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]
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.
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.
Maybe this is the problem. Retailers should cover the statutory warranty on any product they sell.
A major store sold me an expensive item that didn't work, and the store's return policy didn't cover it, so the store said file a warranty claim with the manufacturer. I just did a credit card charge back instead, because the store has to sell me something that works.
If for whatever reason the credit card charge back didn't work, I could use the store in (small claims) court and win.
AI: "The implied warranty of merchantability is a legal guarantee that a product will function as expected for its ordinary purpose, such as a toaster toasting bread. It is automatically applied to most consumer goods sold by merchants and does not need to be in writing."
In the EU (or maybe just my country of origin?) there is certainly statutory warranty. Length and coverage varies per product category.
On the author hand, Amazon has made it difficult to avoid fraudulent sellers, but they also don'e even sort items by price when that option is selected, so I avoid buying through their site.
These days this is often the only recourse you have, because going the legal route you get stonewalled unless you are willing to spend serious money on pursuing a case. And it'll cost you gobs of time. An example is my mother buying new pants for 220 bucks from a reputable seller, the stitching starts to disintegrate after 7 months, and both the retailer and the manufacturer tell my mother to go pound sand.
So please do not portray customers trying to get their due as "ragebaiters".
I mean the "ididnthaveeggs" subreddit exists purely to make light of people who post reviews on recipe sites where they overtly use the wrong ingredients and then downvote the recipe as a result.
Also, all I could think of was the Seinfeld episode where George wanted audio books, because he couldn't stand reading in his own voice, but the narrator ended up sounding exactly like him.
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")
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.
I'm supposing the contract with the recycler would hold the recycler liable, and whatever third party contracts they made with another company would not matter one bit. If ExampleCo contracts with RecycleCo to recycle pants and they do not get recycled then RecycleCo is liable to ExampleCo, yes RecycleCo has contracts with OverseasRecycleCo and it is up to RecycleCo to sue OverseasRecycleCo to recoup the losses they had to pay to ExampleCo; ExampleCo will probably not be suing OverseasRecycleCo, they will take their pound of flesh out of RecycleCo. All of this of course implies that they have some way of verifying that pants they find out in the world are in fact pants that should have been recycled.
What jurisdiction will the suit between RecycleCo and OverseasRecycleCo be taking place in? Depends on the location of the two entities, and possibly also on contractual conditions.
I totally admit that it is not ideal to sue over breaches of contract, it is almost always preferable that breaches not happen because when breaches don't happen it means that things are going the way you specified that they should go and you should be happy.
But let's go to another point here:
what is it about recycling that means that clothes will be taken and resold instead of recycled in greater numbers than clothes that were supposed to be destroyed? Nowadays clothes that are meant to be destroyed are sometimes not, and sold and ExampleCo suffers in the same way as they would with recycled clothes. I suppose ExampleCo must be able to tell if clothes that they find out on third party sites are among clothes that should have been destroyed nowadays otherwise this whole thing is moot and exactly the same as it is now.
Sometimes clothes are stolen from trucks and trains and sold, will this stop happening because of all these clothes that were supposed to have been recycled destroying the market for stolen clothes?
Most non-authorized sales of ExampleCo pants are not actually lower quality ExampleCo pants destined for destruction but fake ExampleCo pants, because ExampleCo as a brand is just so exciting that there are lots of fake ones made, because most pants that are sent for destruction are destroyed and only some are diverted to resellers.
Will the surplus of pants from ExampleCo that were supposed to be recycled but for some reason are not because "oh no, it is impossible to sue people in this new world with recycling going on" going to be so great in amount that instead of completely fake ExampleCo pants there will instead be only ExampleCo pants of lower than normal ExampleCo pants quality?
Why exactly will lower than normal quality ExampleCo pants destroy the brand value of ExampleCo more than counterfeit ExampleCo pants? Are counterfeit ExampleCo pants better than real ExampleCo pants that failed some part of QA process?
Frankly a lot of the argumentation as to how recycling opens up the doors to destroying the value of ExampleCo seems specious, in that it seems like it would not damage ExampleCo any more than it can currently be damaged by breaches of contract where destruction of inventory is concerned or other civil and criminal acts.
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.
Then this will be the pressure that is needed for the company's quality assurance to be improved.
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.
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.
hilarious fantasy
https://www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/us-attorneys-office-secur...
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.
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.
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."
I used to work in IT Recycling and I feel like I was for some time, this process.
We would take stock to be destroyed from refurbishment/replacement pipelines, fix it up "just enough" and if we werent worried about serialisation, it would go out via eBay, otherwise it would be gifted to clients who would say it was for their kids but I had suspicions that sometimes it was going back into retail eventually.
I still have a lot of shit that should have been destroyed.
I think some brands destroy the items to create an artificial scarcity that keeps their stuff 'exclusive'.
Couldn't this be prevented by, say, sticking it on a drill press and drilling a large hole in it, and then recycling it?
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.
Isn't this TKMaxx's entire business model?
Isn't this why Ross exists? It's where I first heard the phrase "slightly irregular".
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...
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...
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.
It's theirs to do with as they please. They paid for it to be made.
If you don't like how they run their business, don't buy the overpriced garbage they sell.
People seem to be so concerned about externalities like CO2 emissions, but it's difficult to believe this problem represents a scale even remotely meaningful in that area. It feels like the plastic straw bullshit that took over the US for a few years. A useless, symbolic gesture that causes far more harm than good.
As a side note, it's a weird feeling to jump to the defense of an industry I generally despise, but the regulation just seems so ludicrous.
This is not how that works. You have to pay for things within a legal framework setup by the government. If the legal frameworks changes then you have to deal with that.
If I pay for something to be made, that something belongs to me. It becomes private property and (at least in the US) I'm free to destroy a thing I own.
If you want to talk about options for protecting the environment, that seems great. There are ways to destroy textiles without fouling rivers or the air.
The OP article raises the spectre of "CO2 emissions" and "pollution" but doesn't provide any meaningful data (units or scale) related to these concerns.
My claim is that there is no way this activity represents any reasonable scale of impact relative to those separate concerns and that we already have lots of regulation related to keeping our water and air clear.
We can discuss ideas about how to do even better on those fronts, but this does not seem like a great way to have a large impact, if the environment is the actual concern.
How about all the laborers who were able to feed their families making these products that were destroyed? What happens to them when the company decides next year to be more conservative and make less stuff?
I'm not advocating for waste, I'm just pointing out that legislation like this often (almost always) comes along with unintended consequences that wind up causing more harm than good.
But the current incentives in the fashion market also has unintended consequences: companies producing a lot of garments only to destroy them to protect perceived intellectual property value.
And here's the thing: this brand image value is relative. So by forcing all companies to comply no one has to take the negative brand image hit that would be required to unilaterally decide to do this.
Only within the confines of the law. If I buy a skyscraper I can’t blow it up without permits. I can’t burn trash in my yard in the middle of the city. I can’t tear down a landmark in a historical district, even if I own it.
That's utterly incorrect. They don't just want profits - that would be easy to obtain by sending the merchandise to an outlet - they want high profits in a way that maintains high profits in the future too. Any discount "cheapens" the brand by giving customers the expectation of low(er) prices in the future.
> It's theirs to do with as they please.
Only within the bounds of the law.
“The regulatory burden on European companies is high and continues to grow, but the EU lacks a common methodology to assess it. The Commission has been working for years to reduce the "stock" and "flow" of regulation under the Better Regulation agenda. However, this effort has had limited impact so far. The stock of regulation remains large and new regulation in the EU is growing faster than in other comparable economies. While direct comparisons are obscured by different political and legal systems, around 3,500 pieces of legislation were enacted and around 2,000 resolutions were passed in the US at the federal level over the past three Congress mandate: (2019-2024). During the same period, around 13,000 acts were passed by the EU. Despite this increasing flow of regulation, the EU lacks a quantitative framework to analyse the costs and benefits of new laws.”
Let's try to stay focused on the subject matter and leave personal jabs aside.
How about extending others some good faith?
These are political disagreements with decades (sometimes centuries) of history, and unless you're fifteen years old, there's a better explanation for the fact that others disagree with you than "I am the single smartest person in the universe, and all my political opinions are so irrefutably correct that anyone who disagrees must be doing so in bad faith and out of ignorance".
The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.
The better explanation is that they have acquired their political tastes mindlessly and are now defending them in an equal manner. The presumption of good faith is wasted on them.
> The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.
That's incorrect. Just take a look at the housing situation in the US: what's best for society is to build, but a majority of the people (the current owners) are blocking that because it suits them.
I'd personally disagree with that assessment. I think the vast majority of people want what's best for them and the cohorts they're in. Which is quite different from wanting what's best for society as a whole.
They are...
Many brands prefer to burn their clothes than to send it to thrift shops or outlets for brand damage.
The EU is now putting your brand image a notch down compared to 'not wasting shit'.
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.
No they shouldn't. Sometimes it's not a matter of paying for the externalities. If you're doing harm at scale the only sane option is to stop doing that, period.
When we figured out that leaded gas was bad we didn't make companies pay for their negative externalities. We banned that shit and that was it.
I remember watching a documentary in which they tracked a package of coffee returned to amazon (unopened). It traveled through half of Europe to end up in an incinerator in Slovakia, which is funny because amazon doesn't even operate there.
Big companies are doing a lot of weird shit because at their scale if it's even 1ct cheaper to burn 10 coffee pods vs reprocessing them back in their store it's going to make a huge difference in the long run.
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.
Are you serious? Pricing theory includes both supply and demand, and limiting supply makes the remaining items more valuable by dint of rarity. Companies absolutely limit supply on items to maximize profits. How is this even a question?
if a manufacturer finds it too complex to not overproduce and not add all kinds of negative externalities then their business model is flawed or they’re not up to the task.
either way, it isn’t “the bureaucrats” fault they’re overproducing, and they absolutely are overproducing.
It's been known for ages that they operate like this. Some more ethical ones cut off the labels from the garment before they sell it in bulk. Most will destroy the items altogether.
This legislation targets this vanity and I applaud it.
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 don't see anything shocking here. Corporations doing corporatey things, which is maximizing profits and that can easily literally mean destroying unconsumed stuff since it would cost them 2 cents more per tonne to ship it and sell someplace cheaper. Ever heard the term economies of scale for example? Those distort many things in money flows.
Those corporations don't give a fuck about mankind, environment, future, long term stuff etc. Any approach to similar topics which gives them benefit of the doubt is dangerously naive and misguided from the start. It's up to society to enforce rules if its healthy and strong enough. Some are better off, some worse.
But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no."
And what if there's genuinely no demand? For example, suspenders went permanently out of style at some point in the 20th century. If this law had been in effect at the time, there might be an "orphaned" truckload of suspenders somewhere, getting wastefully shipped from warehouse to warehouse for decades because they're impossible to sell and illegal to destroy.
Fashion is fickle, prone to fads and flights of taste. Suspenders are by no means an isolated case.
An efficient economy needs a means to delete an item when its current owner doesn't want it, nobody else wants it either, and it imposes ongoing storage costs on whoever holds it.
Are you, personally, a large textile company? If not, then you have no need to worry; see the article. If you are, then argh a textile company has become sentient.
if you want to be doing all the things you could do otherwise, you should have full liability for it.
if youve got a boatload of suspenders, you should give them away, pay people to take them, or invent a new use for them. you could turn them into belts or waistbands or something.
even without the major market, there's still going to be niche market for suspenders
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.
Why apparel specifically? Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles.
Why was USB-C mandated specifically on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: it wasn't. It was mandated on smartphones in general, and Apple was the only company that specifically tried to fight the regulation because apparently they're special.
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-common-c...
If that's so bad, why is doing so the cheapest option? What makes you think you know better than the market what's wasteful?
The obvious counter-example is that polluting is very cost-effective in an unregulated environment there are others - such as this.
The words "cost" and "effective "perhaps?
> Polluting
Pollution is an economic externality. If I buy a shift and throw it out unworn, I've wasted only my own resources. (I'm paying for the landfill of course.)
You could argue that my wasting that shirt hurt you because I could have instead spent those resources on productive activity that benefits you, and therefore I had a duty to keep it -- but that's just communism with extra steps.
Overproduction is a failure mode in capitalist systems. The market can’t correct for this because negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
> negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
What is the unaccounted externality? Clothing makers pay for material inputs and labor inputs. They pay for transportation. If they discard goods, they pay for more transportation and for the landfill. What specific externality is unaccounted?
Because it is very visible to low information voters who are also red/green voters.
Is there such a thing as fast-cutlery? Or fast-furniture? Maybe fast-book or fast-vehicle? Fast-whitegood perhaps? I'm at a loss here, I've only heard of fast-fashion.
There is no law that states specifically Apple must specifically use USB-C. IIUC, the law is that all brands/manufacturers should use the same type of charger, an industry standard. That was apparently USB-C. Apple was the odd one out and had to change. If something better comes along, the industry as a whole can upgrade.
"Don't attempt to in any way address the problem unless you're willing to go for an absolute maximalist solution" is a pretty weird stance.
One of the largest contributors to microplastics in our world is clothing. If companies need to start taking responsibility and reducing their supply, that's good for everyone. If companies feel pressured by regulations because they can no longer produce endless shit and artificially inflate prices by destroying half the shit they produce, then I'm in favor of it. I'd even be in favor of governments shutting down corporations that massively overproduce. It's the 21st century and these companies measure every single little aspect of their business. If they need to trash a bunch of their clothes, it's because they're being actively wasteful. Cost reduction is one of the most fundamental aspects of capitalism, and if companies aren't even concerned about that aspect, then they deserve to be crushed.
https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-s...
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...
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"...
So carbon emissions are bad, but then we should price carbon and not micromanage clothing inventory.
A bit like feeding everyone vs. having an obesity crisis.
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.
If the regulation specifically prohibits burning, it makes sense, as a measure to limit unproductive CO₂ emissions.
It means they’re still using the fibers, which is an upside. It does waste some CO2 for the original cut and dye.
I’m sort of dubious of the value of trying to limit CO2 like this, but that might be the goal. Whether they burn them now or sell them, they end up as atmospheric CO2 either way. It’s the same as lumber; it ends up back in the atmosphere (although not burning them does reduce PM2.5 particulate).
Basic microeconomics is just that: basic and thus an oversimplification.
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.
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
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...)
(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 think the reason that brands don’t want to donate is because they don’t want their brands to be associated with poor people.
Rather have all people spend all of their money to the cent to buy clothes, to pay rent and to buy water tbh
People don't voluntarily lose money. Understand that and the world will way more understandable.
People don't voluntarily lose money. Understand that and the world will way more understandable.
But nobody is arguing that they do. Rather, I'm saying that if some companies lose money on selling clothes and exit the market, there's nothing wrong with that.
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.
Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive 2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
I assume it's not actually a really strong incentive in context.
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
You mean something like, to signal to voters they're trying to solve a problem voters want changed? Or a problem voters say they have?
I didn't mean to imply it would fix the problem, or that the problem would be fixed. Just that there's desire for [thing targeted], is something enough people would want to change.
I also said "assume that" for the sake of the argument/discussion given you started by saying you didn't understand. I say it's trivial to understand if assume there are other incentives where destroying the product is desirable. Thus making the incentive you mentioned, not very strong, (in context).
Call me when they stop buying Russian gas.
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.
overproduction needs to be made more uneconomical than smaller batches. if that is really the issue. i really doubt that large batches of production are actually the problem here.
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.
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
At least for polyester, etc. As the rule is worded today maybe you'd get away with it for cotton? But the rule can always be changed.
Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
Also if really no one wanted it, why are companies destroying the items instead of giving them away?
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.
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.
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
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.
(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...)
Around 1800, 95% of people worked on the farm. Today it is 2%. People do different things now.
Maybe it's better to let them decide what they want to buy.
local development simply does not happen if outside products are allowed to dominate.
if we were talking about a part, say less than half of the market, that would be fine, but the import of cheap clothing is so massive that there is no more room for a local market.
Protectionism has value when applied to strategic industries, like chip making, that you cannot afford to have cut off.
Making local garments is not a strategic industry.
P.S. Every businessman believes in the free market for everyone except his own business, which the government should protect from competition. The same for unions.
providing an income for everyone is important. keeping everyone satisfied is too. not to mention not loosing your cultural identity. and if the clothing industry is able to provide jobs by keeping cheap low quality products out of the country, why would that be bad? clothing is not the biggest expense people have, so making clothing a bit more expensive is not going to hurt that much.
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 most desperate povert I've ever seen was in India. You know what people were using to make tents to live in? Clothes.
Poor people have been making clothes for thousands of years without any help from heavy industry, and it's incredibly cheap to produce long-lasting cotton clothing.
Clothing isn't really a perpetual need the way you frame it. A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
However, countries don’t wear clothes. People do. People sometimes have shortages of clothing in many places.
For example, here in the United States people sometimes experience poverty and may sometimes experience a lack of suitable clothing. This happens at the same time that there are also people in the US throwing away clothing that they do not use. This is because those people are different people in different immediate locations.
The reasons that people lack clothing is not because there is not enough clothing in existence. It is because the clothing is not distributed universally to every person who needs it.
If I have seen this with my own two eyes in the US, then I am sure it happens in other places.
> A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
So? A person with the ass ripped out of their jeans or a hole in their shoe doesn’t give a fuck whether other clothes last 10 years.
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...
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.
All fast fashion does is waste money for consumers who buy into the craze, compared to buying quality that lasts. I have used the same two pair of jeans for over a decade at this point for example, and they are in close to mint condition (apart from the colour on the knees). Some T-shirts that I own have survived as long, many have not (it is very hard to tell the quality of the fibers up front unfortunately). In all cases, I use clothes until they are so worn through that they are past my repair skills.
So yes, some people are "invested" in fashion, but I'm saying that is akin to being "invested" in gambling or shopping for the sake of shopping. Addictions come in many forms.
Fashion is fundamentally an art form that has deep social, cultural, and anthropological meaning. This is high school level social studies.
> Just as unsubstantiated as "You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing".
Are you saying you might not be entitled to an opinion? Okay...?
Sure? It seems to me that the companies dictate what I consume. Many many times I wanted to buy exactly the same clothes item or shoes to replace an old one (because I know exactly how it'd fit and wear) only to discover it has been discontinued with no obvious "heir". Sometimes only 6 months later...
Whats the percentage of people chasing "fashion", especially after mid 30s?
"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."
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.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7070709/Plastic-pac...
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.
This is an odd thing to say. Governments will happily shovel the taxes of people's entire working lives into pointless spending. They'll also happily shovel young men to their actual deaths in wars. Now you know this, will you be hyper-cynical about governments, or are you just blaring your bias?
That just means the business will raise prices.
Have you actually read the science on microplastics? [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...
Perhaps it might encourage producers to do smaller runs to confirm interest before massively increasing volumes. The real issue is to get the lowest price you need to hit minimum volumes. It's cheaper currently to burn unused stock than store it for next year. This may change that model. If it doesn't work it can always be changed.
This helps to maintain the value of the product and for consumers to not defer purchase until sale event.
Clothing companies are similar. The actual product is worth pennies, but they'll refuse to sell for 10% of RSP because who would be buying them at the full price? They'll do 50%, maybe 70 discount and that's it. They destroy whatever they don't sell. Rinse, repeat, four times a year in this crazy, fast fashion reality
It's a known practice and they've been going on like this for ages.
Fashion is vain by definition and this whole industry is very wasteful of our resources. This legislation is meant to help mitigate this.
What's gonna change long term is manufacturers will be keeping more items on sale for longer and the fast fashion cycles will slow down. Hopefully they'll start competing with quality and workmanship thus, in turn, giving EU textile industry a new chance to survive Asian competition.
THIS IS GOOD FOR EU ECONOMY!
5 months is a pretty short timeline for a large company to change literally its entire business to handle one class of products differently. This affects returns, sales, shipping, contracts with disposal companies, etc.
The weirder part is that they're granting medium and small size companies 4 more years to figure it out. It will take any company a long time to deal with this. So why shaft the large companies? Spite? The difficulty this imposes on them, and any fines from their inability to comply, will be passed down to the consumer.
When I think of unsold, I see that some sizes run out, leaving odd sizes as surplus.
They are more than welcome to have an over supply ready, they just need to use it productively is they can't sell it.
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.
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.
If that can be avoided somehow (I haven't looked in detail at the legal text) I think the outcome you mention would be good. Slower fashion cycles, higher quality and higher cost per item would all potentially synergise. Another thing that could happen is less overproduction, which would also be good.
Thinking about what else could be done: I would like to see some mandatory marking indicating fiber / weaving quality. I have had T-shirts that lasted a decade, and those that lasted a couple of years. And it is very hard to tell up front which is which. As a consumer I would like to be able to tell.
The underlying dynamic is simple: the value of the product in every market exceeds the logistics cost of moving the product to that market. In other words, the market clearing price is globally negative. Because most of the cost of production is in the logistics, and destruction can be done close to the point of production, the resource and environmental footprint of destruction is smaller than every alternative.
People don’t produce excess inventory for fun, that is a pure loss. The production is highly optimized to eke out a thin average margin in an unpredictable business. If the product is not destroyed, it necessarily increases the average cost of those products because either logistics costs go up or supply goes down.
You seem to provide a great example of why Eurocrats regulating a highly efficient market will not cause the desired outcome…due to reality.
> Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint.
Yes, keeping 8 billion humans alive does have non-negligible energy costs. Again I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or if you’re an anti-human environmental terrorist.
If you actually care about agriculture emissions though, population decline will cause this to go down faster than any Eurocrat will with silly laws based on some clickbait news article they read about an industry they understand nothing about.
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.
They didn't. You can look at the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) yourself. It's fairly long but it should be easy to scroll until you find some of the lists.
Businesses importing from non-EU countries have to shoulder the responsibility in stead of the manufacturer.
The reason these companies get so greedy is because they can control the demand. Companies have been found destroying their goods to keep the price high.
The whole Europe is pretty broken right now government wise, but they sure know how to have some decent laws in place when the politics aren't being an arse.
And if supply decreases while demand stays the same wouldn't that push prices up for everyone?
But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.
In the first dot-com era, I knew some startup people who were trying to create an online secondary market in used apparel, called Tradeweave. It flopped. You can see their web site on the Internet Archive up to 2004.[1] Then, suddenly, it's gone. There's a Stanford Business School case for this company.[2] Amusingly, the Stanford case study is dated 2000, before the collapse, and makes it sound like a success.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040323045929/http://tradeweave...
[2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/t...
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.
That is a crazy amount.
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.
- TOMS Shoes
- PlayPumps
- Textile Aid
https://www.darveys.com/blog/luxury-brands-burn-their-own-go...
I'm only interested in comments here from people who have an understanding of the complex world of outsourcing responsibility.
TL;DR: International cooperation isn't at a level where ANY country/bloc can have an impact on how their own waste is disposed of. The idea that magically that will happen with clothing is an admission of ignorance of this fact in decades old industries.
We need more and stronger international laws. The opposite of the current US administration's influence.
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.)
Overall, seems reasonably sensible.
It's still ok to destroy products if (among many other reasons) "the product can reasonably be considered unacceptable for consumer use due to damage, including physical damage, deterioration or contamination, including hygiene issues, whether it is caused by consumers or occurs during the handling of the product [...] and repair and refurbishment are not technically feasible or cost-effective;" but cost-effective means "the cost of repairing or refurbishing a product not outweighing the total cost of destruction of that product and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product."
So essentially, they have to offer all the clothing for donation first, if nobody wants it, it can still be destroyed (that's one of the other exceptions).
Unfortunately another exception is if "it is technically unfeasible ... to remove ... labels, logos or recognisable product design or other characteristics that are ... protected by intellectual property rights". So a luxury brand can probably still go "well our design is protected and we don't want the poors wearing our fancy clothes".
Totally disagree. NotebookLM isn't always right, but it can go deep on complex scientific and other academic content. It is absolutely not "surface-level" unless you're feeding it shallow content.
I have never heard this Greene fellow, but I can say that all of the summaries generated by NotebookLM for me have been more nuanced and higher quality than the content created by NPR in recent years.
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.
I used to be very tolerant of people's idiosyncrasies but with the internet, social media etc. that brings out the worst in people I'm now much less so.
Agreed, fashion is deeply irrational but it's always been with us. The real problem now is the degree to which the fashion industry exploits the excessively 'vulnerable'—you know, the oddballs who were once ignored. It's why a $5 can now cost $500.
Moreover, something in fashion one day is out of fashion the next, and it's a damn nuisance. It's gotten completely out of hand. Recently, I bought a pair of cargo-style work pants and they were fine. About a month later I bought another pair of the same brand, size and type (going on the label they were same model and style, and there was only one type--supposedly). Got them home and the cut was not only different and they were less comfortable but the legs were cut narrow (they were now too tight).
Took them back and the sales assistant said "oh that's normal, styles usually change with every new shipment, you're supposed to check them first".
For fuck's sake they are ordinary utilitarian work pants—not something you'd expect to see on the catwalks of Paris. I ought to be able to buy exactly the same product time after time like I used to be able to do with Levi jeans by just by looking at the tag/label (nowadays you can't even rely on Levis being the same fit).
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...)
One reason would be because it meddles with free market and ownership rights.
Thank you China for forcing the world into the solar battery future.
From the material the straw I drink from is made, to what port companies can use for charging, to what companies can do with their own products.
I don't get why European nations always have to turn into totalitarian fascist dictatorships.
“I hope everyone in the system will play nice and not try to abuse or circumvent it”
We really really really need to replace our poloticians with younger ppl with functioning brains.
Being 60+ should automatically disclasify you from running into office.
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.
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 :).
Is a temporary advantage worth destroying the planet forever?
This particular law is probably going to cause more resource waste not less. Holding inventory or distributing it costs money.
Btw have you taken up this topic with china, India, or Africa?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The link is not about the 2024 framework regulation (from just before the elections) but about some new supplementary regulation that the 2024 regulation allowed for and required -- in order to provide clarifications and fix some of the mistakes of the initial regulation.
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.
Where is the dividing line between cellulose, lignin and "plastics"?
polyester is a thermoplastic polymer synthesised from petrochemicals: it doesn’t.
that’s the dividing line. one breaks down in the environment, the other persists for centuries and sheds microplastics into waterways every time you wash it.
rayon has its own environmental problems (deforestation, chemical processing), but “is it plastic?” is not one of them. the chemistry here isn’t ambiguous.
They are working on that, too.
This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
Cost of dealing with it will be directly passed on to them.
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-...
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.
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 has been used as wealth/class indicator for thousands of years, trying to change that will be extremely difficult lift.
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.
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.
We wouldn’t have 99% of the technological advancements we’ve made without a fuckton of failure and waste.
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.
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 understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
Edit to clarify: things can't be put on sale, except for a few times during the year? I guess this is not every country, although I'm not sure which and when.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The general thrust of the underlying messagr is not dishonest just because you say so. The general pattern is that there are degrees of governmental control over people's lives at the core. I don’t think it’s dishonest because my point is that bureaucracy has no limit on what it tries to control given enough time, even though my framing is vulgar.
and should we do stuff to reduce waist and help the environmen? Absolutely!! should we do this? if this worked, it would be a good thing. But if you just want to virtue signal without caring about reality, I think we disagree on more than just definitions.
My reference to "Freakonomics" is a collection of real contradictions to your theory. Since you didn't consider it, here are the expanded findings:
Most of the "recycled" material collected under these new laws is being "downcycled" into insulation, mattress stuffing, or industrial rags—markets that are already saturated and low-value. Reports show these organizations were overwhelmed with low-quality fast fashion that they could not sell. Instead of companies paying to burn it, the charities now had to pay to store or manage it.
The fines are real. France has set fines of up to €15,000 per infraction for companies caught destroying unsold goods. This is why companies are dumping the stock on charities rather than risking the fine. I’m giving how you speak about corporation. I’m guessing you have absolutely no empathy for people who run small single person or small team business and our overwhelmed by all the regulatory traps they can fall into at any point in time.
Then The Freakonomics data (Sanford, Maine case study) showed that when you charge people for trash, they generate less trash, but illegal dumping often spikes, forcing the city to spend more on cleanup patrols.
To pay for this new collection and sorting system, brands pay an "Extended Producer Responsibility" (EPR) fee. In 2025, this fee for textiles in systems like France/Netherlands ranged roughly from €0.12 to €0.50 per kilogram of clothing put on the market. In other words, the cost ultimately falls back on consumers.
So in general, no, I don’t agree at all. I think you are discounting the massive cost to not just corporations but also individuals when it comes to micromanagement. On a second layer, I’m not even against micromanagement, just bad micromanagement, especially micromanagement that is at best naïve regarding effectiveness, and at worst purely virtue signaling.
In short, we should focus on what works, not what you feel is righteously good.
Cypress was the last placed in Europe to remove laws against suicide in 2021 it seems.
Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea? My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2.
The disclosure paperwork and the s/contracts/bribes/ needed to do this will also serve as a nice deterrent for anybody trying to compete with H&M.
The world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.
That EU regulators actually saw need for such regulations makes me both sad and annoyed because they ought not be necessary. What's wrong with clothing manufacture, commerce and trade, and fashion that brand-new clothing can be just trashed and destroyed? Right, we know it's a rhetorical question but we must continue to ask it.
What's happening is sheer madness! If aliens were to witness this from a holistic perspective they'd arrive at conclusion the inhabitants of this planet are de-arranged. Why would any species take effort to gather resources/grow raw materials such as resource-hungry cotton then take time and more effort to manufacture it into useful products then move it holus-bolus to another part of the planet only to discard and destroy it unused—and harm the planet’s ecological systems in the process? That is unless they’re mad.
In a nutshell, why not do something more useful and productive and less wasteful?
What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste is that when I was a kid clothes were expensive, my parents struggled to send us to school neat, tidy and well-dressed. When I ripped holes in the knees of my grey school pants through rough play rather than buy new ones necessity meant my mother would spend hours at the sewing machine mending them.
What’s happening with these clothes is unnecessary waste and vandalism on a grand scale, and the fashion industry along with unethical marketing practices are largely responsible. People not only have too much disposable income but ‘fashion’ has convinced them their clothes are out of fashion almost from the moment they’ve bought them, these days, the notion of actually wearing one’s clothes until they’re worn out is almost inconceivable.
Little wonder megatons of discarded barely-used and new clothes are polluting the planet.
To the degree ethics (which I am using here to mean, accounting for negative externalities) are not incorporated into economics, with very few exceptions, every company will optimize their profits with no thought to externalities.
Shareholders might care about waste as individuals, but are not coordinated in anyway that moves corporations. And any corporations that would like to be more ethical still have to compete with those that are not. Some with large margins can do that, but most cannot.
Asking/convincing companies or individuals to be voluntarily ethical, one at a time, is not a solution. It is asking the wiser people to de-power themselves, in a way that just increases the opportunity, profits and incentives for less-altruistic actors.
What the EU is doing is good. But I would like to see a consistent economic governance effort to avoid all significant negative externalities. Both the environment and the economy's value creation and net wealth, are better off without colossal destruction of value happening off the books.
Dealing with each externality as if it were an isolated problem fritters away resources and time, and throws away the clarity and commonality that would allow consistent reforms to happen. We don't have that time to waste.
Exactly, it's why we need to reintroduce regulations many of which were removed or weakened from the late 1970s onward. Moreover, we need intelligent regulation not just gut reaction to an immediate problem. That's proving much more difficult (reigning in the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism that were let out of the bag ~50 years ago with deregulation won't be easy).
Absolutely. Poorly thought out, too strict, performative, or obsolete regulations create opposition for any regulation.
I also think we need to co-opt the “enemy” to be regulated, in their terms. E.g. get all the major fossil fuel CFO’s in a room, and figure out the financials encouraging green energy, and away from polluting and geopolitically complicated energy, that would make cold business sense for them.
Include and involve the military, insurance giants, large food security/supply chain companies like Cargill, reactor companies, big enterprise customers that want rapid energy growth, and all the other major sectors that take climate change and energy expansion seriously and will get value out of a more stable world, with better energy technology in practical terms. The people that CEOs respect.
Once the biggest resisters can profit off not resisting, you will see a genuine change of heart. That can sound very cynical, but it’s just how people are. “First, I shall do no damage to my own turf.” But once they take a new position, their power doesn’t just cease it’s friction, but becomes another rocket for progress.
Whatever tax breaks and other incentives it took, to make green their best move, would be worth it. Bribe? Maybe. Better understood as the cost of faster consensus and coordination. Where the price of waiting for everyone to change due to the hardship that is being locked in, is so much higher.
On the other hand, after consensus, change itself needs to happen smoothly, not suddenly. Incentives and disincentive need to operate slower than we might want to make change practical. The most important thing is that those reinforcers are credible. Companies are forward looking. They will naturally move their investments today where the profits will credibly be tomorrow. They don’t need to feel pain, just know what to do to avoid it, and most importantly, prosper.
Oh yeah let the corpos and MIC rule the world even more than they already do, great idea :)
We should really reform the "free market" IMO. It is way too free now. They get all the benefits and none of the responsibilities.
Maybe you didn’t read what I wrote? Thats not more market “freedom”.
To make big changes, good changes, you do need both widespread grassroots support, and the cooperation and competencies of big players.
The military has labeled climate change a global destabilizer for years. Insurance companies and farmers are dealing with the fallout already.
Despite growing corruption, there are still competent people in these organizations to work with.
Neither surrender by blanket cynicism, or the incompetence of apathy, are going to solve anything.
This is the part I strongly doubt. Well, not the competence exactly. But the motives. These people don't make their own decisions, they do what the board and shareholders want. And all they want is money. It's the only thing that counts for them. So the only solution is making these externalities have a cost. Business won't collaborate on that because it's only a negative for them.
I don't believe in public/private collaboration anymore. In Holland that was tried way too long.
> The military has labeled climate change a global destabilizer for years. Insurance companies and farmers are dealing with the fallout already.
Yet they continue to run full steam to meddle in oil-producing countries. I doubt they will keep this climate change classification up anyway as it is directly in contradiction to the dogmas of the current administration.
> The world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.
I don't see any cynicism here, only pure realism. The real question is why EU law tries to create a utopia on paper while ignoring real-world situations. That's what has always frustrated people in the EU about the institution: its lack of decisions that are close to the people and grounded in reality. Yes of course, everyone gets the idea and the good intentions behind it, but good intentions alone are not worth the paper that they are written on.
Did we forget how to discover and punish bad actors? Do you think we should just do nothing and let casual bad behavior go because some people are gonna be abusive? No. I refuse to accept that. It is not your false dichotomy.
If people abuse the system, fine and punish them. More than they profit off of the bad actions.
The industrial process (and, to add, global economy relying on slave-cheap labour in a far enough country) has become effective enough that it literally costs less to make surplus items than to scrap them. Not exactly the level of cost in duplicating copyrighted bits but low enough that the sales effort to find buyers for the clothes after the season is more expensive than the profits from it. Often the price of items doesn't even warrant paying for returns: many online shops just tell you to keep the product if you claim a defective product and want your money back.
But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets alone: when it comes to cheap items any reasonable business would source a bit extra in the hopes of selling more. If you source fewer items than what will sell you'll be losing money. Given the profit margins it makes sense to just source X percent extra and calculate that it's cheaper to pay for them but not sell, rather than pay for too few and limit your profits by running out of stock. It's like insuring yourself by taking a slice of your profits today to prevent a rainy day from happening.
Us consumers of the modern commercial wonders are not without guilt either. We support this by buying new, crap quality garments that last only so long we'll soon be buying more. The price is low but the value is even lower, and that's the profit of the clothing industry. Buying new again and again is what enables the industry to operate. You can still have your clothes handmade by a tailor with lasting quality and for prices astronomical enough that you'll surely won't be (nor afford to) throwing them out too soon. Few people choose to do that, of course.
The exact same thing is happening on varying scales in: consumer electronics, appliances, cars, houses...
Right, my rhetorical point somewhat expanded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031527
"But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets..."
Nor stupid consumers, but watering down blame will weaken resolve to fix the problem. Perhaps it should become fashionable to criticize those who buy too many clothes by asking "do you really need that item?". Criticizing and ostracizing works, it greatly reduced cigarette smoking.
The message would soon get across if being seen browsing in a clothing store wasn't the best look (like being seen in a porn shop is embarrassing). Or imagine the impact it were embarrassing to be seen at a fashion show or buying fashion magazines. Throughout history there have been bigger changes in social attitudes than that.
A rowdy mob picketing a few fashion shows would attract world attention to the problem.
You haven’t actually written the argument yet.
It’s what already happens with recycling in Europe, it’s resold several times to companies claiming to recycle it and ends up shipped to the poor parts of South East Asia and burned or dumped.
Because Market Forces said so :(
Clothes used to be more expensive and that makes you upset now?
But go back before the mechanized loom to see ACTUAL expensive clothing. When people were robbed, they literally took their clothes. People were murdered for the clothes they wore.
Now let's rethink this. Should you be angry that you didn't get beaten for destroying your clothing when you were a kid, because actually clothing was insanely cheap compared to pre-industrial ages? No, we should know our history and be glad that things are cheaper now.
No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.
So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.
There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.
They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.
The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.
The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.
The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.
This is what these countries get for having weak laws that allow people to do illegal dumping and then hide behind a corporate veil to avoid accountability.
They will be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar so that some fraction of them can be resold for cheap in Africa or somewhere else poor. Those companies can then dispose of them however they wish.
The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever.
And, as usual, EU regulations achieve absolutely nothing -- if anything, this is worse than nothing.
2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.
3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.
Of course, if I get it from Temu for 6 cents it'll probably fall apart in a week, but modern clothing isn't really covered by "the cheapest thing I can find".
Same for ultralight fabrics, that, while lovely in summer, usually get trashed in a season or two simply because the thing weighs fuck all.
I'd even say we're in a golden age for clothing. I can get a motorcycle jacket that can slide at 80kmh for 40 bucks with shoulder and elbow protectors and a thermo layer insert.
I mean if you mean "hold" like, you can't still wear it albeit it looks nothing like it did two washings before, of course it does.
But then you look exactly like what you buy, someone with worn low quality clothing which looked nice in the shop and first wear.
If you want good looking (symmetrically cut, better stitched, etc) tshirts long term I then raise you Uniqlo with 7 bucks per DRY synthtic tshirt and 12 for a supima cotton one. I pretty much daily them and in over at least 3 years they haven't shown significant aging. Only the supima ones have mostly lost the "supima" text on the inside at the back of the neck area.
Comically enough I also have 3 shirts from Primark for 1$ each that are now at least 5 years old, probably more like 7 that still look fine. I still wear them to work without worry. The shaping of them was all over the place though. No two in the pile were identical.
Dying could be an issue, I wear gray and black ones so your mileage may vary with colored washing. I also don't blast them at 90 degrees C but rather 60 for black/gray, 40 for everything else.
Or your standards are just ultra high compared to mine, for better or worse. From my perspective tshirt quality ends at Uniqlo and I then go to Olympus business/casual shirts. From there the only option I have to look more businessman-y is the wool suit.
The market for regular second-hand clothes is on the verge of collapsing in Germany though. Charities are flooded with low quality and unsalable stuff ever since it was made illegal to throw away clothes in the regular trash. You must bring them to recycling facilities instead now. It not profitable for charities to sort through them because of the volume. There is a market for quality vintage clothes but that's a totally different thing.
> 3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.
That's probably the only thing that motivates brands not to overproduce. But lets be real, they will rather find loopholes for destroying them instead of selling them for cheap.
Hard disagree. Live in Central Asia, buy locally produced relatively cheap clothes and they have been lasting years so far.
and the ones usually making it outside of the EU are tied to large European corps.
"I eat apples grown down the street, so EU apple law is bad"
Much more likely is as the op said: selling to a company that will dispose of the stock.
There is already a healthy trade for second-hand clothing to 3rd world countries (see pics of kids with "<Final's losing team> World Champions 2022"). The prices will be better for brand new clothes. The gray distribution channels already exist and will readily pay for new clothes - at steep discounts, but pay for them nonetheless.
Forecasting demand is hard. If you will produce less than needed you will sell less than could have sold (lost revenue) while overproducing is relatively cheap.
> b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.
The main reason unsold items are destroyed is to avoid price depression - giving unsold items for next to nothing will reduce future demand for full priced items. It's wasteful and harmful for environment but as others noted it's hard to fight with this given that destruction could be outsourced to other countries.
So do you expect this law will increase the amount of dumping? Sounds like it might.
Some places sell their cardboard scrap. I'm guessing that places with the right sorts of metal scrap get paid for their waste.
And folks have to pay for much of the rest. Some of the issue with dumping waste in a business's trash is that the business pays directly for waste removal in many places, unlike a lot of private folks, which pay through taxes.
This is the current state of things. What has changed is the sort of service that they need to pay for. Instead of destruction, they'd be paying for recycling or resale. Like now, they have the option of donation or reduced prices.
That's not how it works in practice, with the economies of scale/production it makes more economic sense to produce goods surplus to requirements then destroy remaining stock so it will not detract from/devalue sales of next/forthcoming product.
It's an old trick and applies not only to clothes but many goods. There are variations such as destroying trade-ins, used equipment etc. rather than sell it to remove it from the market (thus only new equipment is available).
Some companies took this to extremes in that they'd only rent equipment which would be withdrawn from the market and deliberately destroyed at the end of its service life so it couldn't be sold or ratted for spare parts (photocopier manufacturers were notorious for this). IBM used a cleaver approach with its computers, they'd sell off old computers as 'valuable' scrap (some parts could be still useful to others) but anything deemed as spares for their existing machines would be partially disabled (still useful but couldn't be used as a spare part). For example, they'd break the edge connectors off circuit boards but leave the electronic components intact.
They just write it off, Jerry.
All these big companies, they write off everything.
So same shit as before. Slightly more expensive. No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap.
This is just inherently incorrect. In Europe we have a load of outlet villages which is where big brands do exactly that. It’s where I do most of my shopping. Last year I bought two pairs of Nike Dunks for £25 a pop. I bought Salomon hiking shoes for £60 instead of £140. A pair of Levis 501s for £20. Just an example or my most recent purchases.
Ewww, those are last years 501s
I think now the incentive is to produce less.
Tl;dr the EU will say "Mission Accomplished" because no clothing has been burned in the EU since 2026(tm), while all of the emissions are produced abroad.
The same show has been going on with industry, where the dirtiest parts are done in India or China, so that we can say that we are "clean".
The receiver on the other end should defect and renege on their contract and sell the goods in the open market for pennies on the dollar. While they won't be able to bring it back to western countries, they should absolutely be able to sell them locally. It should be legal for them to renege on any illegal contracts.
At least that's how I see it.
Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes?
Surely these companies aren’t paying H&M for the privilege of destroying their surplus clothes, so by reselling them they’ll be getting paid to take the clothes and paid again when they resell them. Why would they ever destroy them?
Which is why this scenario won’t ever happen.
You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?
The point is increasing the cost of over-production. Its not about the EU knowing better, but imposing a higher price for waste. Not sure how you are confused about that.
As basic napkin math, if there's 1000 cargo ships moving in and out of the EU in a year, and this law adds 10 more. That's 1% increase. It's a bigger 1%, but I wouldn't be surprised if the emissions are less than the 9% of discarded clothes talked about in the article.
As you say, ships are moving in and out of the EU each year - the question is, how many have "back loads" - if some percentage of the ships leave Europe empty to return to Asia for more manufactured goods, then it seems very likely that they can have the containers of unwanted clothes as part of the trip.
Some of these arguments are so silly that I'm starting to understand why the EU thinks regulations are a free lunch to improve the environment with no costs whatsoever.
If they would have flown the plane there anyway with an empty seat, your added CO2 is negligible yes.
Airlines adjust capacity to demand — empty seats represent foregone revenue and future flights get cancelled or downsized.
Cargo ships don't work that way. A container ship returns to Asia whether it's carrying 1000 containers or 5000. The marginal emissions of an additional backload container are genuinely close to zero, not as a rhetorical trick but as a structural feature of how bulk shipping economics work.
But the 3rd world country they are about to be shipped to definitely does have burn pits that will incinerate both 1) any remaining unsold inventory, and 2) the older clothes that are replaced with the fancy european stuff.
Or better yet, they'll just be thrown into the river like most other things in Africa and SE Asia...
All you're doing is outsourcing your own pollution to make yourself feel better. It's idiotic.
I'm sure some plastic gets recycled / reused. But as long as it's cheaper to just produce new plastics, the problem will remain. Recycling plastic is only viable for goodwill points and marketing (e.g. if people actively seek it out) and with government subsidies or rules.
In a recent episode of Clive Myrie's African Adventure where he goes to Ghana, he "heads to one of the world’s biggest second-hand markets to meet the designers giving discarded clothes a second chance".
They show a lady that bought a "crate" of random unsold clothes for around 500 USD, and she prays before opening it hoping it will contain clothes in good condition she can resell. The show claims that on a "good day" she can make something like 50 USD on such a crate.
They also (very) briefly show a huge landfill of what appear to be discarded clothes.
Keep in mind that this is only an entertainment show, so this is most likely only the tip of the iceberg.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002q72g
Most of this stuff AFAIK is destroyed to keep brand value or as the cheapest solution to oversupply.
Oversupply is less likely because it costs more, and the cost of removal now at minimum is the cost of a shipment.
For actual good clothes, the company can now decide if they want to pay more to destroy it elsewhere in an attempt to hold brand value, or simply not put in a destruction clause in the sales contract before it is shipped off and maybe make a bit of profit.
If anything this would be displacing lower quality used clothing (often graphic t-shirts) that currently makes up a large part of the textile markets in developing nations.
Inventory is "dead money" in accounting books!
Money has been converted to Obtainium and Obtainium just sits there until it is converted back to (hopefully more) money, taking valuable space that could be filled with more Obtainium as soon as it goes away.
At some point that Obtainium sitting there unsold just becomes un-space and destroying it becomes the cheapest move.
Secondly, disposal is one of two things:
1. Donation to a company that collects clothes, who in reality sell these clothes by the tonnage. Most of the clothing recyclers are companies of this nature.
2. Sale at a low value to the company above.
I think those companies might just actually sell them, and report to the company is being destroyed.
My assumption is these clothes are dumped to someone to get rid of them, and then that person bundles them and ships them to poor countries. Once here, someone buys the bundles, sort the content according to their expected retail price and sells them to resellers.
There is junk that can't be sold and is destroyed. Except in some cases, like in Chile, where they are just dumping the used junk "intact" in the desert.
Prohibiting destroying new clothes is a net positive. There is market for clothes in poor countries, but it is already being exploited. Some clothes will always be dumped in poor countries, but not all of it can be resold. The manufacturers will make less clothes, there is no way around it.
It’s not like there isn’t already a massive industry selling counterfeit goods. So in your hypothetical scenario, if those companies are already shady then I could easily see them selling those surplus stock in the same shady markets.
This isn’t going to happen. But if it did, they would 100% sell them in local markets, not destroy them.
Warehouses aren't really necessary for clothes outside of rich countries where people can afford to just throw away literal tons of it.
I disagree. Suppose that this is even allowed, What's the incentive for these off-shore resale shops to destroy the items? Do they get paid per ton of ash produced? There is a stronger incentive to re-sell it, it'll create more economic value. I could care less if it's sold off-shore or within EU; as long as it's not being destroyed.
It's a farse.
And if they're NOT destroying the goods but are instead using them, then the law is doing exactly what it is intended to.
It's degenerate bullshit so I'm all for the EU banning it, but there is a business rationale.
Look, I fully agree with what is going to happen in reality. But isn't it a bit misleading and ironic to accuse the recipient countries as disrespecting the "rule of law", when the companies selling them there are fully/partially aware and doing business with them to bypass the exact (proposed) law being discussed? As with historic examples of waste management, recycling, etc as well, where everybody in the chain knew and wanted what was /actually/ happening.
Well, they’re guaranteed to be evil without regulations.
Any flaws with the regulation can be worked out and adjusted in the future. These things are not set in stone forever.
The waste is still making its way to those countries, and the way that we know is that NGOs are tracking it[0]
I suspect that clothing will get similar treatment - initial illegal dumping as you predict, followed by determined NGOs holding the supply chain to account.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-30/gps-in-e-waste-from-a...
Until one of them gets the bright idea to resell the clothes, which should take all of 30 seconds.
Your theory presumes the existence of a sketchy african company which will nonetheless remain scrupulously honest.
It's fine to come up with creative solutions using an LLM, but you have to apply some critical thing before throwing your weight behind the conclusions!
Also if someone is buying new goods for pennies on the dollar, I'd expect them to find some value in more than 2% of the stock.
But also, this regulation applies to the company _selling them to customers_, so it's completely irrelevant.
In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring.
Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at.
Serious change is afoot, that much is undeniable.
By the time I hit highschool, seeing a 3ft snow in the winter was pretty rare.
Over the last 4 years, there's never any snow on the ground. They are lucky if 1 inch sticks around.
Sorry about the pipes.
Are they still doing it?
I had a few "proper winters" in the UK during my early 20s. The roads are gritted (and ploughed if necessary) by local councils in lorries, but the footpaths are supposed to be done by residents. The first proper winter, after the snow had refrozen a few times overnight, the paths were lethal. We have these yellow grit bins scattered everywhere that residents are supposed to use to get grit to do the paths. But nobody was doing it. Anywhere. As a pedestrian you just had to walk in the road. This was a real "society has failed" moment for me.
Not that it matters any more, though. Such winters seem a distant memory. The last I can remember was 2018's "beast from the east", but that was more of a freak event than a normal winter.
For public footpaths, unlike in places like Germany [0], there are no such enforceable rules in the UK.
[0] https://www.ergo.com/en/newsroom/advisory/2025/20251222-verb...
In Nuuk they have had 11 degrees celsius. January has been, on average, 8 degrees above the norm. They are having the highest temperatures since 1784.
It is warmer in Greenland than in Denmark.
They now have to close down ski-slopes in Greenland.
I’ve been observing the change for the past 10 years or so here and this is the first year that’s it’s been so “in your face” obvious instead of just subtle changes and effects.
If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.
Climate change needs to be the number one focus and policy for every nation on earth right now. Not AI, not economic growth, not wars.
This is a certainty.
Scientists have been ringing the bell since at least the late 60's and our only reaction was to laugh at them and floor the accelerator pedal and continuously increase our emissions over 5 decades. It is unlikely to change with the AI boom.
This is something that's scared me ever since I learnt about air conditioning and how it works in the 90s when I was like 10.
Air con heats up the outside, so air cons are fighting with each other to cool down their respective buildings. So, more air con, using even more power, all heating up the outside a little bit more. The snowball effect is going to be enormous.
I guess I thought as a 10 year old that some adults would have this under control. Or maybe I realised, even back then, that the only thing really separating adults from children is big bodies and that you don't get told off for being greedy any more.
Compare the volume of your house to the volume of area around your house (including several hundred feet vertically, since that is easily part of the circulation). If you're cooling your house 20 degrees then that would correspond to heating an area 20x the size by 1 degree. How many times bigger is the circulating area around your house (100x? 1000x?)?
Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt cheap to produce, that they have less of an incentive to let it go to waste. When I buy socks they get holes after wearing them 7 times, and then they go in the bin too.
Stated another way: you can total up the manufacturing cost of the shirts you destroyed ($50) and distributed evenly among the ones you sold (50/50=$1 each) and just add that to the cost of each shirt you sell when calculating profit. Same result.
Some people argue that the whole system is going against the objectives of recycling stuff but at least it's better than just burning it to get rid of it.
What's happening in this case is that they are overproducing because profit margins are high enough that they can overproduce and still be happy with the profit after discarding the extra, in the hope of capturing the stochastic upside of extra sales from never being out of stock.
This might cause various random fast fashion junk items to occasionally go out of stock when they wouldn't have in the past, but it's not like you're going to see long waiting lists or high aftermarket prices. People just won't buy that stuff because there will be lots of alternatives, are they just won't buy anything at all and realize they don't need it.
So yes, in an abstract textbook sense, the price might go up in the sense that you might experience some probability of your desired items selling out when that probability was lowered before. But I don't think anybody in their right mind would argue that's a serious economic detriment.
Maybe there's a case to be made that this is a crude way to address what is essentially an allocation failure. But that alone doesn't mean that we shouldn't try it or that it's bad policy.
Storing stock is very expensive too.
This incentivizes what’s happening if you’re making cheap clothes.
Displaces it. And adds other externalities like C02 to do so.
This is not only clothing and apparel, also sporting goods and many other items.
This should be forbidden across all industries. Unsold stock should be delivered to non-profits at no cost for further distribution.
If you can't prove that you either sold or transfer to non-profit an item you manufactured then you should be fined for each unaccounted item proportionally to their market price.
Also the first non-profit to build gigalandfills in Africa.
but brand dilution
I don't care. If you over produce then you made a bad economic decision, tough luck. Destroying goods for accounting reasons is an abhorrent policy driven by greed.
After all, the company could have arguably instead produced fewer product, sold what they have already sold for the same price, paid their workers the same amount of money to do less work, they wouldn't have to pay for the destroyed goods, and wouldn't have had to pay for the wasted input materials...
All in the name of profit FOMO.
the western ordered cheap quality overproduction solution of swamping developing countries with it, where much also ends in a trash heap, means they can continue the exploitive and environmentally destructive mass production.
Smaller local industries would be economically better for the countries, supply more aligned so less waste, and there’d be less of the bad factories in Bangladesh.
The US and I assume Europe have laws against "dumping" - selling a product for below cost - because it drives local competitors out of business. That is exactly what shipping containers full of clothes to Africa does.
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'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.
I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.
Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)
Plus, I may be deluded but I’m of the opinion that polo shirts and jeans/neutral trousers are a multi-decade winning combination.
I actually think the last point has been profound, because I rarely _feel_ like buying clothes, because I look good in whatever Is in my closet.
For reference, I cycle through about 7 t-shirts. I wear the same one in the gym. I have a pair of rotten clothes for when I'm farming or hunting, but my daily clothes endure more daily wear and tear than urban living for sure.
Wall Street here is a boogie man.
Using resources to make life better is actually good. And we keep getting better at it, and doing so in more sustainable and efficient ways.
And if it’s not - you fundamentally believe technology is not beneficial. Then all of industrial society needs to be reversed.
This regulation is not about consumption but about production. Yes, this would not solve the potential over-consumption (I agree generally with what you say) - people actually buying shit they use once - but imagine how bad it is if for each shit used once the company produce 3x that shit...
It shouldn't be cheap. The world got used to the luxury of cheap meat by being unethical and harmful to the environment (humans' environment) and animals.
Cows are insanely resource-intensive to farm, bad for the air, bad for the water, bad for the land. Factory-farmed chicken meat is infamously inhumane, using genetic mutants to produce more meat faster, as well as being bad for the environment. They require more land and water use just to produce the feed for the animals. Both produce toxic runoff that goes into our water and land. Drugs pumped into animals land in us or our water, causing cancer or breeding superbugs. And we accept all these negatives so we can buy a cheap burger we don't need (we have plenty of other food).
Pigs are actually pretty sustainable, as are rabbits, goats, and venison. We used to eat a lot more of them, before the factory animal farms changed our diets to prefer cow and chicken.
In a way, the movement to disparage food pyramid because it institutes too much grain really seems like a first world problem. Especially any that encourages more meat.
I live in a farmer family; our cattle needs around one hectare each, because we don't feed them processed food, only grass; because concentrated food is even less sustainable, and more importantly, more expensive than letting them roam (fenced areas)
Rabbit is not sustainable. There were some people trying to commercially rise and sell them and it didn't work. They would need concentrated food, which is expensive.
Goat meat is much more expensive than cows because they are less efficient than cows and pigs and chicken. I know two people who rise goats to sell them, and it doesn't make them money; really, they do it because they kind of like the critters as a pet project.
Only pigs and chickens are more sustainable, precisely because of theirinhumane(?) short life and their genetics. They are very efficient meat producers.
I know poor people who rise chickens and pigs; those animals take longer to reach "maturity", and the meat is not tender; but since the animals are eating whatever they scavenge, it can't be done at scale; again, we would eat meat like twice a year (This might be an exageration, but chicken pig and cow farms really produce all the meat we eat; of those only cows eat grass under the sun)
Rabbit is one of the most sustainable livestock. It requires less food to produce more rabbits and they don't need much land. A single female produces ~50 kits per season, taking 8-12 weeks to come to market. Ironically, they aren't considered livestock by USDA, so you can skip most of the red tape. As far as feed goes, there are many options that will depend on the farmer; pelleted feed is the best but most costly, so you can mix in either foraging or supplement with various other feeds like different hays, oats, etc. Whether it's economical depends on a number of factors, but there's over 3,000 rabbit farms in USA right now.
Same with goats, very sustainable. In many places like islands, goat is the preferred livestock as it requires less land and feed. And obviously you can forage goats in places most animals won't since they'll eat nearly any plants.
Pigs (and other livestock) historically were raised through the year and only slaughtered in winter. It's the last 100 years that has completely changed how and when people in the West eat meat, people's assumptions about how we must farm, how we must eat, etc. Our diets don't have to remain the way we are. For example, since Chinese people prefer to eat pork, they actually have half the world's pig livestock. We like beef so we have a lot of cows. It could've been reversed if our cultural tastes were different. Similarly, we could just eat less meat, and our tastes would develop towards the whole universe of non-meat foods.
Families would raise one pig they would slaughter once a year and it would be a regular source of preserved meat and fat over the following year.
All of this was pre "green" revolution so it has to be carbon neutral at that level of consumption(which is admittedly lower than that of most people these days).
Eating meat once a year is an exaggeration when it comes to pork.
Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. People like me don't want that big X on our stuff, if we learn Y is the same thing we are going to buy Y. And next year their sales of X drop because people like me waiting for the secondary stuff. Thus even if you do not consider brand dilution it's still in their interest to not sell the technical stuff in the secondary channels. When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
>Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary.
Uhm, if money is deflationary, your house will be worth less than X denominated in the deflationary currency. This means if the money grows in value faster you'd sell all your assets as quickly as possible and replace it with a useless scrap of paper.
>Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.
Again, if money is deflationary, you'd hold onto money and wait for house prices to drop with the aforementioned mechanic.
You might say this is appealing, but the problem is that your income depends on other people's spending and they have the same incentive as you do, which is to earn more than you spend. That's something that is not possible in aggregate, where total aggregate spending and total aggregate income must always be equal. This is a zero sum game purely mathematically and this is not a moral judgement but an explanation how the rules work.
When people follow the rules of the game, something weird happens. The promised outcome of a wealthy society from everyone being prudent savers doesn't emerge. The reason is as follows: If you have 1 million paper notes that represent the wealth of the entire nation and the value of the paper notes goes up, the represented wealth of the entire nation goes up, but the nation still has the same 1 million paper notes. No matter how much value people try to save in the form of money, they will still only have paper notes.
Those paper notes do not have intrinsic value and that is for a good reason. Giving the paper notes intrinsic value doesn't change the fundamentals, it just makes the tokens more expensive to produce. It's like having a golden toilet.
If money is worthless, then trying to give it non-transient value is a fools errand. Trying to say that a house is equally as valuable as a small bundle of cotton fabric is only acceptable for the purposes of accounting, but saying that the same bundle of cotton fabric (whose value is decreed) ought to buy more house next year is batshit insane. You couldn't come up with a better system to reward laziness and idleness.
Does that actually happen? What I see happening instead in the bike clothing market is that either after the season, or if a new design is to be unveiled after several seasons, the items gets heavily discounted (often more than 50%). It's just your decision if you need the most expensive newest items right now or you buy possibly older or out of season designs much cheaper. But the branding is also very much integrated, so it would be hard to change the branding on an existing item.
There are a few brands that try to limit this and keep the discounts in check like Assos, but that only means it's harder to find a heavily discounted item, still possible.
> When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
Sure, if you can find customers that accept that, why not. In that case just manufacture fewer items.
Note that I'm talking technical stuff, not designer stuff.
Most probably, the returned items just sit in the warehouse of the companies than selling to ordinary customers. Golden times for warehouse companies.
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
How is it you dont have winter anymore but when it gets cold it gets stupidly cold?
So by saving the 10% of the cost of the clothing, you end up wasting way more in labor and transport and inventory costs. All of which ends up way worse for the environment than had you just shredded it and treated it as compost.
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?
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.
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/
I can't believe I'm debating climate change on HackerNews. What happened here?
"A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
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.
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.
Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.
mftrhu is probably correct in attributing the origin of the analogy but I don't specifically remember where I got it from and I think some of the examples EY gives in that essay would be uncalled for to apply as a direct analogy to HN. HN was never a doomsday cult and I'm not even trying to say that all of the smart and reasonable people left HN, but rather that there was a specific attitude and mentality that's not well represented here anymore.
[1] This is oversimplified. Classic HN still had lots of people complaining about big tech companies, it's just that the criticism was usually voiced from the perspective of another founder rather than from the perspective of a progressive critic. For instance, I remember lots of complaints about Apple's arbitrary and capricious App Store policies, but then that directly affects the startup founder who wants to build an iPhone app.
The site may feel less changeable than many, but I would be very surprised if it is not "in-development".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550123
The only thing that is more annoying to me than market fundamentalist, neo-liberal bullshit is emotional appeals that sound right on paper but have a total disregard for higher order effects and unintended consequences.
I guess with inflation we can update the quote to “temporarily embarrassed billionaires”
Some of us like the intent of the law but are wondering what the consequences of the law are.
We have already seen all the schemes that corporations use for greenwashing. We have already seen all the recycling that isn't. Most of us assume that these corporations will simply do the absolute minimum they have to do to comply with the letter of the law. That likely means "selling" crates of these clothes back to some country willing to discard or destroy them.
In addition, we already have a ton of problems from Always Late Inventory(tm), and this seems like it's going to add to that. Are you even slightly outside of the normal body shape? Sorry, no stock for you evermore.
I think the law is a good idea, but, sadly, laws mean nothing without implementation. The devil is in the details.
I was in the bar in Revelstoke (where I lived, at the time) chatting with an old-timer the other year, and I asked him "is it just me, or did it used to snow more?"
He laughed, and told me that when he was a kid growing up, they weren't allowed to play on the tops of snowbanks because you'd get electrocuted by the high tension power lines. At the time, mid-winter, it was raining outside with a sad pile of slush maybe 1 foot deep.
Even when I was a kid in Revy, snowbanks were 10' deep mid-winter, every winter. It's been raining in town for the last 5 years, all winter. Winter's over. Time to start surfing, I guess.
What an over exaggeration.
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.
Every business decision is a tradeoff. Smart government interventions in the economy add weight to that tradeoff to reflect externalities not otherwise accounted for; this is how cap-and-trade on SO2 emissions works. Hamfisted government interventions set hard and fast rules that ignore tradeoffs and lead to unintended consequences.
Climate change is coming, fast and brutal. I'm okay with these multi-billion-dollar revenue companies making a few points less in profits, if it means slowing climate change by even a fraction of a fraction of a point.
They don't need those profits. But our children need a viable planet.
supply and demand is that an oversupply makes prices fall, rather than driving artificial scarcity
(Although the original commenter would say, I suspect, that it's perfectly OK if there are minor consumer shortages in luxury goods for the sake of the climate.)
Clothes are something extremely overabundant in the EU. And even if they weren't, the unexpected overdemand will result in just using your old coat another year or buying one you like less. Workers are being unnecessarily exploited and resources are being unnecessarily wasted... so I think nudging companies in the right direction is way overdue. Will it work the way EU thinks? Probably not. Just like GDPR was well-intended, but the result is higher entry barrier to new companies and a bunch of annoying popups. But I'd argue that's a result of "not enough" regulation rather than "too much". Companies caught abusing our data should have been outright banned IMHO.
Due to the high shipping costs, they err on the side of filling up the containers to cover the fixed cost. After selling the clothes, there might be enough clothes left over to fill shipping containers to return the clothes, but they will be clothes from different brands and manufacturers.
It would require extraordinary coordination on both the origin and destination country to return the clothes to the manufacturer where they could add the left over clothes to the next batch that is being shipped out to a different country.
> A company can't prevent a consumer from ruining the wasted clothes.
When a consumer ruins clothing during try on he needs to buy it. I have always expected that rule to be the same everywhere.
The "headache" is just : produce what you sell, sell what you produce, don't fill the world with your shit.
tell that to the people putting the waste into it.
Also, you probably meant to say "developed" countries and not "first world".