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Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherw
by whateverboat 8mo ago
Donations 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?
- WarmWash 8mo agoJust like other companies came along and offered a better Sears catalog when the internet killed their revenue? People don't voluntarily lose money. Understand that and the world will way more understandable.
- anigbrowl 8mo agoIt does appear that people prefer the convenience of internet shopping, though I also see that other firms still successfully apply the catalog model in specific markets, eg Harbor Freight which does this for construction tools. 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.
- philipallstar 8mo agoIt's very very easy to spend much less on clothes. Buying a new handbag every 6 months vs maintaining a bag for 20 years isn't that much different in terms of effort, but one is unbelievably more expensive.
- smt88 8mo agoAny name brand would rather send their unsold clothes to a landfill in India rather than allow their wealthy customers to see poor people wearing the clothes.
- bluebarbet 8mo agoA perhaps inadvertent but nicely succinct indictment of capitalism.
- saubeidl 8mo agoWhich is why you write regulations to ban that. Hence, this thread.
- smt88 8mo agoThese regulations don't and can't ban that. The companies can say they're "selling" or "donating" them abroad.
- jjkaczor 8mo agoThat has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found: https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-secondhand-clothing-donations-can-harm-african-markets https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
- saubeidl 8mo agoYou can steer where donations go with regulations. I don't see any downsides of warm coats to homeless shelters for example.
- jjkaczor 8mo agoThat is a slightly different scenario than taking cheap "fast fashion waste", compressing it into bales, shoving it into shipping containers, transporting/dumping it and flooding local countries/markets. (And many of these large shipments do not end-up as donations by the time they get to their destination, but are actually sold by weight and then resold again) But yes - distribution/logistics of donated goods needed to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
- saubeidl 8mo agoI would hope that that will also be a policy area the EU addresses as part of this regulatory push.
- jacquesm 8mo agoMan it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
- KellyCriterion 8mo agoIve read some years ago that companies do not donate and destroy instead because of whatever wierd tax-regulation
- kube-system 8mo agoAren’t there already advantages to donating? I.e. Tax advantages, and a lack of disposal cost? I think the reason that brands don’t want to donate is because they don’t want their brands to be associated with poor people.
- seydor 8mo agodonations are just an excuse to dump them on poor countries
- Galanwe 8mo agoMy wife worked for a cloth upcycling association (finding sustainable future for discarded clothes). Reality is, there is just 10x more thrown out clothes in the west that any third world country on earth could need, same for shelters. Associations distributing clothes to developing countries / shelters are filtering tightly what they accept. In short, the vast majority of thrown out clothes in the west are just crapwear that not even the third world want. There are entire pipelines of filtering and sorting to only keep and distribute the good quality clothes.
- schubidubiduba 8mo agoSo this law might significantly increase the fraction of good quality clothes that shelters get, which would be a good thing?