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EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
- fleroviumna 8mo ago[dead]
- throwaway198846 8mo agoCan they ship it outside the EU and then destroy it? What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? Why not just put a carbon tax per weight?
- JasonADrury 8mo ago>What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
- ch4s3 8mo agoThat doesn't really make sense, losing your whole investment is already a strong incentive to not produce something you can't sell.
- randomNumber7 8mo agoYou can produce so little people take anything you give them - like it was in the Soviet union.
- grayhatter 8mo agoAssume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem. Why does that problem exist if that incentive is actually really strong in practice? I assume it's not actually a really strong incentive in context.
- ch4s3 8mo ago> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
- grayhatter 8mo ago> 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).
- ch4s3 8mo agoEU regulations aren’t set by people who are directly elected though, so the incentives are really weird. It seems like largely a non-problem, the likes of which gets obsessed over by the types of also ran politicians who end up as members of the European Parliament or filtering into the Brussels bureaucracy. Call me when they stop buying Russian gas.
- wahnfrieden 8mo agoClothing has a huge profit margin (when manufactured overseas) especially at the higher end (for brands which do not invest in local production, which is most, because it is also hard to beat Chinese quality). It's better for these brands to over-produce on some items and lose the low-cost inventory, than to under-produce and not meet market demand, to not offer a range of sizes and varieties to meet individual taste, and not achieve wide distribution that's necessary to grow market demand. That's why regulation is needed here.
- ch4s3 8mo agoI get he economics, but I don’t think it follows that it’s a problem governments need to involve themselves in.
- ragall 8mo agoYou might not think that, but EU citizens think otherwise.
- wahnfrieden 8mo agoWhat’s your big idea
- JasonADrury 8mo agoA factory might have a minimum order quantity of 10000 units for a product. The products cost $1 landed. You know you can sell 4000 of those products for a total of $15k. This might become a bad deal if dealing with the 6000 extra units costs you money.
- em-bee 8mo agomaybe this will force factories to change their process. with manufacturing getting cheaper, smaller batches become affordable. at the extreme we can now print books on demand, and improved 3D printing allows one-off items in many more areas. that's the trend we need to push. to get away from wasteful mass production.
- wahnfrieden 8mo agoPush how? Through regulation? Unclear how else you’d achieve this if it is still worse economically. Buyers don’t want to pay more either.
- em-bee 8mo agothrough demand at first. clothes designers are hopefully going to demand smaller batches to avoid getting punished for overproducing. but if that doesn't work, then yes, maybe regulation is necessary. tricky though because manufacturing is often outside of the EU. overproduction needs to be made more uneconomical than smaller batches. if that is really the issue. i really doubt that large batches of production are actually the problem here.
- wahnfrieden 8mo agoHow much longer do you wait to see if demand solves it? It hasn't. The problem has gotten worse
- em-bee 8mo agowell the laws have just been changed. so i'd say we should observe what effect they will have.
- osigurdson 8mo agoI would think the incentives to produce things no one wants would already be pretty low.
- JasonADrury 8mo agoSupplier MOQs can create significant incentives to overproduce. For example, you get 9000 things someone wants and 1000 that no-one wants. This can be profitable for the customer, if they can't just easily get rid of those 1000 they can't sell, it's presumably less profitable.
- osigurdson 8mo agoPresumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.
- JasonADrury 8mo agoNot really, the EU is just introducing additional weighing in favor of smaller order quantities.
- xp84 8mo agoThey are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?) So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
- JasonADrury 8mo agoYou can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
- StopDisinfo910 8mo agoOverproducing is often cheaper than losing sales because of the fixed costs of producing a batch and the externalities of destroying your inventory not being priced in. Some brands also find it more interesting to destroy stocks than reduce prices because it protects their brand values. Well, now, that's illegal.
- vscode-rest 8mo ago[dead]
- kwanbix 8mo agoMaybe donate it to poor countries? When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
- smt88 8mo agoPoor countries don't need clothes. They have clothes. It's just more (mostly plastic pollution) that fills their landfills and rivers. https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/the-messy-truth/ https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/the-messy-truth/
- kube-system 8mo agoJust because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
- philipallstar 8mo agoThe world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
- kube-system 8mo agoAbsolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
- philipallstar 8mo agoThe answer is simple: despite so much money given and forgiven, and people going over all the time to build toilets and basic human-scale improvements, most countries with real deprivation have a massive corruption problem, mainly culturally induced, that stops real improvement. Saying "it's not people stepping up" elides the cultural issue.
- mbeavitt 8mo agoif you read the article... Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse. I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.
- throwaway198846 8mo agoWell one link deeper says "Restrict the export of textile waste" but I'm still unclear why they preferred these measure over a carbon tax. Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive 2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
- ncruces 8mo agoI bet there's some price at which someone will happily take that Luis Vuitton bag or Burberry coat.
- throwuxiytayq 8mo agoThey should pay people to wear them.
- randomNumber7 8mo agoEuropean politicians will wear the clothes nobody wants so they can be decommissioned lawfully.
- lores 8mo agoThis kind of reply is so cliché it's tiresome. "Someone makes small step to avoid waste and environmental damage" -> "if it's not perfect it's no good at all, let the free market sort it out at t=infinity". Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.
- xp84 8mo agoWhere even are all the people wandering around naked for lack of clothes? There's so much donated clothing already out there. And the homeless here mainly 'need clothes' because they have no way to wash their clothes. It'd be less wasteful to get them access to laundry facilities. And the developing world always gets the "PATRIOTS - Super Bowl LX Champions" gear and a ton of other cast-offs - I doubt they need more. To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
- lores 8mo agoThen fewer clothes will get manufactured, which is exactly the goal.
- oblio 8mo agoYou sound American, so why do you even care? Have fun in the land of the free.
- xp84 8mo agoSame reason you read and comment about America, I guess
- Zigurd 8mo agoIf I had that kind of hustle, I'd be finding out who exports the losing teams T-shirts and reimport them. I'm sure some Pats fans would pay $50 a shirt to live in an alternative reality.
- riffraff 8mo ago> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? from TFA > companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse. Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
- cm2012 8mo agoWhich in many cases is less environmentally efficient than the alternative
- whateverboat 8mo agoDonations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.
- smt88 8mo agoWhat developing country do you think has a clothing shortage?
- saubeidl 8mo agoWhat about the poor in their own countries that might not be able to afford clothes?
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- ozgrakkurt 8mo agoBut then the prices might drop and the shareholders might lose value. Rather have all people spend all of their money to the cent to buy clothes, to pay rent and to buy water tbh
- saubeidl 8mo agoIf the shareholders are rich because the poor are not clothed then fuck the shareholders and the system that made them rich.
- WarmWash 8mo agoThe shareholders losing value means that either all clothes drop to shein quality or they just stop making clothes.
- anigbrowl 8mo agoOK. We were told creative destruction is good, if some companies exit the market and are replaced by others that offer better value then resources are being allocated more efficiently, no?
- smt88 8mo agoI suspect this end up like US "recycling" of plastic: pay another country to "reuse/recycle" the waste, and that country then dumps it in a landfill, dumps it in the ocean, or burns it.
- pfp 8mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean) What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...
- pc86 8mo agoI'm not particularly big into fashion (I think my newest clothes are 4-5 years old), but why is the thing you want "common [expletive] sense" and someone choosing to spend their money a different way, by extension, nonsensical?
- pfp 8mo agoAh yes, the classic HN hair splitting meta-argument. No.
- kube-system 8mo agoWhat they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently. Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society. You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
- VorpalWay 8mo agoFashion changing all the time (on the order of seasons rather than years) contributes to a lot of waste. Your claim that it "factually something that provides value to society“ is unsubstantiated. Just as unsubstantiated as "You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing". All fast fashion does is waste money for consumers who buy into the craze, compared to buying quality that lasts. I have used the same two pair of jeans for over a decade at this point for example, and they are in close to mint condition (apart from the colour on the knees). Some T-shirts that I own have survived as long, many have not (it is very hard to tell the quality of the fibers up front unfortunately). In all cases, I use clothes until they are so worn through that they are past my repair skills. So yes, some people are "invested" in fashion, but I'm saying that is akin to being "invested" in gambling or shopping for the sake of shopping. Addictions come in many forms.
- everforward 8mo agoI don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value). The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on. Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive. This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.
- steanne 8mo agoi would think chanel quilts would sell very well
- nine_k 8mo agoBut what do you do with unsold Chanel quilts?
- otterley 8mo agoTurn them into insulation! This is what happens with old denim jeans: https://www.henry.com/residential/products/insulation/denim-insulation/ultratouch-r13/#product-details-section https://www.henry.com/residential/products/insulation/denim-...
- onionisafruit 8mo agoChanel; the ultimate luxury insulation.
- anigbrowl 8mo agoCut the price, this is basic microeconomics.
- 8mo ago
- Seattle3503 8mo agoIt seems like countries will do anything but tax carbon.
- olalonde 8mo agoFor the same reason tax codes are complex. If you have a simple law, there's no way for a politician to say to a group of people: "If you vote for me, I will get you a special favour".
- Y-bar 8mo agoCarbon is not the only concern here, it is also excessive water use, excessive land use, higher logistics pressure on ports and such which can be reduced if these are made to a higher quality and a reduced quantity.
- kleiba 8mo agohttps://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/carbon-taxes-europe-2024/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/carbon-taxes-europe-20...
- RamblingCTO 8mo agoOutlets could be a key here.
- abecode 8mo agoMaybe they could bury the clothes and call it carbon sequestration. I assume that clothes are made of mostly hydrocarbons.
- nine_k 8mo agoWon't fungi and bacteria eat (cellulose-based) the clothes, releasing the same amount of CO₂, only a bit slower? Synthetic fabrics can likely be buried as a form of carbon sequestration though.
- is_true 8mo agoyep, they do https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-dumping-ground-for-fast-fashion-leftovers https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...
- slaymaker1907 8mo agoThis already happens a lot for used clothes with the thrift store->poor country->landfill pipeline. That third step will likely be a lot less rare with new clothes.
- kylehotchkiss 8mo agoah yes the Container Ship strategy
- rsynnott 8mo agoThis is also a restricted activity: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/waste-shipments/plastic-waste-shipments_en https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/... At least for polyester, etc. As the rule is worded today maybe you'd get away with it for cotton? But the rule can always be changed.
- riffraff 8mo agoconsidering H&M (Sweden), Zara (Spain), C&A (Netherlands) etc.. have lead the way into the clothes-that-self-destructs-in-a-year fashion, it was about time europeans did something about clothing waste, well done.
- senko 8mo agoI have clothes from all three brands. They most definitely don't fall apart after a year (or two, or three).
- blueblimp 8mo agoSeems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
- thedougd 8mo agoIt's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
- bryant 8mo ago> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300. This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
- kmeisthax 8mo agoRelated note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company. My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited supply they control - is inherently predatory and should be restricted. Not because I'm the morality police and want to stop people from buying a bag that says "I spent $2000 on a bag", but because there is nothing that stops the company from cost-reducing that to oblivion. If you are going to sell a $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.
- stackskipton 8mo agoClothing items tend to have quality roof that past that, it doesn't matter and it's not 2000$ for handbag. Clothing has been used as wealth/class indicator for thousands of years, trying to change that will be extremely difficult lift.
- V__ 8mo ago> an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. That is a crazy amount.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- s0rce 8mo agoThis number seems low, so >90% of unsold clothes are worn? Are they all donated? 4-9% of unsold clothes could be defective/damaged or something.
- blitzar 8mo agoI would have guessed, with no real basis whatsoever, that 4-9% of all manufactured clothes would be destroyed without ever being used.
- garaetjjte 8mo agoIs it? 4-9% of unsold portion seems reasonable. Unless they actually mean 4-9% of all manufactured. https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destruction-of-returned-and-unsold-textiles-in-europes-circular-economy 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- plorkyeran 8mo agoI would have guessed a much higher number, and the number possibly being as low as 4% seems like good news to me.
- softwaredoug 8mo agoFashion production is responsible for 8-10% of all carbon emissions https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-sustainability-in-the-textile-industry https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-s...
- Sol- 8mo agoCheap clothing is a civilizational achievement and good for human welfare. So carbon emissions are bad, but then we should price carbon and not micromanage clothing inventory.
- nicbou 8mo agoClothing everyone is an achievement, but fast fashion is overshooting that target. A bit like feeding everyone vs. having an obesity crisis.
- yrcyrc 8mo agoPerfectly summed up
- Gigachad 8mo agoPolyester has been a disaster for clothing. I'd love to see countries come up with a plan to cut down on the amounts of plastic crap being pumped out.
- fy20 8mo agoThere is a brand in my country that I liken to a physical Shein. The clothes are a similar style, and basically everything is polyester. When I walk into it, it smells like a carpet store.
- 1718627440 8mo agoGetting common goods less expensive is good, making them too cheap is not. Imagine you are optimizing a math model, but nothing actually has prices. You just get a garbage point as optimum. You need to have scarcity, so that a system that optimizes the allocation of scarce goods actually works.
- small_model 8mo agoThose 'On Sale' racks are going to take up half the shop now. Maybe they could have a deep discounted section where clothes are set at cost value. Should find an equilibrium and someone will buy them
- jtrn 8mo agoMakes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life. Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
- grayhatter 8mo agoYou're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison. > Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem. While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't? Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.
- jtrn 8mo agoI agree that "sardonic" is a better word. It’s just not used much, and it didn’t even come to mind. It's similar to how people misuse "ironic." But people usually understand what is meant. The general thrust of the underlying messagr is not dishonest just because you say so. The general pattern is that there are degrees of governmental control over people's lives at the core. I don’t think it’s dishonest because my point is that bureaucracy has no limit on what it tries to control given enough time, even though my framing is vulgar. and should we do stuff to reduce waist and help the environmen? Absolutely!! should we do this? if this worked, it would be a good thing. But if you just want to virtue signal without caring about reality, I think we disagree on more than just definitions. My reference to "Freakonomics" is a collection of real contradictions to your theory. Since you didn't consider it, here are the expanded findings: Most of the "recycled" material collected under these new laws is being "downcycled" into insulation, mattress stuffing, or industrial rags—markets that are already saturated and low-value. Reports show these organizations were overwhelmed with low-quality fast fashion that they could not sell. Instead of companies paying to burn it, the charities now had to pay to store or manage it. The fines are real. France has set fines of up to €15,000 per infraction for companies caught destroying unsold goods. This is why companies are dumping the stock on charities rather than risking the fine. I’m giving how you speak about corporation. I’m guessing you have absolutely no empathy for people who run small single person or small team business and our overwhelmed by all the regulatory traps they can fall into at any point in time. Then The Freakonomics data (Sanford, Maine case study) showed that when you charge people for trash, they generate less trash, but illegal dumping often spikes, forcing the city to spend more on cleanup patrols. To pay for this new collection and sorting system, brands pay an "Extended Producer Responsibility" (EPR) fee. In 2025, this fee for textiles in systems like France/Netherlands ranged roughly from €0.12 to €0.50 per kilogram of clothing put on the market. In other words, the cost ultimately falls back on consumers. So in general, no, I don’t agree at all. I think you are discounting the massive cost to not just corporations but also individuals when it comes to micromanagement. On a second layer, I’m not even against micromanagement, just bad micromanagement, especially micromanagement that is at best naïve regarding effectiveness, and at worst purely virtue signaling. In short, we should focus on what works, not what you feel is righteously good.
- chasing0entropy 8mo agoThat this is an actual rule that other versions of have been a thing for years makes further convinced we are on the falling edge of capitalist society.
- Aurornis 8mo agoIn my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason. For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it. What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening. It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service. So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
- throwaway198846 8mo agoThey have exceptions for manufacturing defects
- morkalork 8mo agoWhat became of the relationship with the recycling company?
- WalterBright 8mo ago> had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service. Couldn't this be prevented by, say, sticking it on a drill press and drilling a large hole in it, and then recycling it?
- MagicMoonlight 8mo agoMakes sense. You’d rather burn a birkin than let a poor person get their grubby little mitts on it. So the only way to stop them burning them, is to force them to do something with them.
- isodev 8mo agoThat’s excellent news. I always find it strange that companies would go as far as to destroy unsold items instead of just donating or recycling them.
- blitzar 8mo agoGive a man donated clothing and they will have clothes ... teach a man to become and indentured servant on minimum wage and they will be able to buy clothes every year for the rest of their lives.
- protocolture 8mo agoI mean, most of the destruction is recycling that I am aware of. Turning into rags is the fate of most unwanted clothing. Do the euros burn it instead?
- isodev 8mo ago"the euros"? As opposed to what, "the hillbillies"?
- kmeisthax 8mo agoA good chunk of unsold clothing destruction happens because the brand considers fire sales to be brand damage. I have to wonder if they'll comply with this regulation willingly, or if they'll do some stupid workaround to make sure they can continue to pointlessly destroy clothing for the sake of a brand image.
- CPLX 8mo agoThey can just pull the labels off or relabel them. That’s the usual approach
- Der_Einzige 8mo agoProblems that don't happen with actually good clothes. If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this. I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got. The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.
- blackqueeriroh 8mo agoWow, you know what never happens? People changing size.
- philipallstar 8mo agoAnd that's why companies destroy unsold stock? How?
- WalterBright 8mo ago> People changing size. I was curious why I no longer was able to wear pants I wore in my 20s. I could not get them over my hips. It wasn't because I was getting fatter, my weight is about the same. I was also intrigued by young men looking slim in the hips, and older men not. So I looked it up. Turns out that your hips grow wider with age. I'd never heard of this before! Though I did know one's ears got bigger. Too bad my shoulders never get wider, and my height shrinks :-/ My feet have gotten considerably wider with age, too.
- drecked 8mo agoThe assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out. Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability. HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.
- BurningFrog 8mo agoTheir plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug: "Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."
- jonstewart 8mo agoLaissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
- vscode-rest 8mo agoThat would be a carbon tax. This is plain overregulation.
- philipallstar 8mo agoJust businesses being intrinsically incentivised to not produce waste by the loss of profit is already a good motivation.
- estimator7292 8mo agoIf that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model. Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying things like "you must stop a machine before putting a person inside it". Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop. We have something like 200 years of labor laws around this point. You should probably read some history and ask yourself why every government on the planet has been compelled to force legislation on business to protect the interests of the people.
- namlem 8mo agoTypical Eurocrat meddling in people's affairs. The owners of those items should be free to do whatever they want. If the government is concerend about environmental damage, they should raise landfill fees or tax carbon, not limit what firms are allowed to do with their own things.
- baal80spam 8mo agoWell put. Of course noone says that this will increase clothes price for everyone.
- cbg0 8mo agoRaising the landfill tax or carbon tax will also increase the price of clothes. This might only increase the price of already expensive items, a t-shirt from H&M won't go up in price because of this.
- Traubenfuchs 8mo agoWhat keeps them from selling 1000 pieces for a cent to offshore companies in Africa/Asia that then burn what they bought?
- peterfirefly 8mo agoThat they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.
- mono442 8mo agoJust another case of the EU being focused on unimportant things while looking away from real issues like cost of living crisis or energy costs. Though on the other hand, it may be for the best since they only make things actively worse.
- aniviacat 8mo agoThe government can do more than one thing at a time.
- Sol- 8mo agoSeems like policy ripe with unintended side effects. At the very least, it'll likely raise prices for consumers because the companies aren't allowed to manage their inventory as efficiently as they wish. Now of course this might be a totally acceptable price to pay, I'm not necessarily arguing against it. It will just be conveniently omitted from public communications on the topic by the EU. For regulators, there never are tradeoffs, after all.
- digiown 8mo agoBrand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished. Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases. I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
- pembrook 8mo agoThat’s not what will happen. You will not be seeing Chanel at the local discounter. And for non-luxury brands this law will simply increase costs for companies operating in the EU and therefore cause people to spend more on clothes.
- GreenWatermelon 8mo agoParent painted a very logical sequence of events that concluded in reduced prices. Can you provide similar reasoning for why you believe this law will increase costs?
- irenetusuq 8mo ago[dead]
- amelius 8mo agoCompanies' response: we'll just sew these unsold clothes into a large curtain, which is not apparel so we can then just burn it.
- peterfirefly 8mo agoI do hope they come up with something like that.
- kbelder 8mo agoCheap shop rags!
- GreenWatermelon 8mo agoSuch obvious mockeries of law usually don't pass in court. The jusdge will easily see that the company intended to destroy the objects.
- cm2012 8mo agoIncredibly, unbelievably stupid law. Waste is made when something unwanted is created, not when it is thrown out. Destruction or landfill is often the best option for all involved and modern landfills are very safe and sustainable. I worked in recycled clothing for a few years and it is not always or even often efficient. This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
- pjmlp 8mo agoFinally, this never made any sense.
- locallost 8mo agoThis is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell. So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.
- Flatterer3544 8mo agoMight be to hinder large companies of moving fast-fashion storages into EU, so they cannot circumvent the 150EUR free import limit when it is dissolved, as that would move them into the supposed jaws of this "ban of destruction of fast-fashion" act.
- FergusArgyll 8mo agoLooking forward to Hermes moving to NY
- seydor 8mo agoA strange decision considering that high fashion is one of the few lucrative sectors of eu. LV cannot afford to give away their branded items , and i doubt they are willing to remanufacture or reuse. They may be a tiny fraction of the industry, but equally affected.
- wallaBBB 8mo agoYes, because shareholder value comes first. Ffs
- lysace 8mo agoThis waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021. Very tongue in cheek: In the latest fully analyzed year (2024) Sweden was CO2 net negative. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles. (https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldioxid-an-vad-sverige-slapper-ut/ https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldi...)
- wosined 8mo agoDoes this apply to Chinese companies too or it is just another measure that disadvantages local producers?
- TheChaplain 8mo agoLocal producers. Businesses importing from non-EU countries have to shoulder the responsibility in stead of the manufacturer.
- Glyptodon 8mo agoFor some of these things I wonder if there are missing recyclable options. Like could you economically run a pile of defective clothing through a blender and and use it as fiber reinforcement in some kind of construction material or insulation?
- mathfailure 8mo agoWhat stops them from selling it to an affiliated entity for 1 eurocent and thus evade the ban?
- peterfirefly 8mo agoThis is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules. The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated. Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament. --- The linked page has this text: "Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021." Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers. The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%. I don't think that is very believable. (A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
- moralestapia 8mo agoGreat news! I live in America and I would like it to continue to be the leading economic zone. The more Europe (and others) lag behind, the better my life will be :).
- aniviacat 8mo agoAs a European, it seems absurd to me one would celebrate the short term benefits of being one of the by far most destructive (per capita) countries on earth regarding global climate (challenged only by a few oil states). Is a temporary advantage worth destroying the planet forever?
- groundzeros2015 8mo agoI just think we have vastly different understandings about what actually helps the environment and what’s even happening to the environment. This particular law is probably going to cause more resource waste not less. Holding inventory or distributing it costs money. Btw have you taken up this topic with china, India, or Africa?
- Ylpertnodi 8mo ago> Great news! I live in America... Great news, indeed.
- tsoukase 8mo agoEU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
- dijit 8mo agotextile waste, largely, is plastic waste. Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic). in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee. fast fashion is by far the worst offender though.
- peterfirefly 8mo agoSo is rayon... kinda. It's cellulose from trees and other plants, without the original cells. Where is the dividing line between cellulose, lignin and "plastics"?
- dijit 8mo agorayon is a regenerated cellulose fibre: it biodegrades. polyester is a thermoplastic polymer synthesised from petrochemicals: it doesn’t. that’s the dividing line. one breaks down in the environment, the other persists for centuries and sheds microplastics into waterways every time you wash it. rayon has its own environmental problems (deforestation, chemical processing), but “is it plastic?” is not one of them. the chemistry here isn’t ambiguous.
- oblio 8mo agohttps://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/12/story/20181212STO21610/20181212STO21610_en.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/12/stor... They are working on that, too.
- anymouse123456 8mo agoIt’s shocking to see this legislated. As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead. I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.
- blurbleblurble 8mo agoThey're wontonly destroying and or dumping shitty goods that they got for cheap by externalizing costs.
- perfmode 8mo agoMajor fashion houses have been caught destroying clothes to prop up the value of the brand.
- tossandthrow 8mo agoCompanies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities. It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies. One can speculate that this is an easy way to force the companies to pay for their externalities - given that production in third countries are much harder to touch for the EU.
- bravoetch 8mo agoClothing items are so cheap to make it's hard to believe. I used to work in a distribution warehouse for a national baby and children's clothing chain. Containers would arrive from China and we'd enter items into the warehouse stock system. Cost basis for most items was under 10 cents.
- manuelmoreale 8mo ago> Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities. No they shouldn't. Sometimes it's not a matter of paying for the externalities. If you're doing harm at scale the only sane option is to stop doing that, period. When we figured out that leaded gas was bad we didn't make companies pay for their negative externalities. We banned that shit and that was it.
- oatmeal1 8mo agoIt's a great idea, but this seems incredibly hard to enforce. Shipments sometimes go missing, products can be damaged "unintentionally", etc. I hope they can achieve what they intend.
- motbus3 8mo agoI'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only. This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches. In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that most of it are produced in small sets anyway. Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea? My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold. Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
- lp4v4n 8mo ago>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary. > The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold. What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?
- code4life 8mo ago> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary. I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.
- wizzwizz4 8mo agoWhere I currently live has about the same climate as it did 20 years ago. More variability, I think (people started complaining about weird harvest times about 10 years ago, and we're now all used to chaotic year-on-year yields), but roughly the same averages. Flood infrastructure needs maintenance, but not a redesign. However, the behaviour of the migratory wildlife has changed, and you only have to travel a few dozen miles before you reach somewhere that has needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure. "A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
- awongh 8mo agoCompared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU? In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock. A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount. Edit to clarify: things can't be put on sale, except for a few times during the year? I guess this is not every country, although I'm not sure which and when.
- runarberg 8mo agoTo clarify, this is a consumer protection law which is set in all EEA countries. Discounts are regulated to prevent stores from tricking their customers into thinking they are getting a product at a lower then usual price. You can only claim a product is on discount if the price has been lowered from a previous price less then x-days ago (I think 2 weeks is not uncommon), after which this discount becomes the new price. As a European immigrant to the USA, it infuriates me to no end that American stores are allowed to use the words “price” and “discount” interchangeably. When I get things “on a discount” I expect to be paying lower then usual price.
- ragall 8mo ago> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU? Nonsense. They can. > In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock. Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess. > A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount. False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
- awongh 8mo ago> Nonsense. They can. Specifically I meant that there's a few times during the year when things can be put on discount?
- lp4v4n 8mo agoFashion is a deeply irrational market that preys on the worst of human nature. There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. You might say ok, if people are dumb enough to buy that then that's not my problem. So now there are companies creating the environmental cost of destroying viable products just to sustain this kind of grifting. On top of that I think that society, as a general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product. The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.
- hilbert42 8mo ago"There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. ..." I used to be very tolerant of people's idiosyncrasies but with the internet, social media etc. that brings out the worst in people I'm now much less so. Agreed, fashion is deeply irrational but it's always been with us. The real problem now is the degree to which the fashion industry exploits the excessively 'vulnerable'—you know, the oddballs who were once ignored. It's why a $5 can now cost $500. Moreover, something in fashion one day is out of fashion the next, and it's a damn nuisance. It's gotten completely out of hand. Recently, I bought a pair of cargo-style work pants and they were fine. About a month later I bought another pair of the same brand, size and type (going on the label they were same model and style, and there was only one type--supposedly). Got them home and the cut was not only different and they were less comfortable but the legs were cut narrow (they were now too tight). Took them back and the sales assistant said "oh that's normal, styles usually change with every new shipment, you're supposed to check them first". For fuck's sake they are ordinary utilitarian work pants—not something you'd expect to see on the catwalks of Paris. I ought to be able to buy exactly the same product time after time like I used to be able to do with Levi jeans by just by looking at the tag/label (nowadays you can't even rely on Levis being the same fit).
- zkmon 8mo agoIf you look at the backyards (so called garden) of homes of the advanced countries, from satellite maps, they mostly became junkyards of things. Inside homes are full of things that are rarely used. I have seen Amazon boxes going into bins unopened. Basically, homes are overflowing with goods, and throwing things away is going to become expensive. Advances in manufacturing, supply chains and online shopping have accelerated the saturation of markets. Destruction of goods can't be stooped due the pace of inflow of inventory. This is like a conveyor belt jamming, where the downstream belts are draining slower than upstream ones.
- ungreased0675 8mo agoI anticipate a lot of unintended consequences lurking. But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.
- einpoklum 8mo agoHopefully, what this should motivate is the emphasis on products which can be _disassembled_, taken apart, other than through destruction. It may also become less costly to take products with flaws and fix them up: Right now, it's not profitable; but if one can't just chuck them away, then the cost-benefit analysis changes. Less throw-away fashion hopefully.
- SilverElfin 8mo agoI think incorporating the cost of recycling and trash into the original purchase price should also become a global norm.
- drnick1 8mo agoFar too much state interference in private matters. The EU is quickly becoming the new Soviet Union.
- _ink_ 8mo agoGreat! Can we also ban the export of waste, please?
- jadenPete 8mo agoI think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources? I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in. It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.
- im3w1l 8mo agoI dont really care about waste too much as I think it's a non-issue blown out of proportion, but mandating standards and interoperability creates a lot of value for consumers and prevents anticompetive behavior.
- ragebol 8mo ago> micro-targeted > mandated USB-C on Apple devices There is no law that states specifically Apple must specifically use USB-C. IIUC, the law is that all brands/manufacturers should use the same type of charger, an industry standard. That was apparently USB-C. Apple was the odd one out and had to change. If something better comes along, the industry as a whole can upgrade.
- kranke155 8mo agoAmericans always ask - but who decides - the industry decides. The industry gets to decide what they want to use.
- Mordisquitos 8mo agoYou have an odd perception of what constitutes "micro-targetting". Why apparel specifically? Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles. Why was USB-C mandated specifically on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: it wasn't. It was mandated on smartphones in general, and Apple was the only company that specifically tried to fight the regulation because apparently they're special.
- exizt88 8mo agoThe "Less Growth for Europe" party strikes again.
- Mordisquitos 8mo agoYes, to the frustration of supporters of the "Paperclip Maximising Means Growth" party.
- peterfirefly 8mo agoIt's regulation from the previous European Parliament and the first von der Leyen Commission. The new parliament from 2024 has a lot fewer red/green members (still enough to cause trouble, though) and the second von der Leyen Commission has a different agreement with the current parliament. The current Council is also a lot different than the council of just a year ago -- not in terms of members but in terms of opinions. A lot of the craziness is being rolled back, maybe this will also be rolled back. The link is not about the 2024 framework regulation (from just before the elections) but about some new supplementary regulation that the 2024 regulation allowed for and required -- in order to provide clarifications and fix some of the mistakes of the initial regulation.
- linuxhansl 8mo agoFirst, seems like a good thing. I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start. Second, in the short term this is going to lower profits for some companies. Third, hopefully in the long run it will lead to less waste. Is it perfect? Of course not, no real legislation ever is. If there's a better way to get started on reducing waste I'd like to hear it, though.
- peterfirefly 8mo ago> I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start. They didn't. You can look at the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) yourself. It's fairly long but it should be easy to scroll until you find some of the lists. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng
- altcunn 8mo ago[dead]
- xylon 8mo agoWhat about the environmental impact of all the extra warehouses they have to build to store the unsellable stock?
- titaniumrain 8mo agoEU makes sense once!! two thumbs up
- Animats 8mo agoUnsold apparel is a headache, but banning it probably won't work. Something still has to be done with the stuff. In the first dot-com era, I knew some startup people who were trying to create an online secondary market in used apparel, called Tradeweave. It flopped. You can see their web site on the Internet Archive up to 2004.[1] Then, suddenly, it's gone. There's a Stanford Business School case for this company.[2] Amusingly, the Stanford case study is dated 2000, before the collapse, and makes it sound like a success. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040323045929/http://tradeweave.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040323045929/http://tradeweave... [2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/tradeweave https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/t...
- ddtaylor 8mo agoI get the impression this will turn out similar to how some "for cause" businesses have. Past examples include: - TOMS Shoes - PlayPumps - Textile Aid I worry that, one way or another, this is going to create a pile of unwanted products somewhere, and it probably won't be in a nice neighborhood.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8mo agoTook me a while to find the actual rules: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/commission-delegated-regulation-setting-out-derogations-prohibition-destruction-unsold-consumer_en https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/commission-del... Overall, seems reasonably sensible. It's still ok to destroy products if (among many other reasons) "the product can reasonably be considered unacceptable for consumer use due to damage, including physical damage, deterioration or contamination, including hygiene issues, whether it is caused by consumers or occurs during the handling of the product [...] and repair and refurbishment are not technically feasible or cost-effective;" but cost-effective means "the cost of repairing or refurbishing a product not outweighing the total cost of destruction of that product and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product." So essentially, they have to offer all the clothing for donation first, if nobody wants it, it can still be destroyed (that's one of the other exceptions). Unfortunately another exception is if "it is technically unfeasible ... to remove ... labels, logos or recognisable product design or other characteristics that are ... protected by intellectual property rights". So a luxury brand can probably still go "well our design is protected and we don't want the poors wearing our fancy clothes".
- 0xbadcafebee 8mo ago> The ban on destruction of unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear and the derogations will apply to large companies from 19 July 2026. Medium-sized companies are expected to follow in 2030. The rules on disclosure under the ESPR already apply to large companies and will also apply to medium-sized companies in 2030 5 months is a pretty short timeline for a large company to change literally its entire business to handle one class of products differently. This affects returns, sales, shipping, contracts with disposal companies, etc. The weirder part is that they're granting medium and small size companies 4 more years to figure it out. It will take any company a long time to deal with this. So why shaft the large companies? Spite? The difficulty this imposes on them, and any fines from their inability to comply, will be passed down to the consumer.
- dgxyz 8mo agoThe additional costs will make the people who already are compliant competitive.
- nonethewiser 8mo agoYou're going to have lot worse return policy.
- 331c8c71 8mo agoWhy massive discounts seem to be much more of a thing in the US compared to Europe?
- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo agoThis must be the first thread I've seen in a while on HN where nobody calls the EU a "nanny state".
- cromka 8mo agoA good way to understand this is to think about Apple and how they refuse to run Black Friday or any other type of sales. They just don't. If they do, they're very modest. This helps to maintain the value of the product and for consumers to not defer purchase until sale event. Clothing companies are similar. The actual product is worth pennies, but they'll refuse to sell for 10% of RSP because who would be buying them at the full price? They'll do 50%, maybe 70 discount and that's it. They destroy whatever they don't sell. Rinse, repeat, four times a year in this crazy, fast fashion reality It's a known practice and they've been going on like this for ages. Fashion is vain by definition and this whole industry is very wasteful of our resources. This legislation is meant to help mitigate this. What's gonna change long term is manufacturers will be keeping more items on sale for longer and the fast fashion cycles will slow down. Hopefully they'll start competing with quality and workmanship thus, in turn, giving EU textile industry a new chance to survive Asian competition. THIS IS GOOD FOR EU ECONOMY!
- anonymousiam 8mo agoI wonder why this doesn't also cover handbags and scarves? https://www.darveys.com/blog/luxury-brands-burn-their-own-goods https://www.darveys.com/blog/luxury-brands-burn-their-own-go...
- henvic 8mo agoThe European Union is messing up ignoring the law of unintended consequences, as typical...
- pojzon 8mo agoEU law making is full of hope and dreams but empty on common sense. “I hope everyone in the system will play nice and not try to abuse or circumvent it” We really really really need to replace our poloticians with younger ppl with functioning brains. Being 60+ should automatically disclasify you from running into office.
- 8note 8mo agoEU courts tend to take action based on the spirit of the law, so circumvention is also illegal
- PearlRiver 8mo agoI will never understand fashion. Why does a store need ten new collections per year?
- bdangubic 8mo agothe only reason they need them is cause people are buying them. the supply side is never an issue…
- h4kunamata 8mo agoEvery single country should follow suit, apply to food also. The reason these companies get so greedy is because they can control the demand. Companies have been found destroying their goods to keep the price high. The whole Europe is pretty broken right now government wise, but they sure know how to have some decent laws in place when the politics aren't being an arse.
- altern8 8mo agoThe EU has to get its hand into every aspect of everyone's life. From the material the straw I drink from is made, to what port companies can use for charging, to what companies can do with their own products. I don't get why European nations always have to turn into totalitarian fascist dictatorships.
- okanat 8mo agoWhich of the current players is closer to being a fascist dictatorship: US, China or EU? Fascism loves unregulated, consolidated conglomerates.
- mgilroy 8mo agoI think it's a reasonable idea. It's mostly going to affect the "luxury" brands who attempt to limit price reductions. Perhaps it might encourage producers to do smaller runs to confirm interest before massively increasing volumes. The real issue is to get the lowest price you need to hit minimum volumes. It's cheaper currently to burn unused stock than store it for next year. This may change that model. If it doesn't work it can always be changed.
- phyzix5761 8mo agoIf manufacturers are banned from destroying unsold clothing won't they respond by producing less to avoid excess inventory? And if supply decreases while demand stays the same wouldn't that push prices up for everyone?
- westpfelia 8mo agoif you have so much supply that it makes sense to destroy some of it, why would reducing that supply to meet demand drive up prices?
- GreenWatermelon 8mo agoThis is still a good outcome. Less waste and trash being thrown out is good.
- awesomeusername 8mo ago"The Outlaw Sea" is a book about the long history of the complexity of responsibility, ownership, in international shipping and the ships themselves. It's very good, it should be on the HN standard reading list, much like _The Box_. I'm only interested in comments here from people who have an understanding of the complex world of outsourcing responsibility. TL;DR: International cooperation isn't at a level where ANY country/bloc can have an impact on how their own waste is disposed of. The idea that magically that will happen with clothing is an admission of ignorance of this fact in decades old industries. We need more and stronger international laws. The opposite of the current US administration's influence.
- HardwareLust 8mo agoTwo other books I'd recommend are The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina, and Outside The Box by Mark Levinson (author of The Box).
- awesomeusername 8mo agoThanks, can't wait to read these, didn't know they existed
- apparent 8mo ago> “If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice,” Pesca said, but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI “slop,” a term for spammy, commodified content. “They have banter, but it’s very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they’re always saying, ‘Yeah, that’s so interesting.’ It’s really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?” Totally disagree. NotebookLM isn't always right, but it can go deep on complex scientific and other academic content. It is absolutely not "surface-level" unless you're feeding it shallow content. I have never heard this Greene fellow, but I can say that all of the summaries generated by NotebookLM for me have been more nuanced and higher quality than the content created by NPR in recent years.
- csense 8mo agoI don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor. But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no." And what if there's genuinely no demand? For example, suspenders went permanently out of style at some point in the 20th century. If this law had been in effect at the time, there might be an "orphaned" truckload of suspenders somewhere, getting wastefully shipped from warehouse to warehouse for decades because they're impossible to sell and illegal to destroy. Fashion is fickle, prone to fads and flights of taste. Suspenders are by no means an isolated case. An efficient economy needs a means to delete an item when its current owner doesn't want it, nobody else wants it either, and it imposes ongoing storage costs on whoever holds it.
- lores 8mo agoIf you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.
- bamboozled 8mo agoAgree, a corporation can do orders of magnitude more harm than an individual can. It’s called “regulation”.
- jazz9k 8mo agoA company isn't AI or a bot. It's essentially a group of people. It should have the same rights as an individual when it comes to private property.
- s3p 8mo agoI'm sorry you think that.
- jandrewrogers 8mo agoWhy don’t they do the same with food then? There is a similar issue where truly vast amounts of food is destroyed every year. Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint. Countless tons of e.g. wheat straight to the landfill, not even used as animal feed. The demand for the product is unpredictable and they need to produce and sell enough to cover the investment in producing it at all on average. There is also a fuzzy limit on how much the market can absorb. The underlying dynamic is simple: the value of the product in every market exceeds the logistics cost of moving the product to that market. In other words, the market clearing price is globally negative. Because most of the cost of production is in the logistics, and destruction can be done close to the point of production, the resource and environmental footprint of destruction is smaller than every alternative. People don’t produce excess inventory for fun, that is a pure loss. The production is highly optimized to eke out a thin average margin in an unpredictable business. If the product is not destroyed, it necessarily increases the average cost of those products because either logistics costs go up or supply goes down.
- pembrook 8mo agoAre you arguing against yourself to provide an example of why this law is bad…or do you actually want to force people to eat rotten/spoiled food? You seem to provide a great example of why Eurocrats regulating a highly efficient market will not cause the desired outcome…due to reality. > Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint. Yes, keeping 8 billion humans alive does have non-negligible energy costs. Again I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or if you’re an anti-human environmental terrorist. If you actually care about agriculture emissions though, population decline will cause this to go down faster than any Eurocrat will with silly laws based on some clickbait news article they read about an industry they understand nothing about.
- briandw 8mo agoEverything that is not compulsory is forbidden. Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
- mgraczyk 8mo agoWhat's the best case scenario for the positive impact of this regulation?
- cryptoegorophy 8mo agoHa! Communism solved that. Just produce less so there is scarcity rather than abundance. But jokes aside this is a great move.
- camillomiller 8mo agoWhenever the EU does something positive towards a collective action issue, this forum gets filled to the brim with nitpickers who know everything that is possibly wrong with such action, and yet don't provide any meaningful alternative to solve actual problems. So, I guess it's only innovation if you can make your own startup solving menial or useless first-world issues in order for the PG and YC of the world to share a little piece of their billions with you and maybe get fuck you money from an exit.
- maximalthinker 8mo ago[dead]
- ExpertAdvisor01 8mo agoReminds me of this situation: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983.amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-44885...
- mrybczyn 8mo agohopefully the free plastic feedstock from oil will go away soon. if polyester cost as much as cotton or wool, it wouldnt be wasted by these scum sucking bottom feeder manufacturers. Thank you China for forcing the world into the solar battery future.
- waffle_toast 8mo agoI think I've heard this isn't as much of a think in Europe, but by me sometimes when companies have a bunch of items they can't sell to regular consumers, they sell them for cheap to large thrift stores. Though often this stuff is kinda marked up because its new which sucks but is still better than just burning it.
- burnt-resistor 8mo agoNow if more countries can ban the destruction of edible food and usable pet food rather than preventing it from being reused by intentional spoilage.
- FarmerPotato 8mo agoTurning the issue on its head, if 4-9% is unsold, then the whole supply chain's success at predicting consumer preferences is 90-95%. Wow! When I think of unsold, I see that some sizes run out, leaving odd sizes as surplus.
- tossandthrow 8mo agoThat assumes that they need to predict demand 1:1 which is not true. They are more than welcome to have an over supply ready, they just need to use it productively is they can't sell it.
- nonethewiser 8mo agoNot 4-9% unsold. 4-9% of unsold is destroyed without being worn.
- DeathArrow 8mo ago>Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea? One reason would be because it meddles with free market and ownership rights.
- christkv 8mo agoWe would have been better served by setting minimum clothing standards instead of this bs to get at the fast fashion. Also educate young people about the cost of their cheap clothes to the world especially young women who are the majority consumers of fast fashion.
- fleroviumna 8mo ago[dead]
- dominicrose 8mo agoIt always annoys me when shops have more XXL clothes than regular M clothes. Not destructing is good but why produce them in the first place? Sometimes it looks like they're not even trying to get logistics right.
- whywhywhywhy 8mo agoThis ultimately only harms poor people, the biggest consumers of mass made mass destroyed fast fashion. Cost of dealing with it will be directly passed on to them.
- dklohano1 8mo agowouldnt they just end up getting "donated" to other countries?
- wolvoleo 8mo agoGood!! We should also fine companies that try to work around this. Our planet can't handle this kind of externalisation anymore.
- johnjames87 8mo ago[dead]
- haritha-j 8mo agoWhat I don’t understand is, why are these being destroyed instead of being donated? Is it just because businesses don’t want their brand to be devalued because the poor people will wear their brand?
- stainablesteel 8mo agodonated to who? in the past they would typically send them to africa or something but this actually has negative effects on local african economies for example
- haritha-j 8mo agoeven within the country, to those in need. At least in the UK, there are collection points, as well as many charities that accept clothes such as oxfam and cancer research UK
- Rover222 8mo agoYet another virtue signal law in Europe that won’t actually have the desired effect.
- delfinom 8mo agoRIP what is left of true third world economies. It is about to get dumped on with even more "donations" that destroys and prevents local industry.
- amai 8mo agoFast-fashion, fast-furniture, fast-food, fast-news should all be regulated. They destroy our planet fast.
- touwer 8mo agoEvery time again when it's about Europe, there are lots of commenters here complaining about the Eu or the rules, probably a lot of US commenters aping MAGA sentiments. Of course without solving the problem this law tries to solve. It's soooo easy to complain about something you know nothing about. As if the US is perfect
- nonethewiser 8mo agoWhat does this post have to do with the United States?
- touwer 8mo agoI wrote about the comments, not about the post
- hx833001 8mo agoEurope is now trying to kill their golden goose, the false scarcity luxury market? Weird way to compete in the world.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- codingbot3000 8mo agoAs a EU citizen it is really frustrating to watch that they just can't stop themselves from introducing new regulation. And we don't have non-hallucinating AI yet that can help businesses keep track of all this legislative diarrhea.
- torcete 8mo agoHowever, they still allow food to be destroyed.
- gverrilla 8mo agobasic civilization stuff right here
- KodawariTitan 8mo ago[dead]
- ETH_start 8mo agoWaste isn't automatically a social loss. It only becomes a problem when the cost is pushed onto other people. If burning excess goods pollutes the air or fills landfills, charge for the pollution or disposal. Once the real cost is priced in, companies will naturally waste less without needing thousands of permutations of actions being restricted in an attempt to micromanage them. You still hold them accountable for harm — you just do it through prices instead of micromanaging behavior. And again, don't just assume waste is net-harmful