% of unsold is destroyed without being worn.
considering H&M (Sweden), Zara (Spain), C&A (Netherlands) etc.. have lead the way into the clothes-that-self-destructs-in-a-year fashion, it was about time europeans did something about clothing waste, well done.
I have clothes from all three brands. They most definitely don't fall apart after a year (or two, or three).
Every single country should follow suit, apply to food also.
The reason these companies get so greedy is because they can control the demand. Companies have been found destroying their goods to keep the price high.
The whole Europe is pretty broken right now government wise, but they sure know how to have some decent laws in place when the politics aren't being an arse.
Companies' response: we'll just sew these unsold clothes into a large curtain, which is not apparel so we can then just burn it.
Such obvious mockeries of law usually don't pass in court. The jusdge will easily see that the company intended to destroy the objects.
I do hope they come up with something like that.
Cheap shop rags!
If manufacturers are banned from destroying unsold clothing won't they respond by producing less to avoid excess inventory?
And if supply decreases while demand stays the same wouldn't that push prices up for everyone?
This is still a good outcome. Less waste and trash being thrown out is good.
if you have so much supply that it makes sense to destroy some of it, why would reducing that supply to meet demand drive up prices?
This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.
Very tongue in cheek: In the latest fully analyzed year (2024) Sweden was CO2 net negative. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.
(https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldi...)
I anticipate a lot of unintended consequences lurking.
But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.
Unsold apparel is a headache, but banning it probably won't work. Something still has to be done with the stuff.
In the first dot-com era, I knew some startup people who were trying to create an online secondary market in used apparel, called Tradeweave. It flopped. You can see their web site on the Internet Archive up to 2004.[1] Then, suddenly, it's gone. There's a Stanford Business School case for this company.[2] Amusingly, the Stanford case study is dated 2000, before the collapse, and makes it sound like a success.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040323045929/http://tradeweave...
[2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/t...
As a EU citizen it is really frustrating to watch that they just can't stop themselves from introducing new regulation. And we don't have non-hallucinating AI yet that can help businesses keep track of all this legislative diarrhea.
Might be to hinder large companies of moving fast-fashion storages into EU, so they cannot circumvent the 150EUR free import limit when it is dissolved, as that would move them into the supposed jaws of this "ban of destruction of fast-fashion" act.
Waste isn't automatically a social loss. It only becomes a problem when the cost is pushed onto other people. If burning excess goods pollutes the air or fills landfills, charge for the pollution or disposal. Once the real cost is priced in, companies will naturally waste less without needing thousands of permutations of actions being restricted in an attempt to micromanage them. You still hold them accountable for harm — you just do it through prices instead of micromanaging behavior. And again, don't just assume waste is net-harmful
If you look at the backyards (so called garden) of homes of the advanced countries, from satellite maps, they mostly became junkyards of things. Inside homes are full of things that are rarely used. I have seen Amazon boxes going into bins unopened. Basically, homes are overflowing with goods, and throwing things away is going to become expensive. Advances in manufacturing, supply chains and online shopping have accelerated the saturation of markets.
Destruction of goods can't be stooped due the pace of inflow of inventory. This is like a conveyor belt jamming, where the downstream belts are draining slower than upstream ones.
> an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn.
That is a crazy amount.
Is it? 4-9% of unsold portion seems reasonable. Unless they actually mean 4-9% of all manufactured.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...
Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.
>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.
This number seems low, so >90% of unsold clothes are worn? Are they all donated? 4-9% of unsold clothes could be defective/damaged or something.
I would have guessed, with no real basis whatsoever, that 4-9% of all manufactured clothes would be destroyed without ever being used.
I would have guessed a much higher number, and the number possibly being as low as 4% seems like good news to me.
It's a great idea, but this seems incredibly hard to enforce. Shipments sometimes go missing, products can be damaged "unintentionally", etc. I hope they can achieve what they intend.
I think I've heard this isn't as much of a think in Europe, but by me sometimes when companies have a bunch of items they can't sell to regular consumers, they sell them for cheap to large thrift stores. Though often this stuff is kinda marked up because its new which sucks but is still better than just burning it.
I get the impression this will turn out similar to how some "for cause" businesses have. Past examples include:
I worry that, one way or another, this is going to create a pile of unwanted products somewhere, and it probably won't be in a nice neighborhood.A good chunk of unsold clothing destruction happens because the brand considers fire sales to be brand damage. I have to wonder if they'll comply with this regulation willingly, or if they'll do some stupid workaround to make sure they can continue to pointlessly destroy clothing for the sake of a brand image.
They can just pull the labels off or relabel them. That’s the usual approach
Fast-fashion, fast-furniture, fast-food, fast-news should all be regulated. They destroy our planet fast.
Reminds me of this situation: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-44885...
A strange decision considering that high fashion is one of the few lucrative sectors of eu. LV cannot afford to give away their branded items , and i doubt they are willing to remanufacture or reuse. They may be a tiny fraction of the industry, but equally affected.
Yes, because shareholder value comes first. Ffs
I wonder why this doesn't also cover handbags and scarves?
https://www.darveys.com/blog/luxury-brands-burn-their-own-go...
For some of these things I wonder if there are missing recyclable options. Like could you economically run a pile of defective clothing through a blender and and use it as fiber reinforcement in some kind of construction material or insulation?
What I don’t understand is, why are these being destroyed instead of being donated? Is it just because businesses don’t want their brand to be devalued because the poor people will wear their brand?
donated to who? in the past they would typically send them to africa or something but this actually has negative effects on local african economies for example
even within the country, to those in need. At least in the UK, there are collection points, as well as many charities that accept clothes such as oxfam and cancer research UK
RIP what is left of true third world economies. It is about to get dumped on with even more "donations" that destroys and prevents local industry.
This is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules.
The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.
Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.
---
The linked page has this text:
"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."
Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.
The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.
I don't think that is very believable.
(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
"The Outlaw Sea" is a book about the long history of the complexity of responsibility, ownership, in international shipping and the ships themselves. It's very good, it should be on the HN standard reading list, much like _The Box_.
I'm only interested in comments here from people who have an understanding of the complex world of outsourcing responsibility.
TL;DR: International cooperation isn't at a level where ANY country/bloc can have an impact on how their own waste is disposed of. The idea that magically that will happen with clothing is an admission of ignorance of this fact in decades old industries.
We need more and stronger international laws. The opposite of the current US administration's influence.
Two other books I'd recommend are The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina, and Outside The Box by Mark Levinson (author of The Box).
Thanks, can't wait to read these, didn't know they existed
That’s excellent news. I always find it strange that companies would go as far as to destroy unsold items instead of just donating or recycling them.
I mean, most of the destruction is recycling that I am aware of. Turning into rags is the fate of most unwanted clothing. Do the euros burn it instead?
"the euros"? As opposed to what, "the hillbillies"?
Give a man donated clothing and they will have clothes ... teach a man to become and indentured servant on minimum wage and they will be able to buy clothes every year for the rest of their lives.
Good!! We should also fine companies that try to work around this. Our planet can't handle this kind of externalisation anymore.
Great! Can we also ban the export of waste, please?
What keeps them from selling 1000 pieces for a cent to offshore companies in Africa/Asia that then burn what they bought?
That they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.
I think incorporating the cost of recycling and trash into the original purchase price should also become a global norm.
>Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea?
One reason would be because it meddles with free market and ownership rights.
This must be the first thread I've seen in a while on HN where nobody calls the EU a "nanny state".
What about the environmental impact of all the extra warehouses they have to build to store the unsellable stock?
This is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell.
So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.
Every time again when it's about Europe, there are lots of commenters here complaining about the Eu or the rules, probably a lot of US commenters aping MAGA sentiments. Of course without solving the problem this law tries to solve. It's soooo easy to complain about something you know nothing about. As if the US is perfect
What does this post have to do with the United States?
I wrote about the comments, not about the post
Everything that is not compulsory is forbidden. Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
What stops them from selling it to an affiliated entity for 1 eurocent and thus evade the ban?
The European Union is messing up ignoring the law of unintended consequences, as typical...
Hopefully, what this should motivate is the emphasis on products which can be _disassembled_, taken apart, other than through destruction.
It may also become less costly to take products with flaws and fix them up: Right now, it's not profitable; but if one can't just chuck them away, then the cost-benefit analysis changes.
Less throw-away fashion hopefully.
Took me a while to find the actual rules: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/commission-del...
Overall, seems reasonably sensible.
It's still ok to destroy products if (among many other reasons) "the product can reasonably be considered unacceptable for consumer use due to damage, including physical damage, deterioration or contamination, including hygiene issues, whether it is caused by consumers or occurs during the handling of the product [...] and repair and refurbishment are not technically feasible or cost-effective;" but cost-effective means "the cost of repairing or refurbishing a product not outweighing the total cost of destruction of that product and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product."
So essentially, they have to offer all the clothing for donation first, if nobody wants it, it can still be destroyed (that's one of the other exceptions).
Unfortunately another exception is if "it is technically unfeasible ... to remove ... labels, logos or recognisable product design or other characteristics that are ... protected by intellectual property rights". So a luxury brand can probably still go "well our design is protected and we don't want the poors wearing our fancy clothes".
I will never understand fashion. Why does a store need ten new collections per year?
the only reason they need them is cause people are buying them. the supply side is never an issue…
Why massive discounts seem to be much more of a thing in the US compared to Europe?
What's the best case scenario for the positive impact of this regulation?
EU law making is full of hope and dreams but empty on common sense.
“I hope everyone in the system will play nice and not try to abuse or circumvent it”
We really really really need to replace our poloticians with younger ppl with functioning brains.
Being 60+ should automatically disclasify you from running into office.
EU courts tend to take action based on the spirit of the law, so circumvention is also illegal
Fashion is a deeply irrational market that preys on the worst of human nature. There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. You might say ok, if people are dumb enough to buy that then that's not my problem. So now there are companies creating the environmental cost of destroying viable products just to sustain this kind of grifting.
On top of that I think that society, as a general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product.
The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.
"There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. ..."
I used to be very tolerant of people's idiosyncrasies but with the internet, social media etc. that brings out the worst in people I'm now much less so.
Agreed, fashion is deeply irrational but it's always been with us. The real problem now is the degree to which the fashion industry exploits the excessively 'vulnerable'—you know, the oddballs who were once ignored. It's why a $5 can now cost $500.
Moreover, something in fashion one day is out of fashion the next, and it's a damn nuisance. It's gotten completely out of hand. Recently, I bought a pair of cargo-style work pants and they were fine. About a month later I bought another pair of the same brand, size and type (going on the label they were same model and style, and there was only one type--supposedly). Got them home and the cut was not only different and they were less comfortable but the legs were cut narrow (they were now too tight).
Took them back and the sales assistant said "oh that's normal, styles usually change with every new shipment, you're supposed to check them first".
For fuck's sake they are ordinary utilitarian work pants—not something you'd expect to see on the catwalks of Paris. I ought to be able to buy exactly the same product time after time like I used to be able to do with Levi jeans by just by looking at the tag/label (nowadays you can't even rely on Levis being the same fit).
> “If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice,” Pesca said, but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI “slop,” a term for spammy, commodified content. “They have banter, but it’s very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they’re always saying, ‘Yeah, that’s so interesting.’ It’s really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?”
Totally disagree. NotebookLM isn't always right, but it can go deep on complex scientific and other academic content. It is absolutely not "surface-level" unless you're feeding it shallow content.
I have never heard this Greene fellow, but I can say that all of the summaries generated by NotebookLM for me have been more nuanced and higher quality than the content created by NPR in recent years.
You seems to have commented on a different topic.
Yep, tried to delete but it was too late...
However, they still allow food to be destroyed.
Makes sense. You’d rather burn a birkin than let a poor person get their grubby little mitts on it. So the only way to stop them burning them, is to force them to do something with them.
Looking forward to Hermes moving to NY
Great news!
I live in America and I would like it to continue to be the leading economic zone.
The more Europe (and others) lag behind, the better my life will be :).
As a European, it seems absurd to me one would celebrate the short term benefits of being one of the by far most destructive (per capita) countries on earth regarding global climate (challenged only by a few oil states).
Is a temporary advantage worth destroying the planet forever?
I just think we have vastly different understandings about what actually helps the environment and what’s even happening to the environment.
This particular law is probably going to cause more resource waste not less. Holding inventory or distributing it costs money.
Btw have you taken up this topic with china, India, or Africa?
> Great news! I live in America...
Great news, indeed.
Finally, this never made any sense.
Whenever the EU does something positive towards a collective action issue, this forum gets filled to the brim with nitpickers who know everything that is possibly wrong with such action, and yet don't provide any meaningful alternative to solve actual problems. So, I guess it's only innovation if you can make your own startup solving menial or useless first-world issues in order for the PG and YC of the world to share a little piece of their billions with you and maybe get fuck you money from an exit.
wouldnt they just end up getting "donated" to other countries?
Ha! Communism solved that. Just produce less so there is scarcity rather than abundance. But jokes aside this is a great move.
We would have been better served by setting minimum clothing standards instead of this bs to get at the fast fashion. Also educate young people about the cost of their cheap clothes to the world especially young women who are the majority consumers of fast fashion.
basic civilization stuff right here
It always annoys me when shops have more XXL clothes than regular M clothes. Not destructing is good but why produce them in the first place? Sometimes it looks like they're not even trying to get logistics right.
Now if more countries can ban the destruction of edible food and usable pet food rather than preventing it from being reused by intentional spoilage.
EU makes sense once!! two thumbs up
Europe is now trying to kill their golden goose, the false scarcity luxury market? Weird way to compete in the world.
The EU has to get its hand into every aspect of everyone's life.
From the material the straw I drink from is made, to what port companies can use for charging, to what companies can do with their own products.
I don't get why European nations always have to turn into totalitarian fascist dictatorships.
Which of the current players is closer to being a fascist dictatorship: US, China or EU?
Fascism loves unregulated, consolidated conglomerates.
hopefully the free plastic feedstock from oil will go away soon. if polyester cost as much as cotton or wool, it wouldnt be wasted by these scum sucking bottom feeder manufacturers.
Thank you China for forcing the world into the solar battery future.
That this is an actual rule that other versions of have been a thing for years makes further convinced we are on the falling edge of capitalist society.
Yet another virtue signal law in Europe that won’t actually have the desired effect.
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Typical Eurocrat meddling in people's affairs. The owners of those items should be free to do whatever they want. If the government is concerend about environmental damage, they should raise landfill fees or tax carbon, not limit what firms are allowed to do with their own things.
Well put. Of course noone says that this will increase clothes price for everyone.
Raising the landfill tax or carbon tax will also increase the price of clothes.
This might only increase the price of already expensive items, a t-shirt from H&M won't go up in price because of this.
Just another case of the EU being focused on unimportant things while looking away from real issues like cost of living crisis or energy costs. Though on the other hand, it may be for the best since they only make things actively worse.
The government can do more than one thing at a time.
The "Less Growth for Europe" party strikes again.
Yes, to the frustration of supporters of the "Paperclip Maximising Means Growth" party.
It's regulation from the previous European Parliament and the first von der Leyen Commission. The new parliament from 2024 has a lot fewer red/green members (still enough to cause trouble, though) and the second von der Leyen Commission has a different agreement with the current parliament. The current Council is also a lot different than the council of just a year ago -- not in terms of members but in terms of opinions. A lot of the craziness is being rolled back, maybe this will also be rolled back.
The link is not about the 2024 framework regulation (from just before the elections) but about some new supplementary regulation that the 2024 regulation allowed for and required -- in order to provide clarifications and fix some of the mistakes of the initial regulation.
Far too much state interference in private matters. The EU is quickly becoming the new Soviet Union.
This ultimately only harms poor people, the biggest consumers of mass made mass destroyed fast fashion.
Cost of dealing with it will be directly passed on to them.
EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
textile waste, largely, is plastic waste.
Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic).
in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee.
fast fashion is by far the worst offender though.
So is rayon... kinda. It's cellulose from trees and other plants, without the original cells.
Where is the dividing line between cellulose, lignin and "plastics"?
rayon is a regenerated cellulose fibre: it biodegrades.
polyester is a thermoplastic polymer synthesised from petrochemicals: it doesn’t.
that’s the dividing line. one breaks down in the environment, the other persists for centuries and sheds microplastics into waterways every time you wash it.
rayon has its own environmental problems (deforestation, chemical processing), but “is it plastic?” is not one of them. the chemistry here isn’t ambiguous.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/12/stor...
They are working on that, too.
Those 'On Sale' racks are going to take up half the shop now. Maybe they could have a deep discounted section where clothes are set at cost value. Should find an equilibrium and someone will buy them
Incredibly, unbelievably stupid law. Waste is made when something unwanted is created, not when it is thrown out. Destruction or landfill is often the best option for all involved and modern landfills are very safe and sustainable. I worked in recycled clothing for a few years and it is not always or even often efficient.
This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
producers and sellers will have to optimize via better consumption prediction or via less previous season throw away.
eu is inefficent to be stable, until it is not, by design
good comment, but of course it's downvoted on hackernews
Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
> Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.
[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/fashion-waste-problem-fabrics-...
The majority of clothing produced is not for exclusive brands.
This is a very niche feature of low volume brands.
It's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
Related note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company.
My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited supply they control - is inherently predatory and should be restricted. Not because I'm the morality police and want to stop people from buying a bag that says "I spent $2000 on a bag", but because there is nothing that stops the company from cost-reducing that to oblivion. If you are going to sell a $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.
Clothing items tend to have quality roof that past that, it doesn't matter and it's not 2000$ for handbag.
Clothing has been used as wealth/class indicator for thousands of years, trying to change that will be extremely difficult lift.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.
Counter point: all of human existence.
We wouldn’t have 99% of the technological advancements we’ve made without a fuckton of failure and waste.
Counter point to the counter point: also all of human existence.
The "fuckton of failure and waste" which has brought technological advancements to humanity didn't come from destroying unsold clothing, and the risks involved in actual technological advancements are orders of magnitude larger than the risk of not being able to destroy unsold consumer products without penalty.
But now that we do, we know how to be smarter about it going forward
Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.
IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
So many clothes are already shipped to poorer parts of africa that it ends up being essentially indistinguishable from a landfill.
There are more clothes produced worldwide than there are people to wear them. Shipping unwanted refuse to poor counties is treating them as a landfill and patting yourself on the back.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking
I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
No, it's not just Zara and other fast fashion.
Premium brands really don't want to seel it UNLESS it's to the right people for the high price: https://fashionlawjournal.com/deadstock-destruction-why-fash...
Oh no, poor fast fashion companies won't be able to continue maximizing their profits by using slave labor to manufacture ginormous amounts of garbage that goes out of fashion in a week. Guess they'll have to reduce their garbage output or switch to manufacturing quality stuff that can hang out on a store's shelf for a bit longer. The fucking horror. Fuck them.
It costs a company nothing to donate an unsold coat to a homeless shelter.
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
Edit to clarify: things can't be put on sale, except for a few times during the year? I guess this is not every country, although I'm not sure which and when.
> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
Nonsense. They can.
> In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.
> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
> Nonsense. They can.
Specifically I meant that there's a few times during the year when things can be put on discount?
That's correct: typically Christmas, Easter and Summer. That's more than enough to get rid of excess if they were serious about it.
To clarify, this is a consumer protection law which is set in all EEA countries. Discounts are regulated to prevent stores from tricking their customers into thinking they are getting a product at a lower then usual price. You can only claim a product is on discount if the price has been lowered from a previous price less then x-days ago (I think 2 weeks is not uncommon), after which this discount becomes the new price.
As a European immigrant to the USA, it infuriates me to no end that American stores are allowed to use the words “price” and “discount” interchangeably. When I get things “on a discount” I expect to be paying lower then usual price.
Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.
Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.
> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?
Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.
I agree that "sardonic" is a better word. It’s just not used much, and it didn’t even come to mind. It's similar to how people misuse "ironic." But people usually understand what is meant.
The general thrust of the underlying messagr is not dishonest just because you say so. The general pattern is that there are degrees of governmental control over people's lives at the core. I don’t think it’s dishonest because my point is that bureaucracy has no limit on what it tries to control given enough time, even though my framing is vulgar.
and should we do stuff to reduce waist and help the environmen? Absolutely!! should we do this? if this worked, it would be a good thing. But if you just want to virtue signal without caring about reality, I think we disagree on more than just definitions.
My reference to "Freakonomics" is a collection of real contradictions to your theory. Since you didn't consider it, here are the expanded findings:
Most of the "recycled" material collected under these new laws is being "downcycled" into insulation, mattress stuffing, or industrial rags—markets that are already saturated and low-value. Reports show these organizations were overwhelmed with low-quality fast fashion that they could not sell. Instead of companies paying to burn it, the charities now had to pay to store or manage it.
The fines are real. France has set fines of up to €15,000 per infraction for companies caught destroying unsold goods. This is why companies are dumping the stock on charities rather than risking the fine. I’m giving how you speak about corporation. I’m guessing you have absolutely no empathy for people who run small single person or small team business and our overwhelmed by all the regulatory traps they can fall into at any point in time.
Then The Freakonomics data (Sanford, Maine case study) showed that when you charge people for trash, they generate less trash, but illegal dumping often spikes, forcing the city to spend more on cleanup patrols.
To pay for this new collection and sorting system, brands pay an "Extended Producer Responsibility" (EPR) fee. In 2025, this fee for textiles in systems like France/Netherlands ranged roughly from €0.12 to €0.50 per kilogram of clothing put on the market. In other words, the cost ultimately falls back on consumers.
So in general, no, I don’t agree at all. I think you are discounting the massive cost to not just corporations but also individuals when it comes to micromanagement. On a second layer, I’m not even against micromanagement, just bad micromanagement, especially micromanagement that is at best naïve regarding effectiveness, and at worst purely virtue signaling.
In short, we should focus on what works, not what you feel is righteously good.
> In short, we should focus on what works, not what you feel is righteously good.
These are not mutually exclusive. But i'm glad you're considering shareholder value!
> I’m guessing you have absolutely no empathy for people who run small single person or small team business and our overwhelmed by all the regulatory traps they can fall into at any point in time.
Sigh... yeah, lack of empathy is the core problem here.
> The general thrust of the underlying messagr is not dishonest just because you say so.
Comparing suicide of an individual to administrative fines on a corporation for needlessly destroying textiles is rhetorically dishonest. There's so many disparities and meaningful differences that trying to equate them without discussing any of them is counter productive to a beneficial conversation. It's a cheap impotent shot trying to stir up an emotional reaction where one doesn't belong. Or given how strongly you seem to feel, a completely different reaction is deserved. Making a misleading or inappropriate comparison is dishonest, not because I say it is, but because being misleading, even carelessly, lacks rhetorical integrity, or honesty.
Four more examples, of rhetorical dishonesty suggesting I'm acting in bad faith, and lack empathy, or sympathy for the balance of weight for smaller companies (without cause)
Saying again without argument or evidence that my position is a self righteous one devoid of pragmatic function.
Mischaracterizating my opposition to your comments as shallow or opinionated rather than a different core issue you've been unable to identify or reply to.
And then my top reply to yours, suggesting that all you care about is shareholder value. But at least I'm only saying so because it's become a common joke, but also because your first comment feels irreverent towards S/SI, or humans. And the sum total of your next reply ignores the core point of my objections, and drones on about the financial cost towards companies. So maybe it's not that dishonest.
Where? According to Wikipedia, suicide is no longer illegal anywhere in Europe.
you’re correct. I was just using it to emphasize how all encompassing regulation sometimes feel. I was annoyed and didn’t think; when seeing just another European regulation piling on then endless sea of things you can get fined for here.
Cypress was the last placed in Europe to remove laws against suicide in 2021 it seems.
Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes.
If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this.
I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got.
The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.
The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out.
Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.
HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.
GLP-1's solve this, now you're basically only losing weight and eventually (i.e. the 2030s) most people won't fluctuate much in weight. So, try again on "changing sizes". Yes I'm aware that children grow up rapidly and need new clothes. Don't buy goodyear welted boots for your 7 year old.
The best fashion is timeless, and that's why heritage fashion is far superior to trends. Coincidentally, it's why the brands I listed above are exclusively heritage brands, who have basically no regards for trends.
There's a reason HN is poorly dressed. I'd rather take the "only dresses with startup T-shirt" guy over the "I've gotta have the Sydney Sweeney Jeans" person, and especially over the sneakerhead crowd which now thinks Hoka and NB is superior to Nike.
Wow, you know what never happens? People changing size.
> People changing size.
I was curious why I no longer was able to wear pants I wore in my 20s. I could not get them over my hips. It wasn't because I was getting fatter, my weight is about the same.
I was also intrigued by young men looking slim in the hips, and older men not.
So I looked it up.
Turns out that your hips grow wider with age. I'd never heard of this before! Though I did know one's ears got bigger.
Too bad my shoulders never get wider, and my height shrinks :-/
My feet have gotten considerably wider with age, too.
And that's why companies destroy unsold stock? How?