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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2.<p>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.
<i>"So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2."</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>In a nutshell, why not do something more useful and productive and less wasteful?<p>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.<p>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.<p>Little wonder megatons of discarded barely-used and new clothes are polluting the planet.
> What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
<i>"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."</i><p>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).
This is a fantasy.<p>No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.<p>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.
One man's trash is another man's treasure.<p>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.<p>The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever.<p>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.<p>2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.<p>3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.
Both of those situations sound like a net win.
How is achieving the exact goal worse than nothing?
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 <i>is</i> 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.
> Not so with garbage disposal<p>There is already a healthy trade for <i>second-hand</i> 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.
<i>"financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing."</i><p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
That's not really true.<p>Some places sell their cardboard scrap. I'm guessing that places with the right sorts of metal scrap get paid for their waste.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>So do you expect this law will increase the amount of dumping? Sounds like it might.
>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.<p>I think now the incentive is to produce less.
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.
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 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.<p>So same shit as before. Slightly more expensive. No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap.
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%.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>At least that's how I see 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.<p>Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes?<p>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?<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Secondly, disposal is one of two things:<p>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.<p>2. Sale at a low value to the company above.
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".<p>It's a farse.
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.
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).<p>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.
> Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.<p>This isn’t going to happen. But if it did, they would 100% sell them in local markets, not destroy them.
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
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Regardless of whether they respect the law, why would a business pay for goods just to destroy them? How does that make money?<p>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.<p>It's degenerate bullshit so I'm all for the EU banning it, but there <i>is</i> a business rationale.
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)<p>The waste is still making its way to those countries, and the way that we know is that NGOs are tracking it[0]<p>I suspect that clothing will get similar treatment - initial illegal dumping as you predict, followed by determined NGOs holding the supply chain to account.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-30/gps-in-e-waste-from-australia-reveal-exports-to-south-east-asia/106196324" rel="nofollow">https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-30/gps-in-e-waste-from-a...</a>
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.
>Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.<p>Until one of them gets the bright idea to resell the clothes, which should take all of 30 seconds.<p>Your theory presumes the existence of a sketchy african company which will nonetheless remain scrupulously honest.
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?<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>By the time I hit highschool, seeing a 3ft snow in the winter was pretty rare.<p>Over the last 4 years, there's never any snow on the ground. They are lucky if 1 inch sticks around.
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 :)
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.
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.<p>Sorry about the pipes.
> remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.<p>Are they still doing it?<p>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.<p>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 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.
It has been brutal, and very cold, and we have not seen the sun. Send help!
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
>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.<p>This is a certainty.<p>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.
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 <i>do</i> get precipitation, it’s warm enough in the mountains that it comes down as rain, not snow. Rough year to be a ski area.
Climate change will probably solve itself within 10 years due to exponential growth of solar panels, batteries and electric cars.
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> 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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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)<p>Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.<p>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.<p>I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.<p>Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Wall Street here is a boogie man.<p>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.<p>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.
Where are the 8% annual returns going to come from to pay for all the defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare plans?
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.<p>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
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<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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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.
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.<p>This is not only clothing and apparel, also sporting goods and many other items.<p>This should be forbidden across all industries. Unsold stock should be delivered to non-profits at no cost for further distribution.<p>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.
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 <i>local</i> industry that would otherwise be able to produce and sell clothes.
OK, send them somewhere else or sell them at a discount<p><i>but brand dilution</i><p>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;<p>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...<p>All in the name of profit FOMO.
The appearal industry is among the most exploitive in the world. It's <i>good</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
Note specifically that I said <i>local</i> industry. I don't mean some factory owned by a global chain.
Assuming there was no /s there:<p>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.
If firms prodice less, prices will be higher.
> 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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
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.<p>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.
How are pigs, rabbits, goats and venison more sustainable? Unless you mean eating meat twice a year.<p>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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>Only pigs and chickens are more sustainable, precisely because of theirinhumane(?) short life and their genetics. They are very efficient meat producers.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>less</i> meat, and our tastes would develop towards the whole universe of non-meat foods.
Pigs are huge blobs of meat.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Eating meat once a year is an exaggeration when it comes to pork.
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.<p>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.
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.
> Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.<p>Sure, if you can find customers that accept that, why not. In that case just manufacture fewer items.
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.<p>Most probably, the returned items just sit in the warehouse of the companies than selling to ordinary customers. Golden times for warehouse companies.
I'm guessing EU bashing
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.<p>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?"<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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]<p>The site may feel less changeable than many, but I would be very surprised if it is not "in-development".<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550123">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550123</a>
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.
all that said.. most of the clothes are not so "branded"? Who cares if a GAP or something ends up in outlet or wherever..
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.
I am not against this in spirit but what are the higher order effects and unintended consequences?<p>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.
> 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<p>Some of us like the <i>intent</i> of the law but are wondering what the <i>consequences</i> of the law are.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I think the law is a good <i>idea</i>, but, sadly, laws mean nothing without <i>implementation</i>. The devil is in the details.
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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."<p>What an over exaggeration.
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/" rel="nofollow">https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/</a><p>I can't believe I'm debating climate change on HackerNews. What happened here?
Where’s that, out of curiosity?
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 <i>maintenance</i>, 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 <i>has</i> needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure.<p>"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.<p>You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.<p>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.<p>This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.
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!<p>But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of <i>potential</i> 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.
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 (<a href="https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destruction-of-returned-and-unsold-textiles-in-europes-circular-economy" rel="nofollow">https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...</a>).
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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>supply and demand is that an oversupply makes prices fall, rather than driving artificial scarcity
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.
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?<p>> A company can't prevent a consumer from ruining the wasted clothes.<p>When a consumer ruins clothing during try on he needs to buy it. I have always expected that rule to be the same everywhere.
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.<p>The "headache" is just : produce what you sell, sell what you produce, don't fill the world with your shit.
Or rather, since we know fast fashion is horrible because of the things you just said - it forces a more thoughtful approach to production.
If the headache causes companies to improve their product pipelines so that there is less waste then surely there will be less recycling.
Discouraging superfluous production is not nothing.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.<p>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<p>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...<p>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.).<p>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.<p>If for whatever reason the credit card charge back didn't work, I could use the store in (small claims) court and win.<p>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."
That sounds like another problem then :)<p>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.<p>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.
> 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<p>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.<p>So please do not portray customers trying to get their due as "ragebaiters".
It's not like you wouldn't have this problem anyway though? Like customers have a % of crazy people regardless.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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<p>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.<p>(all assuming the product is not sold as "new")
<i>> Isn't that good though?</i><p>It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.<p>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.<p>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:<p>1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.<p>2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation<p>3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
>and sends them for recycling.<p>>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But let's go to another point here:<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?<p>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?<p>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?<p>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.
How feasible is to remove tag, scratch serial number?
> ExampleCo's quality control does its job,<p>Then this will be the pressure that is needed for the company's quality <i>assurance</i> to be improved.
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.
The problem is the eBay sellers always label defective stuff as simply new product.<p>People buying it may or may not be ok with the defect.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> all assuming the product is not sold as "new"<p>And that is a <i>very</i> big assumption to make. Recycling is <i>ripe</i> with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.<p>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.
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!<p>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.<p>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 <i>all</i> textiles, not just high-end clothing.<p><a href="https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destruction-of-returned-and-unsold-textiles-in-europes-circular-economy" rel="nofollow">https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...</a> says <i>"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."</i>
They have exceptions for manufacturing defects
>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.<p>I used to work in IT Recycling and I feel like I was for some time, this process.<p>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.<p>I still have a lot of shit that should have been destroyed.
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?
> aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.<p>I think some brands destroy the items to create an artificial scarcity that keeps their stuff 'exclusive'.
> had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
There is this insane video where someone actually does repair one of the prototype boards that have been drilled<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q</a>
Why do you think the ones with holes didn‘t have the same defect?
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? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere.<p>Isn't this TKMaxx's entire business model?
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?<p>Isn't this why Ross exists? It's where I first heard the phrase "slightly irregular".
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?<p>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...
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?<p>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].<p>> 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.<p>Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.<p>[1] <a href="https://theweek.com/95179/luxury-brands-including-burberry-burn-stock-worth-hundreds-of-millions-each-year" rel="nofollow">https://theweek.com/95179/luxury-brands-including-burberry-b...</a>
What became of the relationship with the recycling company?
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.
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?<p>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.<p>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".<p>Why apparel <i>specifically</i>? Because apparel is <i>specifically</i> the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles.<p>Why was USB-C mandated <i>specifically</i> on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: <i>it wasn't</i>. It was mandated on smartphones <i>in general</i>, and Apple was the only company that <i>specifically</i> 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.<p>[0] <a href="https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-common-charger-rules-power-all-your-devices-single-charger-2024-12-28_en" rel="nofollow">https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-common-c...</a>
> 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<p>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?<p>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<p>The words "cost" and "effective "perhaps?<p>> Polluting<p>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.)<p>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.
Regulation is not about knowing better than the market. It is about correcting harmful externalities that markets would <i>not</i> solve on their own.
> Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry<p>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 <i>a)</i> ubiquity and market scale and <i>b)</i> destruction of unsold but undamaged items while still producing equally functional equivalents for market?<p>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 <i>fast-fashion</i>.
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.<p>Books are the same logic as apparel, "print more than needed, pulp what doesnt sale". Its just much smaller.
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.
> micro-targeted
> mandated USB-C on Apple devices<p>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 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.
People will say something needs to be done about waste and microplastics then complain when actual action is taken.<p>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 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.
It’s shocking to see this legislated.<p>As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.<p>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 <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983</a>, 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:<p>“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<p>I'm wondering if this includes regulatory agencies which in the US operate under the executive<p>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.
> 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!<p>How about extending others some good faith?<p>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".<p>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.
>As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.<p>They are...<p>Many brands prefer to burn their clothes than to send it to thrift shops or outlets for brand damage.<p>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.<p>It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies.<p>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.
> As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
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.
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.
> However hypercars are not purposely limited<p>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?
If you think Piero Ferrari isn't above playing the same games as Bernard Arnault, you're not paying attention.
Are they harder than ordinary cars?
They're wontonly destroying and or dumping shitty goods that they got for cheap by externalizing costs.
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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This legislation targets this vanity and I applaud it.
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.
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".
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.<p>They're not destroying clothing because it's inherently unsellable, or hazardous, or damaged beyond repair. They destroy it because it's <i>easier</i> to dump excess stuff than it is to set up responsible channels to get rid of it.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Shocking? Why such drama? Is this AI text?<p>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.<p>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 <i>society</i> to enforce rules if its healthy and strong enough. Some are better off, some worse.
Not sure if sarcasm or cluelessness.
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.<p>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."<p>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.<p>Fashion is fickle, prone to fads and flights of taste. Suspenders are by no means an isolated case.<p>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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
you own a business that owns the inventory, rather than owning the inventory yourself, no?<p>if you want to be doing all the things you could do otherwise, you should have full liability for it.<p>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.<p>even without the major market, there's still going to be niche market for suspenders
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?
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.
Fashion production is responsible for 8-10% of all carbon emissions<p><a href="https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-sustainability-in-the-textile-industry" rel="nofollow">https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-s...</a>
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).<p>So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.<p>Citation for the 100-ish hours: <a href="https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivd-spinning-plates/" rel="nofollow">https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an...</a>
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...?
Fashion? No, absolutely not. Textiles in general? Maybe, but almost certainly not.<p>This is the actual quote on the page you cite:<p>"Today, the combined textile and apparel sectors contribute as much as 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions."<p>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.<p>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.<p>A bit like feeding everyone vs. having an obesity crisis.
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?<p>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): <a href="https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/08/15/carbon-emissions-from-ai-and-crypto-are-surging-and-tax-policy-can-help" rel="nofollow">https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/08/15/carbon-emis...</a>
I think it's a reasonable idea. It's mostly going to affect the "luxury" brands who attempt to limit price reductions.<p>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.
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).<p>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.<p>Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.<p>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?<p>If the regulation specifically prohibits burning, it makes sense, as a measure to limit unproductive CO₂ emissions.
i would think chanel quilts would sell very well
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).<p>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.<p>Associations distributing clothes to developing countries / shelters are filtering tightly what they accept.<p>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:<p><a href="https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-secondhand-clothing-donations-can-harm-african-markets" rel="nofollow">https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...</a>
Aren’t there already advantages to donating? I.e. Tax advantages, and a lack of disposal cost?<p>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
donations are just an excuse to dump them on poor countries
What developing country do you think has a clothing shortage?
if you read the article...<p><i>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><p>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.<p>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.
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".<p>Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.
Why would you over produce something no one wants?<p>Also if really no one wanted it, why are companies destroying the items instead of giving them away?
>What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes<p>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.
Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem. Why does that problem exist if that incentive is actually really strong in practice?<p>I assume it's not actually a really strong incentive in context.
A factory might have a minimum order quantity of 10000 units for a product. The products cost $1 landed.<p>You know you can sell 4000 of those products for a total of $15k.<p>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.
You can produce so little people take anything you give them - like it was in the Soviet union.
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 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.<p>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.
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.
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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.
<a href="https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/carbon-taxes-europe-2024/" rel="nofollow">https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/carbon-taxes-europe-20...</a>
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".
> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes?<p>from TFA<p>> companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.<p>Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
Maybe donate it to poor countries?<p>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:<p><a href="https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-secondhand-clothing-donations-can-harm-african-markets" rel="nofollow">https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...</a>
> 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.<p>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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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...<p>(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.<p>Around 1800, 95% of people worked on the farm. Today it is 2%. People do different things now.
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.
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.
I don't think these companies want the poor people to wear their brand.<p>They'll find another way to destroy them.<p>2018 article reports that Burberry destroyed £28 millions worth of clothes to keep their brand "exclusive": <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983</a>
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
Poor countries don't need clothes. They have clothes. It's just more (mostly plastic pollution) that fills their landfills and rivers.<p><a href="https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/the-messy-truth/" rel="nofollow">https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/the-messy-truth/</a>
Maybe they could bury the clothes and call it carbon sequestration. I assume that clothes are made of mostly hydrocarbons.
yep, they do <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-dumping-ground-for-fast-fashion-leftovers" rel="nofollow">https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...</a>
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.
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)<p>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?
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.<p>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...<p>Whats the percentage of people chasing "fashion", especially after mid 30s?
Outlets could be a key here.
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.
They should pay people to wear them.
ah yes the Container Ship strategy
Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug:<p>"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."
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.
So they’ll donate it to someone who will then destroy it.
Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
Don't be surprised if products are sent abroad for destr^Wrecycling.<p>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?<p><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7070709/Plastic-packaging-M-S-Tesco-Essex-council-recycling-sacks-Malaysian-jungle.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7070709/Plastic-pac...</a>
sure, but within an EU context, the company should still get fined as if they destroyed it themselves
That would be a carbon tax. This is plain overregulation.
> They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.<p>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.
Why is that automatically bad?
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 <i>and</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>You seem to provide a great example of why Eurocrats regulating a highly efficient market will not cause the desired outcome…due to reality.<p>> <i>Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint.</i><p>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.<p>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 news article they read once 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!<p>When I think of unsold, I see that some sizes run out, leaving odd sizes as surplus.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 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 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.<p>This helps to maintain the value of the product and for consumers to not defer purchase until sale event.<p>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<p>It's a known practice and they've been going on like this for ages.<p>Fashion is vain by definition and this whole industry is very wasteful of our resources. This legislation is meant to help mitigate this.<p>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.<p>THIS IS GOOD FOR EU ECONOMY!
Every single country should follow suit, apply to food also.<p>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.<p>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.
Does this apply to Chinese companies too or it is just another measure that disadvantages local producers?
> 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<p>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.<p>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.
First, seems like a good thing. I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.<p>Second, in the short term this is going to lower profits for some companies.<p>Third, hopefully in the long run it will lead to less waste.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng" rel="nofollow">https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng</a>
Reminds me of this situation:
<a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983.amp" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-44885...</a>
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.
Companies' response: we'll just sew these unsold clothes into a large curtain, which is not apparel so we can then just burn it.
Unsold apparel is a headache, but banning it probably won't work.
Something still has to be done with the stuff.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20040323045929/http://tradeweave.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20040323045929/http://tradeweave...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/tradeweave" rel="nofollow">https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/t...</a>
>Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea?<p>One reason would be because it meddles with free market and ownership rights.
If manufacturers are banned from destroying unsold clothing won't they respond by producing less to avoid excess inventory?<p>And if supply decreases while demand stays the same wouldn't that push prices up for everyone?
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.
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.<p>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.
I anticipate a lot of unintended consequences lurking.<p>But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.
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.
> an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn.<p>That is a crazy amount.
Is it? 4-9% of <i>unsold portion</i> seems reasonable. Unless they actually mean 4-9% of all manufactured.<p><a href="https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destruction-of-returned-and-unsold-textiles-in-europes-circular-economy" rel="nofollow">https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...</a><p>Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.<p>>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 a much higher number, and the number possibly being as low as 4% seems like <i>good</i> news to me.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I get the impression this will turn out similar to how some "for cause" businesses have. Past examples include:<p><pre><code> - TOMS Shoes
- PlayPumps
- Textile Aid
</code></pre>
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.
I wonder why this doesn't also cover handbags and scarves?<p><a href="https://www.darveys.com/blog/luxury-brands-burn-their-own-goods" rel="nofollow">https://www.darveys.com/blog/luxury-brands-burn-their-own-go...</a>
Took me a while to find the actual rules: <a href="https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/commission-delegated-regulation-setting-out-derogations-prohibition-destruction-unsold-consumer_en" rel="nofollow">https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/commission-del...</a><p>Overall, seems reasonably sensible.<p>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 <i>and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product.</i>"<p>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).<p>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".
What's the best case scenario for the positive impact of this regulation?
"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_.<p>I'm only interested in comments here from people who have an understanding of the complex world of outsourcing responsibility.<p>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.<p>We need more and stronger international laws. The opposite of the current US administration's influence.
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?
Everything that is not compulsory is forbidden. Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
The European Union is messing up ignoring the law of unintended consequences, as typical...
What about the environmental impact of all the extra warehouses they have to build to store the unsellable stock?
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?
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.
Why massive discounts seem to be much more of a thing in the US compared to Europe?
> “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?”<p>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.<p>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.
What stops them from selling it to an affiliated entity for 1 eurocent and thus evade the ban?
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.<p>Thank you China for forcing the world into the solar battery future.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>---<p>The linked page has this text:<p>"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."<p>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.<p>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%.<p>I don't think that is very believable.<p>(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.)
Great! Can we also ban the export of waste, please?
This must be the first thread I've seen in a while on HN where nobody calls the EU a "nanny state".
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.
Ha! Communism solved that. Just produce less so there is scarcity rather than abundance. But jokes aside this is a great move.
I think incorporating the cost of recycling and trash into the original purchase price should also become a global norm.
<i>This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.</i><p>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.<p>(<a href="https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldioxid-an-vad-sverige-slapper-ut/" rel="nofollow">https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldi...</a>)
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.<p>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.
I will never understand fashion. Why does a store need ten new collections per year?
EU law making is full of hope and dreams but empty on common sense.<p>“I hope everyone in the system will play nice and not try to abuse or circumvent it”<p>We really really really need to replace our poloticians with younger ppl with functioning brains.<p>Being 60+ should automatically disclasify you from running into office.
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
Looking forward to Hermes moving to NY
Finally, this never made any sense.
What keeps them from selling 1000 pieces for a cent to offshore companies in Africa/Asia that then burn what they bought?
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.
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.<p>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.
Hopefully, what this should motivate is the emphasis on products which can be _disassembled_, taken apart, other than through destruction.<p>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.<p>Less throw-away fashion hopefully.
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.
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Great news!<p>I live in America and I would like it to continue to be the leading economic zone.<p>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).<p>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.<p>This particular law is probably going to cause more resource waste not less. Holding inventory or distributing it costs money.<p>Btw have you taken up this topic with china, India, or Africa?
> Great news!
I live in America...<p>Great news, indeed.
Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I was also intrigued by young men looking slim in the hips, and older men not.<p>So I looked it up.<p>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.<p>Too bad my shoulders never get wider, and my height shrinks :-/<p>My feet have gotten considerably wider with age, too.
And that's why companies destroy unsold stock? How?
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.
The EU has to get its hand into every aspect of everyone's life.<p>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.<p>I don't get why European nations always have to turn into totalitarian fascist dictatorships.
Far too much state interference in private matters. The EU is quickly becoming the new Soviet Union.
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, <i>is</i> plastic waste.<p>Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic).<p>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.<p>fast fashion is by far the worst offender though.
<a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/12/story/20181212STO21610/20181212STO21610_en.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/12/stor...</a><p>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
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/fashion-waste-problem-fabrics-deadstock-pashko-burberry-reformation" rel="nofollow">https://www.vogue.com/article/fashion-waste-problem-fabrics-...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Clothing has been used as wealth/class indicator for thousands of years, trying to change that will be extremely difficult lift.
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.<p>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.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.<p>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.
No, it's not just Zara and other fast fashion.<p>Premium brands really don't want to seel it UNLESS it's to the right people for the high price: <a href="https://fashionlawjournal.com/deadstock-destruction-why-fashion-keeps-destroying-unsold-goods/" rel="nofollow">https://fashionlawjournal.com/deadstock-destruction-why-fash...</a>
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking<p>I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
It costs a company nothing to donate an unsold coat to a homeless shelter.
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.
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.<p>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
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?<p>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.<p>A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.<p>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?<p>Nonsense. They can.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.<p>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?<p>Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.
Where? According to Wikipedia, suicide is no longer illegal anywhere in Europe.