3 ms·

Is this a problem in the EU? I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once. Those can easily fill a dumpster with tons of garbage

by xnx 3mo ago

Is this a problem in the EU? I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once. Those can easily fill a dumpster with tons of garbage. That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing.

embedding-shape 3mo ago
> I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once Very interesting point of view, as someone who never done a home remodel, it surely brought a new perspective for me. > That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing. I'm not sure, if you have two kids who are into trendy clothing and you're able to let them make choices around clothing, then I can imagine that there is quite high turnover on those things. Besides, the proposed rules seems to try to address waste generated by businesses rather than individuals or families. I guess currently they throw outdated clothing in order to make space for the new clothing lines?
pcdevils 3mo ago
It's companies dumping unsold ranges of clothes as new ranges come in. Not people.
- tialaramex 3mo ago
  Ya, and this is hugely driven by "Fast Fashion". If you're a company which made raincoats since the 1880s and the style with more buttons and few zips starts to be less popular maybe you make fewer of those and more of the zip ones next season, and in five years you've gone from 90% button 10% zip to the reverse. Companies like that don't destroy a lot of stock. They do a few discount sales, end-of-line price slashes, that sort of thing, but this "destroy clothes to make money" wasn't a thing. In fast fashion you're shipping a knock-off of the $8000 designer swimsuit seen in a Paris catwalk show at the start of July, a preview of your $150 version was shown in a TikTok video that blew up on Friday and your customers will be wearing them on the beach next weekend. By August that product is old news, you do not want that $150 product available for $5 in a discount store or your consumers might rebel - so you want to burn it instead and the EU says no, that's a perfectly good swimsuit, sell it to somebody who needs a swimsuit. Or give it away. If "fast fashion" no longer makes economic sense now, too bad, I guess you won't do it any more. The EU's citizens do not want you to destroy the planet they live on just to get more money. We made money up. Stop being crazy.
  - pqtyw 3mo ago
    [dead]
ascorbic 3mo ago
This is about businesses, not families.
Stromgren 3mo ago
My dad worked at a logistics facility, the amount of perfume he took home was ridiculous - and you’d think that something like perfume would never go stale. It does from a brand perspective and they do everything they can to have it destroyed so it doesn’t end up being sold to prices that would hurt the perceptive value. Obviously he wasn’t allowed to take it either.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3mo ago
  This isn't really surprising in a low margin industry. If you are making a 2% margin on the average perfume bottle, and then you liquidate it at -3% because it's cheaper than destroying it, you can accidentally end up anchoring customer perceptions on a price with like a -1% margin which actually will destroy the business over time. High margin industries get more complicated to model, of course.
  - phoronixrly 3mo ago
    Perfume? Low-margin? Getting hits ranging between 50% and 85% depending on how luxury the brand is considered to be...
    - bigballsbjorn 3mo ago
      [dead]
  - Stromgren 3mo ago
    For sure high end perfumes are high margin products. Can’t be a lot of cost in producing a $100 perfume. But I also feel like it’s a bit besides the point. Seeing pallet after pallet of perfumes getting destroyed every month should be an indication that something is not right.
comrade1234 3mo ago
I lived in a small building along with a French family with 5 children. The amount of trash they had every week was incredible. We had our small trash bag and theirs would be a heap of bags chest high. I sometimes wondered if he was throwing out trash from his business too. While living there the system changed from paying for a disposal service to pre-buying special bags that cost around 2.50chf per 35L bag. The French family moved back to France within a couple of months.
- dash2 3mo ago
  I think the children alone are enough of an explanation…
- microtonal 3mo ago
  Did they still have children wearing diapers? If so, that's your answer.
- khurs 3mo ago
  You didn't say where you live, and what kind of waste. Is your separated into general/food/plastic/cardboard? As often it's the plastic bin that overflow if families are not cooking from ingredients but buying ready made food.
anonzzzies 3mo ago
I reuse everything from remodels. Seems a shame to throw out always. And other skips are getting bought by others to use in their building projects.
- sokoloff 3mo ago
  How do you reuse plaster or drywall walls/ceilings? I’m fairly reuse-friendly, but that stuff goes straight in the dumpster for practical reasons.
  - anonzzzies 3mo ago
    we fill anything that needs filling: the ground here is very uneven with massive rocks so you need to fill to even, you can empty containers of crap other people give away or pay a fortune.
    - akersten 3mo ago
      Oh, yeah I forgot, who needs a dumpster when you can just bury your fiberglass in the ground. Of course.
    - quickthrowman 3mo ago
      The ground sounds like a bad place for lead paint and asbestos, two things which can be found in demolition waste. When we need fill in the US, a big truck comes and dumps actual soil and rock so that lead and other things don’t leach into the groundwater, the construction waste is landfilled after removing the metal for recycling. If you have well water and have been using construction demolition waste nearby your wellhead, I would suggest an RO filter for drinking water, yikes.
      - anonzzzies 3mo ago
        I see that when you don’t know what is in there then sure, but we don’t have that issue. No lead or asbestos or fiber glass. Otherwise men in white suits arrive anyway.
amarant 3mo ago
Is fast fashion not a thing in the US? I was under the impression it was, but perhaps I was wrong...
- dgellow 3mo ago
  It definitely is, according to my experience traveling to NYC
dgellow 3mo ago
The keyword is _unsold_. If you bought clothes, they aren’t unsold
dathinab 3mo ago
it's a pretty big _international_ problem basically - company cheap mass produces clothes/shoes - new session (1/4 year) comes in (at beast)// it's fast fashion and there is a new trend (at worst) - the "old" clothes are sold with rabatt but either before the session end or limited to clothes already shipped to stores - this leaves a ton of clothes not shipped to physical shops and not sold in time - selling them very strongly discounted means they compete with the new batch of different clothes, not discounting them means they might block up store space (physical store) or storage space (online shop, storage cost at scale shouldn't be underestimated, especially if some clothes just don't sell) - so companies just destroy the unsold clothes _and write the production cost off as loss_. Turns out destroying + write off is more profitable then gifting or discounting... :( - this is especially true for brand-clothes. They are often produced for a fraction of sales price and don't want to see their stuff being sold for more then a small discount. For some of this brand clothes their values outright lies more in "you needed to pay a bunch for it" then it "being high quality" (beyond a certain baseline of quality). now the relevant question: Will this prevent companies from finding loopholes to still trash their clothes, especially brand clothes? Yes it won't prevent it. But it increases the cost/complexity of it so it will likely reduce it by quite a bit. But some big next "<brand still dumps clothes through loophole>" scandal is basically just a question of time. Still overall it looks like it will be beneficial from a wast, environment and climate POV while harming (way too) fast fashion which is good as fast fashion is harmful for all the previous points, laborer treatment, cloth quality and some others.
UltraSane 3mo ago
This law doesn't apply to individual consumers, only manufactures and retail stores.
maccard 3mo ago
I did a remodel last year. I filled 2 largeskips by the end of it. This is the first large job this house has had in 10 years, and it’s a 130 year old house. The cafe at the bottom of my street has roughly that amount of waste collected every 2 weeks - they fill their commercial trash bin every 2 days. I don’t know how much of that is waste vs old food but they generate orders of magnitude more waste than I do even when I’m making a huge mess.
- altairprime 3mo ago
  The EU has targeted foodservice with regulation as well, though it’s phased much more slowly (2030) than the clothing law was: https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/food-waste/eu-food-waste-relevant-legislation/food-use-and-waste-hierarchy_en https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/food-waste/eu-food-was... Here, too, they consider “stop overproducing” to be the biggest problem on the pyramid. I’m not as familiar with this effort (nor if it, or any related initiative, affects to-go / disposal-ware) but one can reasonably imagine they are targeting all severely wasteful overproduction given enough time.
  - maccard 3mo ago
    Sure - but my point is that the waste by businesses absolutely dwarves domestic waste. I used to work in a shop, and we “recycled” (LDPE so not recyclable) more plastic in a week than I have used in the 10 years since I worked there. I’m not saying that individuals have no impact; our habits are absolutely important and we influence industry. But moving the needle on industry waste will have a more significant on the global situation than halving domestic waste in the UK.
    - altairprime 3mo ago
      The EU seems to agree: the 2030 target, set in 2025, requires a reduction of “10%, in processing and manufacturing” which will probably have an oversized impact on waste in actual kilos reduced, relative to the combined retail-domestic target.
Y-bar 3mo ago
One of my clients (a clothing brand) burns something in the range of 60-100 tonnes of clothes at the end of each season (4/year) here in the EU. They do it because it is easier and cheaper than to optimise the logistics chain. It is also cheaper than to recycle it. And they refuse to discount it or sell to secondary outlets to ”avoid brand dilution”.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

by xnx 3mo ago

embedding-shape 3mo ago

> I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once Very interesting point of view, as someone who never done a home remodel, it surely brought a new perspective for me. > That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing. I'm not sure, if you have two kids who are into trendy clothing and you're able to let them make choices around clothing, then I can imagine that there is quite high turnover on those things. Besides, the proposed rules seems to try to address waste generated by businesses rather than individuals or families. I guess currently they throw outdated clothing in order to make space for the new clothing lines?

pcdevils 3mo ago

It's companies dumping unsold ranges of clothes as new ranges come in. Not people.

tialaramex 3mo ago
Ya, and this is hugely driven by "Fast Fashion". If you're a company which made raincoats since the 1880s and the style with more buttons and few zips starts to be less popular maybe you make fewer of those and more of the zip ones next season, and in five years you've gone from 90% button 10% zip to the reverse. Companies like that don't destroy a lot of stock. They do a few discount sales, end-of-line price slashes, that sort of thing, but this "destroy clothes to make money" wasn't a thing. In fast fashion you're shipping a knock-off of the $8000 designer swimsuit seen in a Paris catwalk show at the start of July, a preview of your $150 version was shown in a TikTok video that blew up on Friday and your customers will be wearing them on the beach next weekend. By August that product is old news, you do not want that $150 product available for $5 in a discount store or your consumers might rebel - so you want to burn it instead and the EU says no, that's a perfectly good swimsuit, sell it to somebody who needs a swimsuit. Or give it away. If "fast fashion" no longer makes economic sense now, too bad, I guess you won't do it any more. The EU's citizens do not want you to destroy the planet they live on just to get more money. We made money up. Stop being crazy.
- pqtyw 3mo ago
  [dead]

ascorbic 3mo ago

This is about businesses, not families.

Stromgren 3mo ago

My dad worked at a logistics facility, the amount of perfume he took home was ridiculous - and you’d think that something like perfume would never go stale. It does from a brand perspective and they do everything they can to have it destroyed so it doesn’t end up being sold to prices that would hurt the perceptive value. Obviously he wasn’t allowed to take it either.

hiAndrewQuinn 3mo ago
This isn't really surprising in a low margin industry. If you are making a 2% margin on the average perfume bottle, and then you liquidate it at -3% because it's cheaper than destroying it, you can accidentally end up anchoring customer perceptions on a price with like a -1% margin which actually will destroy the business over time. High margin industries get more complicated to model, of course.
- phoronixrly 3mo ago
  Perfume? Low-margin? Getting hits ranging between 50% and 85% depending on how luxury the brand is considered to be...
  - bigballsbjorn 3mo ago
    [dead]
- Stromgren 3mo ago
  For sure high end perfumes are high margin products. Can’t be a lot of cost in producing a $100 perfume. But I also feel like it’s a bit besides the point. Seeing pallet after pallet of perfumes getting destroyed every month should be an indication that something is not right.

comrade1234 3mo ago

I lived in a small building along with a French family with 5 children. The amount of trash they had every week was incredible. We had our small trash bag and theirs would be a heap of bags chest high. I sometimes wondered if he was throwing out trash from his business too. While living there the system changed from paying for a disposal service to pre-buying special bags that cost around 2.50chf per 35L bag. The French family moved back to France within a couple of months.

dash2 3mo ago
I think the children alone are enough of an explanation…
microtonal 3mo ago
Did they still have children wearing diapers? If so, that's your answer.
khurs 3mo ago
You didn't say where you live, and what kind of waste. Is your separated into general/food/plastic/cardboard? As often it's the plastic bin that overflow if families are not cooking from ingredients but buying ready made food.

anonzzzies 3mo ago

I reuse everything from remodels. Seems a shame to throw out always. And other skips are getting bought by others to use in their building projects.

sokoloff 3mo ago
How do you reuse plaster or drywall walls/ceilings? I’m fairly reuse-friendly, but that stuff goes straight in the dumpster for practical reasons.
- anonzzzies 3mo ago
  we fill anything that needs filling: the ground here is very uneven with massive rocks so you need to fill to even, you can empty containers of crap other people give away or pay a fortune.
  - akersten 3mo ago
    Oh, yeah I forgot, who needs a dumpster when you can just bury your fiberglass in the ground. Of course.
  - quickthrowman 3mo ago
    The ground sounds like a bad place for lead paint and asbestos, two things which can be found in demolition waste. When we need fill in the US, a big truck comes and dumps actual soil and rock so that lead and other things don’t leach into the groundwater, the construction waste is landfilled after removing the metal for recycling. If you have well water and have been using construction demolition waste nearby your wellhead, I would suggest an RO filter for drinking water, yikes.
    - anonzzzies 3mo ago
      I see that when you don’t know what is in there then sure, but we don’t have that issue. No lead or asbestos or fiber glass. Otherwise men in white suits arrive anyway.

amarant 3mo ago

Is fast fashion not a thing in the US? I was under the impression it was, but perhaps I was wrong...

dgellow 3mo ago
It definitely is, according to my experience traveling to NYC

dgellow 3mo ago

The keyword is _unsold_. If you bought clothes, they aren’t unsold

dathinab 3mo ago

it's a pretty big _international_ problem basically - company cheap mass produces clothes/shoes - new session (1/4 year) comes in (at beast)// it's fast fashion and there is a new trend (at worst) - the "old" clothes are sold with rabatt but either before the session end or limited to clothes already shipped to stores - this leaves a ton of clothes not shipped to physical shops and not sold in time - selling them very strongly discounted means they compete with the new batch of different clothes, not discounting them means they might block up store space (physical store) or storage space (online shop, storage cost at scale shouldn't be underestimated, especially if some clothes just don't sell) - so companies just destroy the unsold clothes _and write the production cost off as loss_. Turns out destroying + write off is more profitable then gifting or discounting... :( - this is especially true for brand-clothes. They are often produced for a fraction of sales price and don't want to see their stuff being sold for more then a small discount. For some of this brand clothes their values outright lies more in "you needed to pay a bunch for it" then it "being high quality" (beyond a certain baseline of quality). now the relevant question: Will this prevent companies from finding loopholes to still trash their clothes, especially brand clothes? Yes it won't prevent it. But it increases the cost/complexity of it so it will likely reduce it by quite a bit. But some big next "<brand still dumps clothes through loophole>" scandal is basically just a question of time. Still overall it looks like it will be beneficial from a wast, environment and climate POV while harming (way too) fast fashion which is good as fast fashion is harmful for all the previous points, laborer treatment, cloth quality and some others.

UltraSane 3mo ago

This law doesn't apply to individual consumers, only manufactures and retail stores.

maccard 3mo ago

I did a remodel last year. I filled 2 largeskips by the end of it. This is the first large job this house has had in 10 years, and it’s a 130 year old house. The cafe at the bottom of my street has roughly that amount of waste collected every 2 weeks - they fill their commercial trash bin every 2 days. I don’t know how much of that is waste vs old food but they generate orders of magnitude more waste than I do even when I’m making a huge mess.

altairprime 3mo ago
The EU has targeted foodservice with regulation as well, though it’s phased much more slowly (2030) than the clothing law was: https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/food-waste/eu-food-waste-relevant-legislation/food-use-and-waste-hierarchy_en https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/food-waste/eu-food-was... Here, too, they consider “stop overproducing” to be the biggest problem on the pyramid. I’m not as familiar with this effort (nor if it, or any related initiative, affects to-go / disposal-ware) but one can reasonably imagine they are targeting all severely wasteful overproduction given enough time.
- maccard 3mo ago
  Sure - but my point is that the waste by businesses absolutely dwarves domestic waste. I used to work in a shop, and we “recycled” (LDPE so not recyclable) more plastic in a week than I have used in the 10 years since I worked there. I’m not saying that individuals have no impact; our habits are absolutely important and we influence industry. But moving the needle on industry waste will have a more significant on the global situation than halving domestic waste in the UK.
  - altairprime 3mo ago
    The EU seems to agree: the 2030 target, set in 2025, requires a reduction of “10%, in processing and manufacturing” which will probably have an oversized impact on waste in actual kilos reduced, relative to the combined retail-domestic target.

Y-bar 3mo ago

One of my clients (a clothing brand) burns something in the range of 60-100 tonnes of clothes at the end of each season (4/year) here in the EU. They do it because it is easier and cheaper than to optimise the logistics chain. It is also cheaper than to recycle it. And they refuse to discount it or sell to secondary outlets to ”avoid brand dilution”.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]