I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only.
This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches.
In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that most of it are produced in small sets anyway.
Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea?
My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
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?
It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
You should check out "Ascension" (it is on Paramount unfortunately). It gives a pretty close up look at China and factory culture and how their entire country is mobilized to push maximum consumption. The corporation's don't view Americans high per-capita consumption as a problem but instead wonder how to drive the rest of the world to consume the same absurd amount. It gives you a sort of fly on the wall view of the whole thing and it really makes you question what kind of psychotic road we are barreling down.
I agree with you about food though. I care about food and healthcare, very occasionally transportation. Can we focus on those instead of all the bullshit "amenities" corporations are churning out, are we really gonna decimate the planet for clothes, cosmetics and plastic conveniences?
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
It's good exactly because of this. Every company is pushing us to consume more, and Wall Street is at the top of this, growth at all costs (including human lives, mental health, just anything)
Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.
We should be making shoes which lasts 4 years, clothes which last at least 2 years with no "fashion" industry pushing us to change it every 2 days.
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
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
> The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.
Where I currently live has about the same climate as it did 20 years ago. More variability, I think (people started complaining about weird harvest times about 10 years ago, and we're now all used to chaotic year-on-year yields), but roughly the same averages. Flood infrastructure needs maintenance, but not a redesign. However, the behaviour of the migratory wildlife has changed, and you only have to travel a few dozen miles before you reach somewhere that has needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure.
"A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.
If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust.
This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.
I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet.
The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.
Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.
Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.
If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.
If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it!
But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some winters are colder than average. This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.
What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.
It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
I buy mostly from liquidators, where everything is sold as-is, but that doesn't stop end users from trying to make a claim, so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty. For example, Ryobi brands the items with a plastic welder, leaving a tell-tale wavy mark.
A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who participate, so finding ways to allow products to be truly sold as-is is vital, otherwise the next most logical option is to put those items in a landfill.
It's also important that there's no legislative hurdles to seelling items as-is, or there may be no legal way to sell a salvage products without completely overhauling them, which is usually not cost effective.
> so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty
With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.
But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as not eligible for warranty. They just want that coverage
We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products they bought through gray market channels.
Having never tried to get any clothing company to warranty their stuff, I find it commendable at all that your clothes were even worth warranty claim in the first place.
> We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products
These days this is often the only recourse you have, because going the legal route you get stonewalled unless you are willing to spend serious money on pursuing a case. And it'll cost you gobs of time. An example is my mother buying new pants for 220 bucks from a reputable seller, the stitching starts to disintegrate after 7 months, and both the retailer and the manufacturer tell my mother to go pound sand.
So please do not portray customers trying to get their due as "ragebaiters".
> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.
Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling.
If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:
1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.
2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation
3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then
the recycler will have undoubtedly violated a contract they have with ExampleCo and will lose in civil court and pay significant penalties greater than the money they made selling never worn ExampleCo jeans and also, undoubtedly, suffer from not having ExampleCo as a customer for their services in the future.
But the recycler has all the papers and documentation that they lawfully contracted an overseas company for wholesale recycle of the product. What's your civil court's jurisdiction? You might be able to play wack-a-mole with ebay, temu, alibaba express sellers through civil court in your jurisdiction assuming you have the money of course.
What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels? Or why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?
I suspect this will need to be a cultural change. If ExampleCo does it but not RandomCo, of course your reputation will suffer. But if the law is for all of EU, it gives everyone an equal footing.
Especially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.
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.
No, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.
I think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.
Had this recently, bought a dehumidifier for a good price, marked as new - arrived and had obviously been opened and didn't work. Out of a desire to have a dehumidifier sooner than later I was about to open it up when I saw it already had been, so I opened a return instead and sent it back.
I can only assume it is worth it for the seller to sell untested goods as new, a good number must work long enough for the buyer to be happy.
And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.
The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
If you had bothered to read TFA, you'd have understood that the rules only apply to products that have fully passed QA, were being kept as stock but ended up not selling. They don't apply to experimental batches, to defective or damaged items, etc...
Beautiful insight into processes that most of us never see, thanks!
My initial thought was "reusing an item is even better than recycling" but then realized that a warrantied item is quite likely to have flaws and get warrantied again very soon.
I have recently been trolling eBay for used computing equipment rather than buying new, after it was suggested I sell my old hardware that I don't think anyone would want. And man has that been a great experience, it's way more fun than browsing Newegg or doing pc part picking from new catalogs. I need neither the compute hardware nor the cost savings but it's a fun activity on its own, not unlike so many computer games where you do deck optimization or similar.
I heard that the clothes especially from high end brands are destroyed to keep the value of the brand high ie not to cannibalize sales. Which doesnt seem like good enough reason to burn 300.000+t of clothes (that created untold emissions)
Do high-end brands even produce 300 kilotons of clothing? Assuming, very generously, that a piece of clothing, with packaging and all, weights 1 kg, it would be 300M pieces of clothing; that could be an entire production run of something very ubiquitous (say, Levi's 501), but definitely not high-end.
I think that tonnage is for all textiles, not just high-end clothing.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
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?
This does happen: for example in Macbook repair, it is common to buy defective motherboards, in order to salvage the chips off them (which are apple-specific, hence not purchasable elsewhere). Those boards often come from China, and often have holes drilled in them, I guess exactly to prevent them from being repaired.
It's a shame, because some of those boards could (and would, they are valuable enough) be fully repaired by a skilled repair person. Instead, the chips are picked off and the rest goes to waste.
I did buy a batch once that didn't have holes drilled, and they all turned out to have all sorts of strange, often random issues, so I suspect those were RMAs that somehow "fell off the back of a truck" and escaped the drilling.
Probably, but part of the point of outsourcing the recycling was that you wouldn't have to set up infrastructure, process and people for that. If they weren't crooked, you could even have customers ship the products directly to the recycler. To drill it first, then you are paying for shipping twice, on an item that is already worthless to you.
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
Not covered by this regulation in spirit and (probably, haven't read it yet) in text. The spirit of the regulation is targeting fast-fashion on-prem retailers (think H&M, Primark, Zara and the likes) and online retailers like Shein, who have heaps of products that just aren't sold because they're not wanted - and also the occasional luxury brand trying to maintain scarcity [1].
> but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.
As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.
They quite clearly are. Burberry was caught a while ago https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983, but it's well known that every major upmarket brand was doing it to avoid the loss of prestige of sending the items to outlets.
Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.
It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies.
One can speculate that this is an easy way to force the companies to pay for their externalities - given that production in third countries are much harder to touch for the EU.
Clothing items are so cheap to make it's hard to believe. I used to work in a distribution warehouse for a national baby and children's clothing chain. Containers would arrive from China and we'd enter items into the warehouse stock system. Cost basis for most items was under 10 cents.
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.
Of course they're not. They're destroying goods that they can't sell at a profit because, for example, the cost of processing some unworn but returned goods outweighs the potential profit from those goods.
In TFA it's estimated that between 4% and 9% of clothing put on the EU market is destroyed before being worn. An admittedly high uncertainty, but even 4% of all clothing sold in the EU is still a heck of a lot of clothes.
Luxury brands do in fact intentionally destroy old stock to make sure their value doesn't drop due to excess supply. I suppose the next step is making everything extremely limited like hypercars?
Yeah, it is shocking. And that's why it needed to be legislated. Companies prove time and time again that they will take the easiest route to minimise losses and maximise profits, even if that means destroying the environment or wasting perfectly good merchandise to do so.
They're not destroying clothing because it's inherently unsellable, or hazardous, or damaged beyond repair. They destroy it because it's easier to dump excess stuff than it is to set up responsible channels to get rid of it.
Many "high fashion" shithouses intentionally destroy excess stock so that their precious branded status symbols can't get into the hands of the filthy proles, which would dilute their brand recognition.
These "regulatory burdens", as you call them, are the only thing holding back companies from further messing up the planet and I welcome them with open arms.
I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?
I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in.
It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.
The interesting parallel here is with digital goods. Software and AI services have near-zero marginal cost of production, so overproduction is literally impossible - you just serve another copy. Physical goods are the opposite, where every unit has real material cost and environmental impact.
What I find compelling about this regulation is that it forces companies to treat demand forecasting as a real engineering problem instead of just overproducing and writing off waste. The technology to do small-batch, responsive manufacturing already exists (Shein basically proved it works at scale, ethical concerns aside). The question was always whether incumbents would adopt it voluntarily.
Now they have to. And the companies that figure out how to forecast accurately and produce lean will have a genuine competitive advantage, not just a compliance cost.
I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).
The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.
Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.
This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.
Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.
My wife worked for a cloth upcycling association (finding sustainable future for discarded clothes).
Reality is, there is just 10x more thrown out clothes in the west that any third world country on earth could need, same for shelters.
Associations distributing clothes to developing countries / shelters are filtering tightly what they accept.
In short, the vast majority of thrown out clothes in the west are just crapwear that not even the third world want. There are entire pipelines of filtering and sorting to only keep and distribute the good quality clothes.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
That is a slightly different scenario than taking cheap "fast fashion waste", compressing it into bales, shoving it into shipping containers, transporting/dumping it and flooding local countries/markets.
(And many of these large shipments do not end-up as donations by the time they get to their destination, but are actually sold by weight and then resold again)
But yes - distribution/logistics of donated goods needed to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".
Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.
(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)
Brand value particularly for commodity products is usually just a form of information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers, and creates economic inefficiency since it diverts expenditure from other products that can materially improve lives. It also allows enshittification to happen since it creates inertia (brand loyalty) to switching, and the positive brand image sticks around for longer than the actual good quality products.
It's very very easy to spend much less on clothes. Buying a new handbag every 6 months vs maintaining a bag for 20 years isn't that much different in terms of effort, but one is unbelievably more expensive.
Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.
Well one link deeper says "Restrict the export of textile waste" but I'm still unclear why they preferred these measure over a carbon tax.
Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that
involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to
destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following
operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive
2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that
Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the
recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to
destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
This kind of reply is so cliché it's tiresome. "Someone makes small step to avoid waste and environmental damage" -> "if it's not perfect it's no good at all, let the free market sort it out at t=infinity".
Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.
Where even are all the people wandering around naked for lack of clothes? There's so much donated clothing already out there. And the homeless here mainly 'need clothes' because they have no way to wash their clothes. It'd be less wasteful to get them access to laundry facilities. And the developing world always gets the "PATRIOTS - Super Bowl LX Champions" gear and a ton of other cast-offs - I doubt they need more.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
Carbon is not the only concern here, it is also excessive water use, excessive land use, higher logistics pressure on ports and such which can be reduced if these are made to a higher quality and a reduced quantity.
For the same reason tax codes are complex. If you have a simple law, there's no way for a politician to say to a group of people: "If you vote for me, I will get you a special favour".
> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes?
from TFA
> companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
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.
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.
Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.
They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
You can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
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.
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
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.
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.
Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise:
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
The intended effect of the law is that they get better at planning. It requires supply chain innovation similar to what happened in the automotive industry decades ago with JIT manufacturing. They can borrow from fast-fashion but now there’s a penalty for over producing.
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
Just because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
Won't fungi and bacteria eat (cellulose-based) the clothes, releasing the same amount of CO₂, only a bit slower?
Synthetic fabrics can likely be buried as a form of carbon sequestration though.
I wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean)
What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...
I'm not particularly big into fashion (I think my newest clothes are 4-5 years old), but why is the thing you want "common [expletive] sense" and someone choosing to spend their money a different way, by extension, nonsensical?
What they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently.
Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society.
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
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.
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.
Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug:
"Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."
Don't be surprised if products are sent abroad for destr^Wrecycling.
No I am not joking, some german company hid an airtag in a old computer that went to recycling. It ended up somewhere in Thailand, being not very environmentally friendly taken care of.
If that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model.
Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying things like "you must stop a machine before putting a person inside it".
Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
We have something like 200 years of labor laws around this point. You should probably read some history and ask yourself why every government on the planet has been compelled to force legislation on business to protect the interests of the people.
And in pre-industrial societies, peasants (almost entirely women, ranging from children to the elderly) commonly spent around 100 hours of labor to produce a single square yard of fabric to clothe their families (fabric was too expensive for peasants to buy, so most spun it at home).
So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.
There has to be a sweet spot between someone hand spinning wool for 100s of hours and an automated factory spitting 80% polymer based clothing directly into a trash can.
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.
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
Nonsense. They can.
> In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.
> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
To clarify, this is a consumer protection law which is set in all EEA countries. Discounts are regulated to prevent stores from tricking their customers into thinking they are getting a product at a lower then usual price. You can only claim a product is on discount if the price has been lowered from a previous price less then x-days ago (I think 2 weeks is not uncommon), after which this discount becomes the new price.
As a European immigrant to the USA, it infuriates me to no end that American stores are allowed to use the words “price” and “discount” interchangeably. When I get things “on a discount” I expect to be paying lower then usual price.
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.
I anticipate a lot of unintended consequences lurking.
But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.
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.
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.
If you look at the backyards (so called garden) of homes of the advanced countries, from satellite maps, they mostly became junkyards of things. Inside homes are full of things that are rarely used. I have seen Amazon boxes going into bins unopened. Basically, homes are overflowing with goods, and throwing things away is going to become expensive. Advances in manufacturing, supply chains and online shopping have accelerated the saturation of markets.
Destruction of goods can't be stooped due the pace of inflow of inventory. This is like a conveyor belt jamming, where the downstream belts are draining slower than upstream ones.
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.
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?
Seems like policy ripe with unintended side effects. At the very least, it'll likely raise prices for consumers because the companies aren't allowed to manage their inventory as efficiently as they wish.
Now of course this might be a totally acceptable price to pay, I'm not necessarily arguing against it. It will just be conveniently omitted from public communications on the topic by the EU. For regulators, there never are tradeoffs, after all.
Brand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.
Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.
I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic).
in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee.
Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.
>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.
Fashion is a deeply irrational market that preys on the worst of human nature. There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. You might say ok, if people are dumb enough to buy that then that's not my problem. So now there are companies creating the environmental cost of destroying viable products just to sustain this kind of grifting.
On top of that I think that society, as a general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product.
The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.
This is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules.
The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.
Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.
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The linked page has this text:
"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."
Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.
The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.
I don't think that is very believable.
(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
Incredibly, unbelievably stupid law. Waste is made when something unwanted is created, not when it is thrown out. Destruction or landfill is often the best option for all involved and modern landfills are very safe and sustainable. I worked in recycled clothing for a few years and it is not always or even often efficient.
This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
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.
Hopefully, what this should motivate is the emphasis on products which can be _disassembled_, taken apart, other than through destruction.
It may also become less costly to take products with flaws and fix them up: Right now, it's not profitable; but if one can't just chuck them away, then the cost-benefit analysis changes.
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.
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.
This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.
Very tongue in cheek: In the latest fully analyzed year (2024) Sweden was CO2 net negative. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.
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.
That they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.
As a European, it seems absurd to me one would celebrate the short term benefits of being one of the by far most destructive (per capita) countries on earth regarding global climate (challenged only by a few oil states).
Is a temporary advantage worth destroying the planet forever?
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.
Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes.
If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this.
I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got.
The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.
The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out.
Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.
HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.
GLP-1's solve this, now you're basically only losing weight and eventually (i.e. the 2030s) most people won't fluctuate much in weight. So, try again on "changing sizes". Yes I'm aware that children grow up rapidly and need new clothes. Don't buy goodyear welted boots for your 7 year old.
The best fashion is timeless, and that's why heritage fashion is far superior to trends. Coincidentally, it's why the brands I listed above are exclusively heritage brands, who have basically no regards for trends.
There's a reason HN is poorly dressed. I'd rather take the "only dresses with startup T-shirt" guy over the "I've gotta have the Sydney Sweeney Jeans" person, and especially over the sneakerhead crowd which now thinks Hoka and NB is superior to Nike.
I was curious why I no longer was able to wear pants I wore in my 20s. I could not get them over my hips. It wasn't because I was getting fatter, my weight is about the same.
I was also intrigued by young men looking slim in the hips, and older men not.
So I looked it up.
Turns out that your hips grow wider with age. I'd never heard of this before! Though I did know one's ears got bigger.
Too bad my shoulders never get wider, and my height shrinks :-/
My feet have gotten considerably wider with age, too.
This is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell.
So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.
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.
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.
Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.
It's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
Related note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company.
My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited supply they control - is inherently predatory and should be restricted. Not because I'm the morality police and want to stop people from buying a bag that says "I spent $2000 on a bag", but because there is nothing that stops the company from cost-reducing that to oblivion. If you are going to sell a $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.
Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.
IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.
Counter point to the counter point: also all of human existence.
The "fuckton of failure and waste" which has brought technological advancements to humanity didn't come from destroying unsold clothing, and the risks involved in actual technological advancements are orders of magnitude larger than the risk of not being able to destroy unsold consumer products without penalty.
I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
Oh no, poor fast fashion companies won't be able to continue maximizing their profits by using slave labor to manufacture ginormous amounts of garbage that goes out of fashion in a week. Guess they'll have to reduce their garbage output or switch to manufacturing quality stuff that can hang out on a store's shelf for a bit longer. The fucking horror.
Fuck them.
Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.
Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.
> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?
Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.
I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only. This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches. In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that most of it are produced in small sets anyway.
Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea? My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
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?
How will apparel be cheaper? When they lower production runs, it'll be less available, which will mean prices will go up.
It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
You should check out "Ascension" (it is on Paramount unfortunately). It gives a pretty close up look at China and factory culture and how their entire country is mobilized to push maximum consumption. The corporation's don't view Americans high per-capita consumption as a problem but instead wonder how to drive the rest of the world to consume the same absurd amount. It gives you a sort of fly on the wall view of the whole thing and it really makes you question what kind of psychotic road we are barreling down.
I agree with you about food though. I care about food and healthcare, very occasionally transportation. Can we focus on those instead of all the bullshit "amenities" corporations are churning out, are we really gonna decimate the planet for clothes, cosmetics and plastic conveniences?
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
It's good exactly because of this. Every company is pushing us to consume more, and Wall Street is at the top of this, growth at all costs (including human lives, mental health, just anything)
Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.
We should be making shoes which lasts 4 years, clothes which last at least 2 years with no "fashion" industry pushing us to change it every 2 days.
+1 to Ascension, one of the most fine piece of filmmaking that tries to explain the world of today
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
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
> The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.
Where I currently live has about the same climate as it did 20 years ago. More variability, I think (people started complaining about weird harvest times about 10 years ago, and we're now all used to chaotic year-on-year yields), but roughly the same averages. Flood infrastructure needs maintenance, but not a redesign. However, the behaviour of the migratory wildlife has changed, and you only have to travel a few dozen miles before you reach somewhere that has needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure.
"A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.
If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust.
This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.
I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet.
The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.
Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.
[delayed]
Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.
If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.
If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it!
But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some winters are colder than average. This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
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.
In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.
What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.
It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
I buy mostly from liquidators, where everything is sold as-is, but that doesn't stop end users from trying to make a claim, so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty. For example, Ryobi brands the items with a plastic welder, leaving a tell-tale wavy mark.
A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who participate, so finding ways to allow products to be truly sold as-is is vital, otherwise the next most logical option is to put those items in a landfill.
It's also important that there's no legislative hurdles to seelling items as-is, or there may be no legal way to sell a salvage products without completely overhauling them, which is usually not cost effective.
> so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty
With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.
But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as not eligible for warranty. They just want that coverage
We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products they bought through gray market channels.
> ... the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer...
Maybe this is the problem. Retailers should cover the statutory warranty on any product they sell.
Having never tried to get any clothing company to warranty their stuff, I find it commendable at all that your clothes were even worth warranty claim in the first place.
> We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products
These days this is often the only recourse you have, because going the legal route you get stonewalled unless you are willing to spend serious money on pursuing a case. And it'll cost you gobs of time. An example is my mother buying new pants for 220 bucks from a reputable seller, the stitching starts to disintegrate after 7 months, and both the retailer and the manufacturer tell my mother to go pound sand.
So please do not portray customers trying to get their due as "ragebaiters".
> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
(all assuming the product is not sold as "new")
> Isn't that good though?
It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.
Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling.
If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:
1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.
2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation
3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
>and sends them for recycling.
>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then
the recycler will have undoubtedly violated a contract they have with ExampleCo and will lose in civil court and pay significant penalties greater than the money they made selling never worn ExampleCo jeans and also, undoubtedly, suffer from not having ExampleCo as a customer for their services in the future.
But the recycler has all the papers and documentation that they lawfully contracted an overseas company for wholesale recycle of the product. What's your civil court's jurisdiction? You might be able to play wack-a-mole with ebay, temu, alibaba express sellers through civil court in your jurisdiction assuming you have the money of course.
What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels? Or why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?
I suspect this will need to be a cultural change. If ExampleCo does it but not RandomCo, of course your reputation will suffer. But if the law is for all of EU, it gives everyone an equal footing.
> ExampleCo's quality control does its job,
Then this will be the pressure that is needed for the company's quality assurance to be improved.
How feasible is to remove tag, scratch serial number?
Especially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.
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.
No, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.
I think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.
The problem is the eBay sellers always label defective stuff as simply new product.
People buying it may or may not be ok with the defect.
Think bad welds, usually they're fine for a while and then they're very much not.
Had this recently, bought a dehumidifier for a good price, marked as new - arrived and had obviously been opened and didn't work. Out of a desire to have a dehumidifier sooner than later I was about to open it up when I saw it already had been, so I opened a return instead and sent it back.
I can only assume it is worth it for the seller to sell untested goods as new, a good number must work long enough for the buyer to be happy.
> all assuming the product is not sold as "new"
And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.
The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
If you had bothered to read TFA, you'd have understood that the rules only apply to products that have fully passed QA, were being kept as stock but ended up not selling. They don't apply to experimental batches, to defective or damaged items, etc...
Beautiful insight into processes that most of us never see, thanks!
My initial thought was "reusing an item is even better than recycling" but then realized that a warrantied item is quite likely to have flaws and get warrantied again very soon.
I have recently been trolling eBay for used computing equipment rather than buying new, after it was suggested I sell my old hardware that I don't think anyone would want. And man has that been a great experience, it's way more fun than browsing Newegg or doing pc part picking from new catalogs. I need neither the compute hardware nor the cost savings but it's a fun activity on its own, not unlike so many computer games where you do deck optimization or similar.
I heard that the clothes especially from high end brands are destroyed to keep the value of the brand high ie not to cannibalize sales. Which doesnt seem like good enough reason to burn 300.000+t of clothes (that created untold emissions)
Do high-end brands even produce 300 kilotons of clothing? Assuming, very generously, that a piece of clothing, with packaging and all, weights 1 kg, it would be 300M pieces of clothing; that could be an entire production run of something very ubiquitous (say, Levi's 501), but definitely not high-end.
I think that tonnage is for all textiles, not just high-end clothing.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
They have exceptions for manufacturing defects
> aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
I think some brands destroy the items to create an artificial scarcity that keeps their stuff 'exclusive'.
This is also very detrimental to buyer experience. When you search for a specific new product, prices from different sellers can vary widely. Most often there is no way to tell what is the reason for the difference. Is the cheapest offer simply the best deal, or is it a refurbished product, or even a fake?
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere.
Isn't this TKMaxx's entire business model?
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
Isn't this why Ross exists? It's where I first heard the phrase "slightly irregular".
> had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Couldn't this be prevented by, say, sticking it on a drill press and drilling a large hole in it, and then recycling it?
This does happen: for example in Macbook repair, it is common to buy defective motherboards, in order to salvage the chips off them (which are apple-specific, hence not purchasable elsewhere). Those boards often come from China, and often have holes drilled in them, I guess exactly to prevent them from being repaired.
It's a shame, because some of those boards could (and would, they are valuable enough) be fully repaired by a skilled repair person. Instead, the chips are picked off and the rest goes to waste.
I did buy a batch once that didn't have holes drilled, and they all turned out to have all sorts of strange, often random issues, so I suspect those were RMAs that somehow "fell off the back of a truck" and escaped the drilling.
Why do you think the ones with holes didn‘t have the same defect?
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?
Not covered by this regulation in spirit and (probably, haven't read it yet) in text. The spirit of the regulation is targeting fast-fashion on-prem retailers (think H&M, Primark, Zara and the likes) and online retailers like Shein, who have heaps of products that just aren't sold because they're not wanted - and also the occasional luxury brand trying to maintain scarcity [1].
> but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.
[1] https://theweek.com/95179/luxury-brands-including-burberry-b...
What became of the relationship with the recycling company?
It’s shocking to see this legislated.
As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.
They quite clearly are. Burberry was caught a while ago https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983, but it's well known that every major upmarket brand was doing it to avoid the loss of prestige of sending the items to outlets.
Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.
It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies.
One can speculate that this is an easy way to force the companies to pay for their externalities - given that production in third countries are much harder to touch for the EU.
Clothing items are so cheap to make it's hard to believe. I used to work in a distribution warehouse for a national baby and children's clothing chain. Containers would arrive from China and we'd enter items into the warehouse stock system. Cost basis for most items was under 10 cents.
I personally know that L’oreal will buy back and destroy products of theirs from outlets, just to keep the prices up. These items are often bought in bulk on grey markets by discount outlets. Not only does L’oreal destroy the products, they pay for them to do so. None of this is shocking IMO.
They're wontonly destroying and or dumping shitty goods that they got for cheap by externalizing costs.
Of course they're not. They're destroying goods that they can't sell at a profit because, for example, the cost of processing some unworn but returned goods outweighs the potential profit from those goods.
In TFA it's estimated that between 4% and 9% of clothing put on the EU market is destroyed before being worn. An admittedly high uncertainty, but even 4% of all clothing sold in the EU is still a heck of a lot of clothes.
Luxury brands do in fact intentionally destroy old stock to make sure their value doesn't drop due to excess supply. I suppose the next step is making everything extremely limited like hypercars?
Yeah, it is shocking. And that's why it needed to be legislated. Companies prove time and time again that they will take the easiest route to minimise losses and maximise profits, even if that means destroying the environment or wasting perfectly good merchandise to do so.
They're not destroying clothing because it's inherently unsellable, or hazardous, or damaged beyond repair. They destroy it because it's easier to dump excess stuff than it is to set up responsible channels to get rid of it.
Many "high fashion" shithouses intentionally destroy excess stock so that their precious branded status symbols can't get into the hands of the filthy proles, which would dilute their brand recognition.
These "regulatory burdens", as you call them, are the only thing holding back companies from further messing up the planet and I welcome them with open arms.
First, seems like a good thing. I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.
Second, in the short term this is going to lower profits for some companies.
Third, hopefully in the long run it will lead to less waste.
Is it perfect? Of course not, no real legislation ever is. If there's a better way to get started on reducing waste I'd like to hear it, though.
I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?
I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in.
It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.
The interesting parallel here is with digital goods. Software and AI services have near-zero marginal cost of production, so overproduction is literally impossible - you just serve another copy. Physical goods are the opposite, where every unit has real material cost and environmental impact.
What I find compelling about this regulation is that it forces companies to treat demand forecasting as a real engineering problem instead of just overproducing and writing off waste. The technology to do small-batch, responsive manufacturing already exists (Shein basically proved it works at scale, ethical concerns aside). The question was always whether incumbents would adopt it voluntarily.
Now they have to. And the companies that figure out how to forecast accurately and produce lean will have a genuine competitive advantage, not just a compliance cost.
Can they ship it outside the EU and then destroy it? What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? Why not just put a carbon tax per weight?
I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).
The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.
Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.
This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.
How recycling by shredding is not destroying?
If the regulation specifically prohibits burning, it makes sense, as a measure to limit unproductive CO₂ emissions.
i would think chanel quilts would sell very well
But what do you do with unsold Chanel quilts?
Turn them into insulation! This is what happens with old denim jeans: https://www.henry.com/residential/products/insulation/denim-...
Chanel; the ultimate luxury insulation.
Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.
My wife worked for a cloth upcycling association (finding sustainable future for discarded clothes).
Reality is, there is just 10x more thrown out clothes in the west that any third world country on earth could need, same for shelters.
Associations distributing clothes to developing countries / shelters are filtering tightly what they accept.
In short, the vast majority of thrown out clothes in the west are just crapwear that not even the third world want. There are entire pipelines of filtering and sorting to only keep and distribute the good quality clothes.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
You can steer where donations go with regulations. I don't see any downsides of warm coats to homeless shelters for example.
That is a slightly different scenario than taking cheap "fast fashion waste", compressing it into bales, shoving it into shipping containers, transporting/dumping it and flooding local countries/markets.
(And many of these large shipments do not end-up as donations by the time they get to their destination, but are actually sold by weight and then resold again)
But yes - distribution/logistics of donated goods needed to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
I would hope that that will also be a policy area the EU addresses as part of this regulatory push.
Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
I think this was predicted in that "documentary"... hmmm, Zoolander... with the fashion-line "Derelicte"...
Why do you want those brands to die?
Why do you want those brands to exist?
Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".
Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.
(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)
The opposite of “Why do you want those brands to die?” is not “Why do you want those brands to exist?”.
Brand value particularly for commodity products is usually just a form of information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers, and creates economic inefficiency since it diverts expenditure from other products that can materially improve lives. It also allows enshittification to happen since it creates inertia (brand loyalty) to switching, and the positive brand image sticks around for longer than the actual good quality products.
Aren’t there already advantages to donating? I.e. Tax advantages, and a lack of disposal cost?
I think the reason that brands don’t want to donate is because they don’t want their brands to be associated with poor people.
Ive read some years ago that companies do not donate and destroy instead because of whatever wierd tax-regulation
What developing country do you think has a clothing shortage?
What about the poor in their own countries that might not be able to afford clothes?
But then the prices might drop and the shareholders might lose value.
Rather have all people spend all of their money to the cent to buy clothes, to pay rent and to buy water tbh
The shareholders losing value means that either all clothes drop to shein quality or they just stop making clothes.
If the shareholders are rich because the poor are not clothed then fuck the shareholders and the system that made them rich.
It's very very easy to spend much less on clothes. Buying a new handbag every 6 months vs maintaining a bag for 20 years isn't that much different in terms of effort, but one is unbelievably more expensive.
donations are just an excuse to dump them on poor countries
if you read the article...
Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.
Well one link deeper says "Restrict the export of textile waste" but I'm still unclear why they preferred these measure over a carbon tax.
Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive 2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
European politicians will wear the clothes nobody wants so they can be decommissioned lawfully.
This kind of reply is so cliché it's tiresome. "Someone makes small step to avoid waste and environmental damage" -> "if it's not perfect it's no good at all, let the free market sort it out at t=infinity".
Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.
Where even are all the people wandering around naked for lack of clothes? There's so much donated clothing already out there. And the homeless here mainly 'need clothes' because they have no way to wash their clothes. It'd be less wasteful to get them access to laundry facilities. And the developing world always gets the "PATRIOTS - Super Bowl LX Champions" gear and a ton of other cast-offs - I doubt they need more.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
Then fewer clothes will get manufactured, which is exactly the goal.
yep, they do https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...
It seems like countries will do anything but tax carbon.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/carbon-taxes-europe-20...
Carbon is not the only concern here, it is also excessive water use, excessive land use, higher logistics pressure on ports and such which can be reduced if these are made to a higher quality and a reduced quantity.
For the same reason tax codes are complex. If you have a simple law, there's no way for a politician to say to a group of people: "If you vote for me, I will get you a special favour".
> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes?
from TFA
> companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
Which in many cases is less environmentally efficient than the alternative
>What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
That doesn't really make sense, losing your whole investment is already a strong incentive to not produce something you can't sell.
Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem. Why does that problem exist if that incentive is actually really strong in practice?
I assume it's not actually a really strong incentive in context.
> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
A factory might have a minimum order quantity of 10000 units for a product. The products cost $1 landed.
You know you can sell 4000 of those products for a total of $15k.
This might become a bad deal if dealing with the 6000 extra units costs you money.
maybe this will force factories to change their process. with manufacturing getting cheaper, smaller batches become affordable. at the extreme we can now print books on demand, and improved 3D printing allows one-off items in many more areas. that's the trend we need to push. to get away from wasteful mass production.
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 get he economics, but I don’t think it follows that it’s a problem governments need to involve themselves in.
You might not think that, but EU citizens think otherwise.
I would think the incentives to produce things no one wants would already be pretty low.
Supplier MOQs can create significant incentives to overproduce. For example, you get 9000 things someone wants and 1000 that no-one wants.
This can be profitable for the customer, if they can't just easily get rid of those 1000 they can't sell, it's presumably less profitable.
Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.
Not really, the EU is just introducing additional weighing in favor of smaller order quantities.
They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
You can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
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.
Maybe donate it to poor countries?
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
Whether or not is a net loss for the planet as a whole is irrelevant. Africa countries need jobs to sustain a middle class so they no longer accept donations of clothes.
Just send them money, then, rather than breaking windows to provide fake jobs.
You can start if you wish.
this is not destroying things to create jobs. this is about globalization negatively affecting local culture. clothing especially represents culture. if people can not afford to create their own clothes then that has a negative effect on their culture as a whole.
I don't see how localized culture clothing styles would be destroyed by importing different styles from other countries.
Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise:
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
Or people do other things.
Around 1800, 95% of people worked on the farm. Today it is 2%. People do different things now.
I don't think these companies want the poor people to wear their brand.
They'll find another way to destroy them.
2018 article reports that Burberry destroyed £28 millions worth of clothes to keep their brand "exclusive": https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983
The intended effect of the law is that they get better at planning. It requires supply chain innovation similar to what happened in the automotive industry decades ago with JIT manufacturing. They can borrow from fast-fashion but now there’s a penalty for over producing.
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.
https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/the-messy-truth/
Just because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
Maybe they could bury the clothes and call it carbon sequestration. I assume that clothes are made of mostly hydrocarbons.
Won't fungi and bacteria eat (cellulose-based) the clothes, releasing the same amount of CO₂, only a bit slower? Synthetic fabrics can likely be buried as a form of carbon sequestration though.
I wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean)
What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...
I'm not particularly big into fashion (I think my newest clothes are 4-5 years old), but why is the thing you want "common [expletive] sense" and someone choosing to spend their money a different way, by extension, nonsensical?
Ah yes, the classic HN hair splitting meta-argument. No.
What they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently.
Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society.
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
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.
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.
Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug:
"Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."
So they’ll donate it to someone who will then destroy it.
As the recipient of that donation, why would I actually destroy it when I can sell it?
Because that's what you agreed to, that's why they donated it to you.
Then that's not a donation, just some shenanigans to bypass the law, which regulators presumably understands could happen.
Welcome to Planet Earth in 2026 :)
Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
Don't be surprised if products are sent abroad for destr^Wrecycling.
No I am not joking, some german company hid an airtag in a old computer that went to recycling. It ended up somewhere in Thailand, being not very environmentally friendly taken care of.
Remember when UK council recycling bags were found in rubbish dumps in the Myanmar jungle?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7070709/Plastic-pac...
That would be a carbon tax. This is plain overregulation.
Just businesses being intrinsically incentivised to not produce waste by the loss of profit is already a good motivation.
If that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model.
Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying things like "you must stop a machine before putting a person inside it".
Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
We have something like 200 years of labor laws around this point. You should probably read some history and ask yourself why every government on the planet has been compelled to force legislation on business to protect the interests of the people.
Does this apply to Chinese companies too or it is just another measure that disadvantages local producers?
Local producers.
Businesses importing from non-EU countries have to shoulder the responsibility in stead of the manufacturer.
Fashion production is responsible for 8-10% of all carbon emissions
https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-s...
And in pre-industrial societies, peasants (almost entirely women, ranging from children to the elderly) commonly spent around 100 hours of labor to produce a single square yard of fabric to clothe their families (fabric was too expensive for peasants to buy, so most spun it at home).
So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.
Citation for the 100-ish hours: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an...
There has to be a sweet spot between someone hand spinning wool for 100s of hours and an automated factory spitting 80% polymer based clothing directly into a trash can.
Cheap clothing is a civilizational achievement and good for human welfare.
So carbon emissions are bad, but then we should price carbon and not micromanage clothing inventory.
Clothing everyone is an achievement, but fast fashion is overshooting that target.
A bit like feeding everyone vs. having an obesity crisis.
Perfectly summed up
Fashion? No, absolutely not. Textiles in general? Maybe, but almost certainly not.
This is the actual quote on the page you cite:
"Today, the combined textile and apparel sectors contribute as much as 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions."
Notice the unusual way they spell "fashion"...
Right, textiles are much bigger than fashion - bedding, furniture upholstery, curtains, some types of shelter, practical items like footwear, protective equipment, medical equipment and dressings, vehicle interiors... pretty much all aspects of human life depend on textiles. It ain't just cheap t shirts and dresses.
For comparison, crypto and datacenters constituted 2% in 2022 (probably 3%+ now): https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/08/15/carbon-emis...
The "Less Growth for Europe" party strikes again.
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
Nonsense. They can.
> In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.
> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
To clarify, this is a consumer protection law which is set in all EEA countries. Discounts are regulated to prevent stores from tricking their customers into thinking they are getting a product at a lower then usual price. You can only claim a product is on discount if the price has been lowered from a previous price less then x-days ago (I think 2 weeks is not uncommon), after which this discount becomes the new price.
As a European immigrant to the USA, it infuriates me to no end that American stores are allowed to use the words “price” and “discount” interchangeably. When I get things “on a discount” I expect to be paying lower then usual price.
A strange decision considering that high fashion is one of the few lucrative sectors of eu. LV cannot afford to give away their branded items , and i doubt they are willing to remanufacture or reuse. They may be a tiny fraction of the industry, but equally affected.
Yes, because shareholder value comes first. Ffs
Far too much state interference in private matters. The EU is quickly becoming the new Soviet Union.
I anticipate a lot of unintended consequences lurking.
But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.
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.
considering H&M (Sweden), Zara (Spain), C&A (Netherlands) etc.. have lead the way into the clothes-that-self-destructs-in-a-year fashion, it was about time europeans did something about clothing waste, well done.
I have clothes from all three brands. They most definitely don't fall apart after a year (or two, or three).
Great! Can we also ban the export of waste, please?
If you look at the backyards (so called garden) of homes of the advanced countries, from satellite maps, they mostly became junkyards of things. Inside homes are full of things that are rarely used. I have seen Amazon boxes going into bins unopened. Basically, homes are overflowing with goods, and throwing things away is going to become expensive. Advances in manufacturing, supply chains and online shopping have accelerated the saturation of markets.
Destruction of goods can't be stooped due the pace of inflow of inventory. This is like a conveyor belt jamming, where the downstream belts are draining slower than upstream ones.
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.
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?
Seems like policy ripe with unintended side effects. At the very least, it'll likely raise prices for consumers because the companies aren't allowed to manage their inventory as efficiently as they wish.
Now of course this might be a totally acceptable price to pay, I'm not necessarily arguing against it. It will just be conveniently omitted from public communications on the topic by the EU. For regulators, there never are tradeoffs, after all.
Brand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.
Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.
I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
textile waste, largely, is plastic waste.
Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic).
in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee.
fast fashion is by far the worst offender though.
> an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn.
That is a crazy amount.
Is it? 4-9% of unsold portion seems reasonable. Unless they actually mean 4-9% of all manufactured.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...
Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.
>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.
This number seems low, so >90% of unsold clothes are worn? Are they all donated? 4-9% of unsold clothes could be defective/damaged or something.
I would have guessed, with no real basis whatsoever, that 4-9% of all manufactured clothes would be destroyed without ever being used.
I would have guessed a much higher number, and the number possibly being as low as 4% seems like good news to me.
Companies' response: we'll just sew these unsold clothes into a large curtain, which is not apparel so we can then just burn it.
I do hope they come up with something like that.
Fashion is a deeply irrational market that preys on the worst of human nature. There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. You might say ok, if people are dumb enough to buy that then that's not my problem. So now there are companies creating the environmental cost of destroying viable products just to sustain this kind of grifting.
On top of that I think that society, as a general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product.
The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.
What stops them from selling it to an affiliated entity for 1 eurocent and thus evade the ban?
This is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules.
The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.
Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.
---
The linked page has this text:
"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."
Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.
The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.
I don't think that is very believable.
(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
Incredibly, unbelievably stupid law. Waste is made when something unwanted is created, not when it is thrown out. Destruction or landfill is often the best option for all involved and modern landfills are very safe and sustainable. I worked in recycled clothing for a few years and it is not always or even often efficient.
This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
producers and sellers will have to optimize via better consumption prediction or via less previous season throw away.
eu is inefficent to be stable, until it is not, by design
good comment, but of course it's downvoted on hackernews
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.
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.
I think incorporating the cost of recycling and trash into the original purchase price should also become a global norm.
Hopefully, what this should motivate is the emphasis on products which can be _disassembled_, taken apart, other than through destruction.
It may also become less costly to take products with flaws and fix them up: Right now, it's not profitable; but if one can't just chuck them away, then the cost-benefit analysis changes.
Less throw-away fashion hopefully.
A good chunk of unsold clothing destruction happens because the brand considers fire sales to be brand damage. I have to wonder if they'll comply with this regulation willingly, or if they'll do some stupid workaround to make sure they can continue to pointlessly destroy clothing for the sake of a brand image.
They can just pull the labels off or relabel them. That’s the usual approach
Finally, this never made any sense.
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.
This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.
Very tongue in cheek: In the latest fully analyzed year (2024) Sweden was CO2 net negative. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.
(https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldi...)
Looking forward to Hermes moving to NY
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.
What keeps them from selling 1000 pieces for a cent to offshore companies in Africa/Asia that then burn what they bought?
That they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.
Great news!
I live in America and I would like it to continue to be the leading economic zone.
The more Europe (and others) lag behind, the better my life will be :).
As a European, it seems absurd to me one would celebrate the short term benefits of being one of the by far most destructive (per capita) countries on earth regarding global climate (challenged only by a few oil states).
Is a temporary advantage worth destroying the planet forever?
Typical Eurocrat meddling in people's affairs. The owners of those items should be free to do whatever they want. If the government is concerend about environmental damage, they should raise landfill fees or tax carbon, not limit what firms are allowed to do with their own things.
Well put. Of course noone says that this will increase clothes price for everyone.
Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes.
If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this.
I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got.
The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.
The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out.
Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.
HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.
GLP-1's solve this, now you're basically only losing weight and eventually (i.e. the 2030s) most people won't fluctuate much in weight. So, try again on "changing sizes". Yes I'm aware that children grow up rapidly and need new clothes. Don't buy goodyear welted boots for your 7 year old.
The best fashion is timeless, and that's why heritage fashion is far superior to trends. Coincidentally, it's why the brands I listed above are exclusively heritage brands, who have basically no regards for trends.
There's a reason HN is poorly dressed. I'd rather take the "only dresses with startup T-shirt" guy over the "I've gotta have the Sydney Sweeney Jeans" person, and especially over the sneakerhead crowd which now thinks Hoka and NB is superior to Nike.
Wow, you know what never happens? People changing size.
> People changing size.
I was curious why I no longer was able to wear pants I wore in my 20s. I could not get them over my hips. It wasn't because I was getting fatter, my weight is about the same.
I was also intrigued by young men looking slim in the hips, and older men not.
So I looked it up.
Turns out that your hips grow wider with age. I'd never heard of this before! Though I did know one's ears got bigger.
Too bad my shoulders never get wider, and my height shrinks :-/
My feet have gotten considerably wider with age, too.
And that's why companies destroy unsold stock? How?
This is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell.
So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.
Just another case of the EU being focused on unimportant things while looking away from real issues like cost of living crisis or energy costs. Though on the other hand, it may be for the best since they only make things actively worse.
The government can do more than one thing at a time.
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.
Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.
[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/fashion-waste-problem-fabrics-...
The majority of clothing produced is not for exclusive brands.
This is a very niche feature of low volume brands.
It's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
Related note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company.
My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited supply they control - is inherently predatory and should be restricted. Not because I'm the morality police and want to stop people from buying a bag that says "I spent $2000 on a bag", but because there is nothing that stops the company from cost-reducing that to oblivion. If you are going to sell a $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.
Clothing items tend to have quality roof that past that, it doesn't matter and it's not 2000$ for handbag.
Clothing has been used as wealth/class indicator for thousands of years, trying to change that will be extremely difficult lift.
Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.
IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.
Counter point: all of human existence.
We wouldn’t have 99% of the technological advancements we’ve made without a fuckton of failure and waste.
Counter point to the counter point: also all of human existence.
The "fuckton of failure and waste" which has brought technological advancements to humanity didn't come from destroying unsold clothing, and the risks involved in actual technological advancements are orders of magnitude larger than the risk of not being able to destroy unsold consumer products without penalty.
But now that we do, we know how to be smarter about it going forward
No, it's not just Zara and other fast fashion.
Premium brands really don't want to seel it UNLESS it's to the right people for the high price: https://fashionlawjournal.com/deadstock-destruction-why-fash...
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking
I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
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.
Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.
Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
Where? According to Wikipedia, suicide is no longer illegal anywhere in Europe.
You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.
> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?
Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.