Is this a problem in the EU? I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once. Those can easily fill a dumpster with tons of garbage. That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing.
I did a remodel last year. I filled 2 largeskips by the end of it. This is the first large job this house has had in 10 years, and it’s a 130 year old house.<p>The cafe at the bottom of my street has roughly that amount of waste collected every 2 weeks - they fill their commercial trash bin every 2 days. I don’t know how much of that is waste vs old food but they generate orders of magnitude more waste than I do even when I’m making a huge mess.
> I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once<p>Very interesting point of view, as someone who never done a home remodel, it surely brought a new perspective for me.<p>> That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing.<p>I'm not sure, if you have two kids who are into trendy clothing and you're able to let them make choices around clothing, then I can imagine that there is quite high turnover on those things.<p>Besides, the proposed rules seems to try to address waste generated by businesses rather than individuals or families. I guess currently they throw outdated clothing in order to make space for the new clothing lines?
It's companies dumping unsold ranges of clothes as new ranges come in. Not people.
My dad worked at a logistics facility, the amount of perfume he took home was ridiculous - and you’d think that something like perfume would never go stale. It does from a brand perspective and they do everything they can to have it destroyed so it doesn’t end up being sold to prices that would hurt the perceptive value. Obviously he wasn’t allowed to take it either.
This isn't really surprising in a low margin industry. If you are making a 2% margin on the average perfume bottle, and then you liquidate it at -3% because it's cheaper than destroying it, you can accidentally end up anchoring customer perceptions on a price with like a -1% margin which actually will destroy the business over time.<p>High margin industries get more complicated to model, of course.
I lived in a small building along with a French family with 5 children. The amount of trash they had every week was incredible. We had our small trash bag and theirs would be a heap of bags chest high. I sometimes wondered if he was throwing out trash from his business too.<p>While living there the system changed from paying for a disposal service to pre-buying special bags that cost around 2.50chf per 35L bag. The French family moved back to France within a couple of months.
Did they still have children wearing diapers? If so, that's your answer.
I think the children alone are enough of an explanation…
The keyword is _unsold_. If you bought clothes, they aren’t unsold
it's a pretty big _international_ problem<p>basically<p>- company cheap mass produces clothes/shoes<p>- new session (1/4 year) comes in (at beast)// it's fast fashion and there is a new trend (at worst)<p>- the "old" clothes are sold with rabatt but either before the session end or limited to clothes already shipped to stores<p>- this leaves a ton of clothes not shipped to physical shops and not sold in time<p>- selling them very strongly discounted means they compete with the new batch of different clothes, not discounting them means they might block up store space (physical store) or storage space (online shop, storage cost at scale shouldn't be underestimated, especially if some clothes just don't sell)<p>- so companies just destroy the unsold clothes _and write the production cost off as loss_. Turns out destroying + write off is more profitable then gifting or discounting... :(<p>- this is especially true for brand-clothes. They are often produced for a fraction of sales price and don't want to see their stuff being sold for more then a small discount. For some of this brand clothes their values outright lies more in "you needed to pay a bunch for it" then it "being high quality" (beyond a certain baseline of quality).<p>now the relevant question: Will this prevent companies from finding loopholes to still trash their clothes, especially brand clothes?<p>Yes it won't prevent it. But it increases the cost/complexity of it so it will likely reduce it by quite a bit. But some big next "<brand still dumps clothes through loophole>" scandal is basically just a question of time.<p>Still overall it looks like it will be beneficial from a wast, environment and climate POV while harming (way too) fast fashion which is good as fast fashion is harmful for all the previous points, laborer treatment, cloth quality and some others.
Is fast fashion not a thing in the US? I was under the impression it was, but perhaps I was wrong...
This is about businesses, not families.
I reuse everything from remodels. Seems a shame to throw out always. And other skips are getting bought by others to use in their building projects.
This law doesn't apply to individual consumers, only manufactures and retail stores.