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radu_floricica 5 hours ago [-]
> To prevent misuse, businesses relying on these exemptions must provide proof (e.g. documents or test results) and publish annual reports on what they have discarded.
I wonder if anybody is keeping track of everything a mid size business needs to take care of. Each particular report probably sounds like a reasonable request, but by now they're probably well into hundreds, and they're all outside the actual scope of the business (e.g. it may seem manageable for the bureaucrats designing them, because that's what they deal with all day, but not for a small organization doing... something else).
athrowaway3z 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure your complaint works in this case.
You only write a report if you want the exemption.
The hypothetical business you're imaging shouldn't be looking for an exemption.
The law's effect on small business is conceptually not too different from eg laws against dumping toxic sludge.
ablob 18 minutes ago [-]
You have to deal with this no matter what unless you can live with wasting storage space. You have to arrange extra sales or try and donate stuff (basically, go through all possible options that exclude it from being exempted) if you want to get rid of an item. Your estimates on sales count need to be pretty spot on to keep that low.
Donations are still taxable where I live, by the way, so all that shenanigans is added too. It's not just about the report itself. You can't get rid of products not valuable enough to keep around without adapting your whole business model.
Even if you are _not_ looking for an exemption, you will have to accommodate.
No one bothered to make any of the other options easier, only the previously simplest option was barred behind trying everything else. This is what over-bureaucratization looks like.
To use a different example:
No one wants to switch to public transport (which is already crowded anyway)? No problem, just ban driving unless you can prove that it's orders of magnitude faster and it's not feasible to move your residence. No further preparation is done; no thought goes beyond the horizon. "Eat this rule and deal with it, you don't have to deal with the paperwork if you're willing to spend 2 hours more on commuting". That's the line of thought here. There are no plans to make it actually viable to use the train, the other options are just barred behind this veil of plausible optionality. You can do it, of course. The issue arises from doing this with literally anything you tackle.
You essentially only add rules and special cases without ever consolidating them or even considering possible impact on adjacent topics. Everything grinds to a halt by doing this and nothing ever gets simplified. It is a huge issue on a landscape that favored small businesses (that can't afford divisions dealing with this) when the way the law is written suddenly requires structures only big companies or consultancies can provide. It entombs the market structure and drowns any competition in regulatory capture. We haven't even seen what happens once the markets are dominated by oligopolies and monopolies. By that time the only way to deal with the fall out will be even more rules, as the competitive landscape will already be dead.
I'm not against the goal of this regulation, but the recent way the rules have been made favor a market structure I consider incompatible with the goals of the EU.
no-name-here 3 hours ago [-]
Per the OP article, this only affects large businesses (and medium businesses after a period of years).
altairprime 4 hours ago [-]
At minimum, any medium business will be tracking disposal costs in its accounting books; the EU rule effectively taxes disposal by imposing regulatory processes upon it, so the net cost of disposal will increase to reflect the paper trail costs. The phased-in ‘large first, medium next’ started a while ago, giving mediums about twice as long (iirc?) to prepare for compliance as larges. One of the more predictable outcomes is that retailers will need to inspect and classify their completed-product waste streams, rather than simply dump every return bucket into the trash. Retailers are expected to do everything in their power to reduce the total volume of material inspected in order to increase profits, which in concert with stricter return regulations already in place, will force them to do various things.
Small retailers that process returns by taking the item out of the envelope, studying it, and then putting it back up for sale (either at full or reduced price, depending on new or cosmetic defect) will be entirely unaffected because their production costs vastly exceed their return inspection costs and they’ve been recording ‘sellable’ vs ‘worn’ vs ‘cosmetic defect’ somewhere this whole time anyways (or else they’d collapse even without these regulations!), and medium businesses will likely find their profits temporarily reduced — but since they were disposing of sellable products to begin with, they can either sell them to recover profits, donate them to reduce taxes, or accept the fractional inspection charge against profits and continue as-is.
Some possibilities: Reduce production defects (slower production/qa times), return rate), Reduce size variability (slower production/qa times), Improve fabric quality (higher production costs, lower future sales), Provide more detailed sizing charts (higher sales cost, lower return rates), Provide more consistent sizing (eg. band size 85 is not 80-90cm between different models and different brands), Reduce production batch sizes (less waste, more shipping costs), Reduce overseas manufacturing (higher cost production, lower cost/time shipping), Sell entire batches until sold out (increased inventory costs, maintains brand wealth-image), Donate wearable clothing to charity (tax deductions, goodwill), Switch from overseas large-batch production to domestic JIT (reduces inventory of never-sold products to zero), and so on.
isodev 1 hours ago [-]
As a mid sized business in touch with other mid-sized businesses - the burden you speak of doesn't exist. If you read the directive and others like it carefully, you will find they’re well integrated into reporting you already do. Each member state also adapts these to best fit their local legislation.
mnewme 3 hours ago [-]
This whole story that Europe suffers from overregulation is just in parts true, and mainly lazy thinking.
In fact there was a study by an American law school that came to the conclusion that the US has more bureaucracy than many European countries…
‘Europe’ is not substitutable by ‘Germany’: a one state counter-example does not substantiate a disproof of a union. Texas is not representative of how U.S. patent law works. Florida is not representative of how U.S. business regulation works. So, the recent HN post about German incorporation slowness fails, in isolation, to disprove the claim above that the US is more regulated than the EU; you’ll need to make your own case (or relevant citations!) about the EU (or Europe) rather than just Germany to be taken seriously here. Do you argue that “many” is the minority case out of all European countries? Are you evaluating difficulty weighted by GDP? Are you evaluating EU and non-EU together or separately? etc.
mnewme 3 minutes ago [-]
Exactly this! People compare to Europe as a whole when convenient and then cherry pick when it is inconvenient
oblio 3 hours ago [-]
Spoken as a German or as an American?
SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago [-]
I don't really find this article persuasive. To pick out a good example of why:
> The debate around chlorinated chicken was never really just about chicken. It became a symbol of something larger: the fear that “market access” would become a polite way of saying, “please lower your food and safety standards so our companies can sell more easily into your market.” You can dismiss that as protectionism if you like. From a European perspective, it often looks like defending standards that citizens broadly trust.
Chemical washing of chicken is a safe and effective way to reduce pathogens. European food agencies agree that it's safe and effective, there's really no dispute about this, and in the US that's the end of the regulatory story. But in Europe the regulators see it as their job to consider esoteric second order effects: if we make it too easy to clean your chicken meat, might that cause you to underinvest in efforts to keep pathogens from getting there in the first place? It might, and the status quo achieves acceptably low rates of foodborne illness, so there's no need to permit innovations in chicken processing.
It's true, I would concede, that regulatory agencies requiring businesses to do stuff in a way that citizens consider normal will produce strong standards that citizens broadly trust.
mnewme 2 minutes ago [-]
I have lived both in the US and two European countries. Food quality is not even on the same scale. So much better in Europe, you can’t even compare, no wonder life expectancy is higher.
Danox 2 hours ago [-]
Europe may get some things wrong, but in comparison to United States on food, they don’t, particularly eggs, chickens and baked goods, America allows to many substitutions for expediency (profit).
TitaRusell 1 hours ago [-]
Mandatory testosterone testing!
At the end of the day people want to impose their morality on on others. Whether it is crazy Christians or leftist eco warriors- don't let them take away your freedom. Keep on buying shit from China.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
> but not for a small organization doing... something else
But for you to do your "small organization", shouldn't you be required to have to consider the environment around you?
A bar of course doesn't want to care about the noise the patrons do on the terrace for example, but because we live in the world with other people, they do have to care about this, even if it's "something else" than what they want to do.
Or data centers as another (maybe more contemporary) example, where sometimes they have things that needs to be disposed of in a certain way. Yes, the data center operators aren't in the business of "toxic waste management", but if you want to run a data center, you need to figure out how to deal with the byproducts.
I don't think clothing companies should somehow be magically excepted from having to care about others.
warumdarum 3 hours ago [-]
Socialist micromanaging you say? You should see what those maniacs do with there farmers. The job has literally turned into bureaucrat who ocassionally works a field as hobby.
azan_ 3 hours ago [-]
Well yes, farming in European Union is pretty much eu-funded hobby. For good reasons of course (food security etc), but if European protectionism and donations were gone, farmers would be much worse off.
preisschild 3 hours ago [-]
Most of the EU budget goes to agricultural subsidies, the least we can expect of them is to keep their books orderly
outime 4 hours ago [-]
The "regulation kills businesses" saying is often (not always) exactly right.
dinfinity 4 hours ago [-]
Is it? What is the proof for that?
I think we've seen time and time again that self-regulation of the industry doesn't work and that businesses will gladly fuck over society if they can get away with it and make more money. Usually that behavior is even defended with saying "Well, it's not their responsibility to solve society's issues. They are there to make money."
Barring nationalization of an industry, heavy regulation and/or taxation/subsidizing are the only ways to reliably protect the interests of society. If some businesses get killed in the process, so be it.
cbmuser 3 hours ago [-]
»If some businesses get killed in the process, so be it.«
The problem with this attitude is that the rest of the world often doesn’t have these strict regulations and as result, businesses aren’t killed but just leaving the country.
palata 2 hours ago [-]
And as a result you get monopolies like TooBigTech and you can't compete anyway.
Arainach 2 hours ago [-]
If a business can't be profitable while treating employees, customers, and the environment well, then it going out of business or leaving is not a loss.
seszett 2 hours ago [-]
Is that a justification for resuming slavery, child labour and dumping chemicals in our rivers?
r3trohack3r 1 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure you can oppose slavery and support what GP said without significant cognitive dissonance
DangitBobby 29 minutes ago [-]
Not really. It's a race to the bottom.
3 hours ago [-]
4 hours ago [-]
bananamogul 5 hours ago [-]
"Companies may only destroy unsold clothes and shoes in limited cases, such as when items are unsafe or damaged, counterfeit or infringing intellectual property rights, or are rejected by charities or donation schemes."
Nike's unsold, defective, or returned shoes are ground up to make carpet padding. They're processed by the truckload in a large grinding machine.
It seems that under these rules, this would be illegal - ?
altairprime 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, with the exception of ‘unsafe’ where a shoe is used and/or non-cosmetically defective.
The law reduces wasted production inputs — materials, energy, and labor — as well as production outputs — wearable shoes, here. This directly regulates a practice by brands where they destroy wearable clothing rather than see their latest branded fashion worn by people who bought it at a discount or received it for free. This also directly regulates corporations from using grinders, melters, incinerators, landfills, and overseas ‘recycling’ (=landfills) to replace warehouses with retailers, accelerate product cycle times and derive FOMO sales benefits without the cost of reducing their batch sizes. The apparel industry is destroying something like one third of what it produces, so it’s certainly earned regulation of its ‘this shall not be sold’ decisions to its disfavor.
I would expect Nike in the EU market to either increase product prices and/or decrease release intervals until their inventory supply is lowered to meet demand while claiming that it’s the EU’s fault that their hottest shoes aren’t yet available, rather than maintaining their existing cycle times and quantities by donating their wearable, branded, wealth-signaling shoes to be worn by poor people. (Perhaps that’s already begun?)
kelvinjps10 4 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't they have to make discounts or sell it therefore lowering the price.
altairprime 3 hours ago [-]
Nike certainly could choose to sell at a discount rather than grind unsold shoes into rubber. They have a wealth-signal brand to maintain, however, so they will resist doing so if at all possible.
Schiendelman 1 hours ago [-]
Nike is famously one of the less wealth signalling shoe brands. Until recently I don't think they had a product for sale for more than ~$220 at all.
SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago [-]
Is it really the case that Nike is a wealth signalling brand? In the investigation I think you're referring to (https://www.fastcompany.com/90697259/nike-appears-to-be-shre...), I find Nike's side of the story much more plausible: if they find in processing returns that a shoe appears to have been altered, they prefer to reuse the shoe materials for other purposes, rather than carefully inspecting individual shoes to analyze what the alterations are and whether they might compromise the shoe's performance.
altairprime 3 hours ago [-]
Regarding ‘wealth signaling’, a similar lens to mine would be ‘brand dilution’, which is certainly a more widely-accepted concept in business management; see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959809
The EU has disagreed with Nike, and the law is now in effect.
SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago [-]
The law is indeed in effect. Perhaps the new supply will revitalize Nike's Refurbished program, and European consumers will buy lots of used sneakers at discount prices. My bet is that it will not, and they'll mostly buy a slightly lower supply of new shoes that were made more expensive to cover the costs of refurbishing everything.
I do agree that this law will have a more meaningful effect on luxury clothing brands, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if certain kinds of fast fashion become impractical to offer in the EU. More power to them, as long as people don't start complaining in a few years when Zara's trendsetting new line of blouses isn't available in European stores.
ryandrake 1 hours ago [-]
It’s probably been 20 years since I’ve even noticed what brand of shoes anyone was wearing, let alone processed that information into some kind of economic class judgment. Is this really still a thing?
As far as I can tell (although I'm no lawyer, sorry Nike), the point is to reduce waste and to increase recycled content in use. With these two main objectives, what Nike is doing seem to be fitting within that. It's not the "destruction" itself that is bad, but what you do with that after the destruction, recycling it doesn't create waste (or maybe, as much waste) as outright destroying+throwing all of it.
pfdietz 5 hours ago [-]
What is considered recycling? Is convert the clothing into fuel pellets considered recycling? What about thermal decomposition for feedstocks for chemical manufacture (and what if 75% of the mass isn't useful for that and is instead burned in turbines for cogeneration)?
Down-cycling is a thing. Even aluminum and steel get down-cycled.
I have no sympathy for recycling fetishism.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
From previously linked text:
> The concept of destruction as outlined in this Regulation should cover the last three activities on the waste hierarchy, namely recycling, other recovery and disposal. Preparation for reuse, including refurbishment and remanufacturing, should not be considered destruction. Preventing destruction will reduce the environmental impact of those products by reducing the generation of waste and by disincentivising overproduction.
Basically, does it end up as waste or does it end up being repurposed in some good way? If the former, we should find a way of getting rid of it, if it's the latter, it's A-OK!
altairprime 4 hours ago [-]
To clarify without using the word ‘waste’ into two simple bullets:
1. Destruction is conversion of any usable product X to any non-X form (even if the new form is usable).
2. Destruction is prohibited (for large businesses, right now).
Usable is not perfectly defined and will be a judgment call, but one can construct a common sense set of ‘what is unusable?’ definitions that an inspector or judge would accept — so long as sellers have not explicitly caused such outcomes:
- Product lacks structural integrity (a loose thread doesn’t count, a missing sleeve does count)
- Product is contaminated (tried on and didn’t fit doesn’t count, motor oil stains does count)
- Product is unsafe (tried on and didn’t fit doesn’t count, underwear returned with safety liner removed may count, product has been worn for more than try-on period may count)
Note that, for example, the EU is likely to say ‘launder it first, then donate it’ for products that are worn and returned but can be safely donated after laundering; so they are specifically aware of some of the loopholes that corps will aim for first.
sixhobbits 45 minutes ago [-]
This seems kinda backwards, as far as I know charities and donation schemes are overwhelmed by clothing donations. Our problem isn't that we are destroying clothes that could be used somewhere else, the problems are manufacturing low quality clothing that lasts 2-3 wears, and fast fashion where people buy clothing for a specific event.
If they want to achieve their goals they should be aiming for demand destruction on _new_ clothes, once the clothes are unwanted it's too late.
But seems better to somehow incentivize fabric recycling and higher quality clothes. Even expensive clothes fall apart these days.
jay_kyburz 16 minutes ago [-]
I'm no expert, but I think the charities are overwhelmed it because very few people want secondhand clothes. They have a lot coming in and not much going out.
I hope this will result in lots of _new_ clothes being sold very cheaply in discount outlets.
vsviridov 2 hours ago [-]
Create a holding company and register some trademarked design. Apply said design to the product. License the design to the manufacturer.
When the manufacturer wants to destroy unsold stock - revoke the license to the design. You can now fully legally destroy unsold stock for "violating ip rights"
LaundroMat 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't that recycling instead of destroying?
Wicher 5 hours ago [-]
Turning shoes into carpet padding is probably "downcycling". I think recycling would mean most of the shoe would be used for new shoes or something of similar complexity, retaining the grade and value of the input materials.
Downcycling is when you reuse something for a less refined purpose. For instance you can use contaminated plastics (im the sense of somewhat mixed types, bits and bobs of labels etc) to make humble park benches, but you won't be then reusing that low grade park bench plastic to make the Hubble space telescope with.
Still, downcycling into carpet is better than dumping the shoes on a coral atoll of course. Yet it's a step below recycling.
jjice 5 hours ago [-]
I guess it comes down to if that is considered recycling. I'd personally consider it such, but not sure what the legal definitions will be.
sajithdilshan 5 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure all those brands would now export those clothes to non-EU Balkan countries or even Turkey to be destroyed.
mattalex 3 hours ago [-]
Why do you assume that the entire EU has brain damage and did not think of this _most obvious_ loophole?
Sure the companies could commit crimes but if that is enough of a reason not to pass laws then we better start striking murder of the books as well.
The EU cannot control every avenue you might be sneaking products out for destruction. The goal is not to prevent all sort of destruction, just make it risky enough not to be worth it: Since it's illegal to do, you now have something to fear when you try to get away with your (now) crime.
ESPR regulates the entire placement of products, not only the destruction, e.g. the Digital Product Passport (DPP) which every product has to have (it's slowly being phased in over the coming decade) gives information about repairability, resource used, recyclability,...
To do the exporting for destruction you would need to fake the entire paper trail of the product, committing countless numbers of document forgery.
In general the "you are not allowed to destroy unsold goods" part is arguably the small element of ESPR.
ESPR also contains the right-to-repair legislation, where ESPR introduces requirements (or at the very least disclosure requirements) for
- Design for durability
- Availability of spare parts
- Access to repair information
- Software support obligations
- Design for repairability / Restricting design practices intended to hinder repair
The "don't destroy working items" is just a one component of this. The more important component is the DPP which makes the product lifetime traceable.
vasco 26 minutes ago [-]
Because it happens with other things like recycling rules for most trash? How many years of EU exporting trash to places without regulation now?
sajithdilshan 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mikaeluman 5 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Rather than deal with it, there will just be some shell company in non EU they can export to and have it destroyed there...
Though that will obviously incur a larger cost than today.
sajithdilshan 5 hours ago [-]
Transportation would be costly, but it could be that in whole it would be much cheaper than discarding them in let’s say in Germany. I can imagine the price to destroy 1kg of clothes in Serbia way less than in Germany
b112 5 hours ago [-]
What typically happens is that people buy up these clothes in massive auction/lots, then just sell them on Amazon. As Amazon joins all listings together, 100 sellers of the same item all have the same reviews/etc.
So some slightly damaged shirt, or a shirt returned and such, ends up sold by these secondary sellers as new. This is part of why people destroy clothes upon return, so that secondary sellers can't buy their own returned product at $1, and sell it making more than the original seller would have.
Not to mention, all returns I've been noticing, resold from Amazon, are heavily treated now with some sort of spray. I can only presume bedbugs were getting returned with used clothing...
sajithdilshan 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t think m that’s happening in EU. Most of the clothes I see on Amazon are the same as I find on Temu. Only the prices are higher on Amazon
b112 20 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure what you mean. Temu has nothing to do with this.
* people buy something on Amazon, return it due to defect or just don't like it
* product is currently sold in lots via auction by Amazon via bids, wholesale (not on amazon.com, but via other channels)
* 3rd parties buy the lots, sort, and re-package and sell on Amazon
As Amazon joins all listings for "shirt brand $x colour $y" into one product listing, this means that the original seller of the shirt, even the brand owner, now is competing with its own returns.
Not sure how to make this clearer.
earth-tattoo 4 hours ago [-]
Or perpetually store it in an "open warehouse" where it rots over time.
izacus 5 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a lot of extra work which will make this kind of behaviour less financially viable vs. just selling or overproducing it.
thefourthchime 4 hours ago [-]
The EU is doing everything it can to fail. The only thing that seems to be coming out of the EU in the last 20 years is regulation. It seems to be its only invention and contribution to itself. They have no upper bounds on creativity when it comes to creating rules that disrupt business.
I can't tell if this is coming from jealousy or incompetence—or perhaps a combination of both. They see the rest of the world, especially the United States and China, getting richer and more advanced, and their response seems to be to shield themselves from it instead of competing.
Volkswagen in Germany is going to lay off 100,000 jobs and shutter plants. Half of the EU is recklessly in debt. And Germany is supposed to be the good country with the good economy.
cbg0 3 hours ago [-]
You're arguing in favor of destroying unworn clothes instead of donating to charity or discounting them as somehow being good for business? The point of this is to control against wasteful business practices, not a ban on producing or selling clothes.
The EU is a $23 trillion economy, hardly a slouch even though it is underperforming.
The VW example is actually something you probably don't understand - they're failing because they're an inefficient business, not because of EU regulations or Germany not having a "good economy". Toyota produces almost twice as many vehicles per employee.
mattalex 2 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't even say that VW is a failing company: They sold the largest number of EVs in the EU in 2025 (https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-brand-domi...) and that is before you consider that e.g. Audi, Cupra and Skoda are _also_ VW brands (and some of the ford cars are built on top of VW's EV platform).
The main problem they have is that you just need a fraction of the number of people to build an electric car than what you need for a combustion car. You no longer need complex transmission, exhaust filtering, turbos, highly complex combustion engines,... all of which are marvels of engineering but no longer necessary for EVs.
VW "main" (i.e. excluding sub-brands like audi) was already rather highly staffed (though part of this is due to them taking over some duties for their sub-brands), so the employee impact is higher than what you would expect, but even for a reasonably staffed car company this would imply huge layoffs and changes in the structure of the company.
snowpid 1 hours ago [-]
thank you! These are the comments I drive on HN. Not the lazy take, EU economy is failling because of fashion regulation.
sajithdilshan 3 hours ago [-]
I agree that VW is mostly responsible for its own demise, they got too comfortable with their success and soon would be the blackberry of car manufacturers.
NoImmatureAdHom 3 hours ago [-]
Neat info. I would guess that Toyota produces twice as many vehicles per employee at least in part because the regulatory and social environment where Toyota operates is better.
There is often an underlying sensible economic reason for doing things like destroying perfectly wearable shoes or burning edible crops. Understanding involves admitting things people don't want to admit to themselves.
Nike destroying shoes: the shoes they make are just cheap synthetics and foam, and the per-pair materials and manufacturing cost is a small part of the cost of the shoes. Nike is a marketing company that sorta does shoes. The shoes themselves aren't a very important part of the value they provide to people who buy their shoes. People who buy their shoes are buying a social signal about who they are and how much money they have that doesn't work if the shoes are too cheap.
gib444 3 hours ago [-]
This is some top-tier bait
nieksand 6 hours ago [-]
It seems like this policy would lead to shortages in less common sizes of clothing.
cbg0 3 hours ago [-]
It can be made available online with a longer lead time if the manufacturers care enough about it. I guess it depends on whether the complexity is worth it, because if you're just selling cheap fast fashion then discounting/donating might still be worth it even if you produce excess, but more high-end brands probably won't stock uncommon sizes.
altairprime 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, this will likely exacerbate that further in the short-term: if retailers simply stop producing outlier sizes to reduce disposal of those sizes, then various niches will open up. In US women’s flats, very few go up to size 12+ (it’s already higher-cost to make products in outlier sizes and most don’t!) and so the one retailer (agaik) that offers that size has 100% market share, and keeps an inventory warehouse of unsold product that is listed until it sells at up to 80% discounts after a year-plus on the shelf. Another handful of retailers specialize exclusively in women’s clothing for people XL and above, which allows them to profit equally as well from less-common sizes.
My hope, however, is that this reduces overseas manufacturing in favor of domestic, which would allow retailers to dramatically reduce the shipping costs for small production batches, so that they’re able to simply produce more small batches of less-common sizes in response to demand. Sure, they might see a few percent lower profits per item, but they’ll be able to sell considerably more of their product simply by raising their supply to meet demand with finer granularity than the cheaper ‘produce an entire season one-time only and store it in a cargo container’ model offers today.
4ndrewl 6 hours ago [-]
The invisible hand of the market will rectify this of course. Nothing to see here.
groundzeros2015 18 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean? This is a case of a regulation distorting the markets ability to price and distribute goods.
mpyne 4 hours ago [-]
The invisible hand of the market has been handcuffed a bit here though. Though I imagine this will simply show up as higher cost rather than blanket inavailability.
altairprime 3 hours ago [-]
If a charity sets up a ‘returned product classification’ flow and issues tax credits to companies donating their return flow to the charity, then companies can simply shunt returns to charity and lower their costs in triplicate: 1) changeover of return provider replaces expense with deduction; 2) compliance with EU regulations costs shipping to charity; 3) charity provides itemized receipts for compliance and further tax credits. Of course, companies won’t actually lower their prices to reflect the net reduction in costs, but it will certainly strip away the excuse that they must raise costs.
mpyne 1 hours ago [-]
Couldn't they already do this today, without an additional regulation?
Why is a charity supposed to be able to magically conjure sales the original seller was unable to find?
I just think if it was as easy to doing this, there's already be nothing for regulators to be complaining about.
leonidasrup 2 hours ago [-]
The invisible hand of the market is already disabled by regulation, in this case trademark protection.
For example: if Nike is willing to destroy 100$ shoes, instead of selling them at 40$ discount, for brand protection, another shoemaker could try make identical shoes and sell them at discount. But the alternative shoemaker is not allowed to make identical shoes, this would infringe Nike trademark.
6 hours ago [-]
josephcsible 6 hours ago [-]
How do you figure?
flowerbreeze 6 hours ago [-]
It seems plausible. Less common sizes have a lower chance of being sold out, so if they can no longer be destroyed at the end and need to be further managed at lower quantities, it can become more cost effective to simply not make them. Whether it is true or not, I don't know.
palata 5 hours ago [-]
Hmm... say you estimate that you will sell 1000 items of "normal size", you stock 1000 items, and hope that you sell all of them. You end up selling 900, you have a remaining 10%.
No say you estimate that you will sell 10 items of "less common size", you stock 10 items, and hope that you sell all of them. You end up selling 9, you have a remaining 10%.
How does that make a difference?
flowerbreeze 4 hours ago [-]
It's more like if you find one mushroom in the forest, it doesn't make sense to bring it home, get the knife, clean it, get the pan, oil the pan, fry the mushroom, eat it, clean the knife, clean the pan, put things away. It's not worth the effort for just one mushroom. If there are many, a lot of these actions only need to be taken once.
palata 2 hours ago [-]
Right. So what you're saying is that instead you should be allowed to go in the forest to get another 99 mushrooms, give them the same treatment, and then throw them away? And suddenly it's worth it for one mushroom if you threw away 99 other mushrooms in the process?
wisty 1 hours ago [-]
> Right. So what you're saying
If you start a sentence with "so what you are saying", and then say something obviously silly ...
The argument would be that it's a large burden to have to write a report if you forage 10 mushrooms and toss one away.
Low volumes, higher fixed costs.
1 hours ago [-]
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
But that's about the cost of making them. That doesn't change between the destroy and not-destroy scenarios.
jandrewrogers 5 hours ago [-]
There is no global definition of "less common size". It varies greatly from one locale to another. At the same time, production has relatively high fixed costs and is centralized.
It would be very expensive for the global factory to customize the distribution of sizes manufactured for a retail store in Des Moines, Iowa. The order is tiny and it would require customized logistics, all of which greatly increases cost and complexity.
ungreased0675 4 hours ago [-]
Companies should have extensive data on how many of what size they can expect to sell.
altairprime 3 hours ago [-]
The missing factor in cheap-fast fashion here is warehousing costs. Companies are shredding shoes and landfilling clothing — and underproducing relative to what they could sell — rather than paying money to store products in a warehouse. One possible outcome the EU sellers can choose is to reinvest in product storage, so that they can raise their production targets to meet demand rather than to minimize product storage — at which point there is a vast demand for outlier sizes that is, today, unmet due to the unwillingness to store anything.
toast0 6 hours ago [-]
If your minimum run is 1000 of a size, and you can only really sell 500 because it's an uncommon size, and you would prefer to sell at full price or not at all, seems like making that size no longer fits your plans.
watermelon0 6 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't it be cheaper to only produce 500 items, instead of producing 1k, and throwing half of it away?
binaryturtle 5 hours ago [-]
Many years ago I worked in the printing industry. F.ex. a client wants 100 products of something (e.g. posters or flyers), usually it was more cost effective to produce a 1000 (or more) and then throw away 900 the client didn't need. Obviously a huge waste of material.
palata 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't that law exactly trying to avoid that kind of waste?
toast0 5 hours ago [-]
Yes. But in some cases the waste will be avoided by not doing a production run at all if the minimum production quantity is too high and the law prohibits destroying the unwanted product.
palata 2 hours ago [-]
I just don't get how it is cheaper in total to produce more units and throw them away.
If you make more units, it's cheaper per unit. But doesn't it mean that waste is always a loss?
jandrewrogers 3 minutes ago [-]
The direct cost of manufacturing the units is only a small percentage of the total costs of the retail product. Logistics is often a bigger cost. You can create substantial economic efficiencies elsewhere in the supply chain by allowing some manufacturing waste.
Production processes that require more production and supply chain customization for each order have significantly higher costs that need to be amortized. It is cheaper to pack and ship identical boxes at the factory than to customize the contents and logistics of each box for every retailer or customer. The more variation and complexity you allow into the supply chain, the more capital infrastructure, equipment, and people you need, all of which must be amortized into the retail unit cost.
The costs of increased supply chain variability and customizability can easily exceed the cost of wasting a few units. You may have wasted hundreds of t-shirts but you also didn't have to invest the millions of dollars in systems and equipment that would have prevented that waste. These are low-margin businesses, everyone is carefully tracking and attributing these costs.
Supply chains in most industries continuously and ruthlessly optimize to squeeze out waste while trying to increase flexibility. The number of items that are produced on demand -- and therefore produce little waste -- has grown dramatically over the last couple decades. However, many goods intrinsically have long, slow supply chains which makes waste all but unavoidable.
binaryturtle 15 minutes ago [-]
F.ex. in the case of flyers or other smaller print products: You will not print one product for one customer at once, but many at once (e.g. from different customers), that will share a sheet. So, e.g., you print 1000 of everything, aka 1000 sheets. If a customer needs 2000 they get two spots on the sheet. If a customer wants 4000, they get 4 spots. Now, if a customer needs less than 1000, they still need one spot for the 1000. For that customer this still will be way cheaper than doing a separate small series print.
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
For printers, the cost is pretty much all in the setup. Printing 1000 copies costs about the same as printing 20.
SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago [-]
1k in this example would be the minimum needed to make it worth the static cost of setting up and tearing down the production run.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
> prefer to sell at full price or not at all
That really only applies to luxury designer brands where selling at a discount can dilute the brand prestige, is Gucci, Versace, etc. really destroying unsold inventory at large volumes vs. standard retailers?
Stevvo 5 hours ago [-]
Yes. The law was motivated by reports of luxury retailers destroying their entire stock every year. Usual stores just discount stuff until it sells.
josephcsible 5 hours ago [-]
But clothes aren't perishable, so why would you only be able to sell 500, rather than it just taking twice as long to sell all 1000?
toast0 5 hours ago [-]
Fashionable clothes are perishable. "Nobody" wants to buy clothes from last season or last year.
Storing the clothes until they come back in fashion is expensive... and some materials really won't be useful after sitting for 10 years anyway. (Elastic bands really are perishable)
altairprime 3 hours ago [-]
> Fashionable clothes are perishable.
False. Not all apparel demand is for street cred, and non-‘season’ clothes can still be fashionable. ‘Last season’ is about wealth signaling and FOMO, and while I do love fashion as an entertainment and my hobby in design of it, the level of flux we have now in everyday clothing shapes and fabrics is openly hostile to the non-wealthy being clothed well. I don’t know if the EU’s regulations will work in full or at all, but I’m cheering them for trying.
A while back someone on Tumblr noted that they would buy and wear a full 360° hue spectrum of 360 t-shirts in spectrum order from 0..359, just to fuck with people’s minds as their shirt is the same color day after day until suddenly “wait, I thought your shirt was green” makes the people around them feel like they’re hallucinating en masse. This joke — well, it’s not a joke, this product with great fit would sell out even at 30° intervals! — T-shirts are shaped the same year after year, and fast fashion has had to resort to mining old brand imagery to try and convince people to buy them. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to find unprinted t-shirts at outlier sizes, because that’s slightly less profitable than waves of shapeless L-XL junk. Yes, I’m fine with Hot Topic collaborations, but they need to stop being the market majority.
pqtyw 1 hours ago [-]
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atrus 5 hours ago [-]
Because it won't take twice as long, but 10x as long. There's typically a large rush on a new design, followed by a slow tick in sales. Meanwhile you have to pay to warehouse it, pay tax on the inventory, etc.
jandrewrogers 5 hours ago [-]
Currently, unpopular sizes are over-produced because they are subsidized by popular sizes. If the unpopular sizes have to be paid for, the logistics and production processes would push producers to under-produce popular sizes.
A key insight is that what constitutes an "unpopular size" is a very local phenomenon. Every point of retail sells a different, semi-predictable distribution of sizes. It is much cheaper to ship sizes no one will buy than to manage the logistics of exactly matching local demand for a specific distribution of sizes.
I asked the same question to someone who works in this business and got an eye-opening detailed explanation that made it obvious in hindsight why things the work the way the do. The difference in product cost and logistics infrastructure was not small.
cm2012 5 hours ago [-]
Normally you can overproduce clothing and make three of every size or something, knowing that it only costs a couple bucks to make another shirt, for instance. And you can throw out if you make too many. If it's illegal to throw it out, maybe that raises the price from $2 to $4 because now you have to pay for storage for a long time. So you'll buy less inventory at the start, which usually means cutting less common sizes first
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
> because now you have to pay for storage for a long time
Or you sell the extras off at a discount and it's fine.
s1artibartfast 6 hours ago [-]
It's really different depending on if the manufacturer has Brand reputation or is just a replaceable good. For no name jeans, they probably just keep making them and donate the leftovers.
For a high-end designer dress, may be better to not manufacture large or small sizes that don't sell frequently.
dash2 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t understand why they would ban this rather than charge for it. It seems very likely that destroying unsold clothes is sometimes the socially efficient thing to do, even after taking into account the environmental externalities.
bulder 6 hours ago [-]
Destroying unsold clothes is financially the most efficient thing to do. It remains unclear to me how taking actions to maintain higher markups on products would be socially efficient in any way. Companies of course can keep doing it, they just will face financial and legislative repercussions for it.
dash2 3 hours ago [-]
If you can't sell clothes to anyone, then it may be more socially efficient to destroy them than (a) keep them in a warehouse or (b) ship them overseas. Both (a) and (b) can have substantial environmental costs. I don't think it should be hard to come up with other plausible cases. You're assuming there's only one reason companies do this. I don't deny that that's a possible reason. I also don't see why taxing that behaviour would not reduce it.
nairboon 2 hours ago [-]
Or (c) lower the price to the market clearing price point and your clothes will be gone.
dash2 2 hours ago [-]
You're assuming there is such a price! Charity shops throw out the majority of clothes they are given: some things just will never sell.[1]
Once once they are rejected by charities, they can be destroyed just like before this law. EU regulators are flawed humans, but you can be assured that any argument you can come up with in 10 minutes has been considered.
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
Those are used clothes. New clothes, especially from a brand that would use a shredder to have a little more exclusivity? I expect almost all to sell just fine.
jandrewrogers 2 hours ago [-]
Market clearing prices can be negative i.e. you have to pay someone to "buy" them. This regularly happens in commodities markets. In agriculture, for example, negative market clearing prices is why a lot of food ends up in a landfill instead of on store shelves.
quotemstr 2 hours ago [-]
How do you know the "social value" is real value if you ignore the market?
17 minutes ago [-]
roysting 6 hours ago [-]
That was my initial thought too; just make it a non-deductible charge, ideally, payable from executive compensation.
Or they could also just levy higher taxes/fees on synthetic fibers and clothing that cannot be repaired (there are several reasons), and at the same time support the industry for natural, truly biodegradable fibers and their research?
This seems like more ivory tower navel gazing.
And that doesn’t even touch on all the jurisdictional and financial shenanigans that immediately come to my mind how you can circumvent that.
Government legislatures really should have red team groups that have to be included in legislative processes with the objective of punching holes into legislation.
cromka 6 hours ago [-]
Because it promotes recycling instead of being another tax.
pyuser583 3 hours ago [-]
Recycling an object almost always means destroying it.
dash2 3 hours ago [-]
A tax would also promote recycling, since that would avoid the tax?
Saline9515 6 hours ago [-]
It looks like a great opportunity for mafia networks to get paid by clothing brands in order to dispose of the stocks.
kps 5 hours ago [-]
Now I'm imagining someone dumped in the river chained to a pallet of t-shirts rather than a cinder block.
HelloUsername 3 hours ago [-]
in order to dispose of the socks
palata 5 hours ago [-]
I mean at this point they may as well have a deal to let the mafia steal cars in the parking lot and share the benefits...
tancop 7 hours ago [-]
some places already do this for food where anything thats after sell by date but still safe to eat has to be donated to a food bank.
i think it should be expanded to cover more categories than food and clothes when reuse and recycling infra grows to take the demand. its not just good for the environment it also prevents producers from restricting supply to keep their profits high.
the ultimate goal is make it illegal to destroy or intentionally damage anything usable before it reaches consumers. that would create a new ecosystem of discount stores and giveaway centers, and save everyone a ton of money.
jandrewrogers 6 hours ago [-]
Who pays for the logistics cost of moving and stocking these products in discount stores and giveaway centers? That is a large percentage of the total cost of production and the reason disposal is cheaper.
If those costs are paid for by taxpayers then the consumers are in effect involuntarily buying products they would not have otherwise bought, just with more steps. We already see this with agricultural subsidies.
If those costs are charged back to the producer then it becomes economically optimal to under-produce, which will cause prices to rise and risk shortages but eliminate waste. One can make the argument that higher prices for basic goods to reduce waste is a social good but it also impoverishes consumers.
All of these scenarios have happened empirically countless times. That almost every producer over-produces to some extent at no profit to themselves when allowed has strong "Chesterton's Fence" characteristics.
rzwitserloot 6 hours ago [-]
It's a somewhat blunt instrument used to internalize some externalities: Making a product and then destroying it is wasteful, and the market will fix all internalized costs of that waste, but some of those costs are externalized. Having society pay somewhat for producing clothes that are then worn, that's one thing. Having society pay for pointless waste is another.
What you've said is: Looking only at the internalized costs, pointless-wasting a percentage of clothes costs X but reduces clothes cost in the store by Y, with Y being larger than X.
Okay. Irrelevant - that math doesn't include externalized costs. It may well be that this is a stupid idea, but "market decided destroying some clothes was more efficient" doesn't prove anything unless you can show that the size of the externalized costs to this process are 0 or close enough to 0 to have no meaningful relevance.
loeg 5 hours ago [-]
You could internalize the cost of waste more generically by charging appropriately for landfill use and letting producers decide how much it's worth avoiding waste. Instead of just banning a particular waste stream by a particular industry, with distortive consequences.
rzwitserloot 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, and that sounds like a better plan, but evidently that requires more political capital than is available.
altairprime 2 hours ago [-]
There’s a missing component here: “Pray we do not regulate the deal further.”
Governments tend to be annoyed at having to regulate and will often ‘somewhat’ regulate the worst excesses and then do the equivalent of a staring contest with those regulated. If business push right up to the wire and fight every tiny loophole then they risk being hit with a second wave of much more severe regulations; if they generally comply and don’t embarrass regulators and politicians, then there isn’t need to spend more capital on better regulation. At some level it’s very costly to micromanage business regulation gestures at California but so there’s definitely some decisions to be made about How Far To Go Each Time that aren’t simply due to a lack of political willpower.
SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago [-]
Again, the waste is not pointless, it's part of an inventory management strategy to ensure adequate supply. If your local grocery store established a policy that they'll never buy more meat than they're sure they can sell before the expiration date, they'd routinely run out.
IneffablePigeon 5 hours ago [-]
The result of laws like this is not that the store will never buy too much, it’s that when they do buy too much they will give it away to somewhere it can be used instead of destroying it. It will not cost them much if any more to simply give things to food banks or charity shops.
loeg 5 hours ago [-]
It in fact does cost them more to give things than to destroy them.
rzwitserloot 4 hours ago [-]
... and it costs society more to process the destroyed waste, and it costs society more to then deal with the fallout of shelters not having enough clothes.
Or not. Who knows. The point is, this 'economically it is more efficient' is not a proven case because the externalities need to be taken into account, and so far the person I've been responding to seems to not understand this part, or is ignoring it.
SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure everyone in the conversation is understanding each other. Saying the waste is pointless implies to me that it has no value, that companies could eliminate it with small costs and no other tradeoffs and they just don't want to bother. That's not accurate; a system with no oversupply is necessarily a system with fewer choices and more shortages.
The tradeoff may be worth it in some contexts, but if you don't understand that there are tradeoffs, you're going end up proposing silly policies like the original commenter's idea that nobody should ever be allowed to destroy any object a consumer could use.
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
"it would be a small cost" and "there are tradeoffs" can both be true at the same time!
If the benefit they get from waste is like 10% of the value they're destroying, then in a broad sense it is pointless.
And nobody is arguing against oversupply. Oversupply itself is fine.
SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago [-]
It's not so easy to give things away at scale. If someone deposited 500 kilograms of assorted meat products outside your front door right now, with a note attached saying they need to be consumed or frozen in the next 24 hours or they'll go bad, how much work would it take for you to deal with that?
Clothing is of course a bit easier to deal with (it'll still grow mildew if you don't protect it from moisture!), but the source link explicitly anticipates there will be some circumstances where it's impossible to give away clothing and authorizes destruction in that case.
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
Is that scenario supposed to be relevant?
This isn't some random guy. Their entire job is dealing with the logistics of big piles of clothes, and they have months in advance to plan.
SpicyLemonZest 26 minutes ago [-]
There just aren't that many people in developed countries who can make use of a pallet of unsellable clothing. Even free clothing distributors - which most organizations accepting clothing donations are not, by the way - generally strive to provide a broad selection of desirable clothing rather than a bunch of copies of an unpopular shirt.
jyounker 5 hours ago [-]
Do you have proof of that assertion?
jandrewrogers 5 hours ago [-]
Happens all the time at my local butcher shop. They make a point of using the whole animal -- no waste -- but that means they are frequently out of the more popular products. For the most popular parts you sometimes have to reserve it a week in advance from a future animal.
herbst 6 hours ago [-]
> Who pays for the logistics cost of moving and stocking these products in discount stores and giveaway centers?
All the examples I know of (Austria, Switzerland) are social clubs/associations (whatever that is called) and DO NOT depend on tax payer money.
groundzeros2015 20 minutes ago [-]
> that would create a new ecosystem of discount stores and giveaway centers, and save everyone a ton of money.
No. The real cost storage and selling, not the finished product. You don't magically get competent organizations to sell that popping out of the ground.
I have worked at a donation center like goodwill before. They get tons of stuff and throw away most of it. People won't buy it and they don't have time or space.
s1artibartfast 6 hours ago [-]
It may be an incentive to produce less and restrict options available. It really depends on how much harm it does to the company to donate or mark down their product.
mc32 4 hours ago [-]
Food4Less I think is owned by a larger grocery store brand. They sell near due date or past due date foods at a reduced price. There are also third party past due grocers in secondary cities.
storus 4 hours ago [-]
Africa is going to be full of old Versaces, Balenciagas, Guccis and Valentinos.
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't that drive textile manufacturing out of the EU?
petcat 4 hours ago [-]
I think that's the point. EU doesn't actually want these factories to operate in the EU. They just want to buy the clothes from elsewhere.
But then of course they cry a lot when they realize how easy it has become for China and USA to squeeze them.
Tough consequences of stuff like this.
enaaem 2 hours ago [-]
No, this will give EU textile manufacturing an advantage, because they mostly produce low volume high value products. This will hurt fast fashion importers the most.
xnx 7 hours 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 7 hours 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 7 hours ago [-]
It's companies dumping unsold ranges of clothes as new ranges come in. Not people.
tialaramex 5 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
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Stromgren 7 hours 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 6 hours 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.
Stromgren 5 hours 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.
phoronixrly 6 hours ago [-]
Perfume? Low-margin? Getting hits ranging between 50% and 85% depending on how luxury the brand is considered to be...
bigballsbjorn 6 hours ago [-]
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maccard 6 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
The EU has targeted foodservice with regulation as well, though it’s phased much more slowly (2030) than the clothing law 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.
Y-bar 5 hours 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”.
4 hours ago [-]
comrade1234 6 hours 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.
microtonal 6 hours ago [-]
Did they still have children wearing diapers? If so, that's your answer.
khurs 4 hours 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.
dash2 6 hours ago [-]
I think the children alone are enough of an explanation…
amarant 6 hours ago [-]
Is fast fashion not a thing in the US? I was under the impression it was, but perhaps I was wrong...
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
It definitely is, according to my experience traveling to NYC
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
The keyword is _unsold_. If you bought clothes, they aren’t unsold
ascorbic 7 hours ago [-]
This is about businesses, not families.
anonzzzies 6 hours 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 5 hours 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 3 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
Oh, yeah I forgot, who needs a dumpster when you can just bury your fiberglass in the ground. Of course.
dathinab 6 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
This law doesn't apply to individual consumers, only manufactures and retail stores.
cassianoleal 7 hours ago [-]
How long until they start shipping those abroad where they will become toxic bonfires?
mtrovo 6 hours ago [-]
You're half joking but this actually happens already. As you can imagine there's a lot of backlash on dumping good clothes on Europe itself so they export them in bad conditions just to have it burned out of sight.
And it's not just old clothes being discarded, another related study showed that around 30% of clothes returned from online stores are not even looked over to see if they're worth selling again and are discarded straight away.
But when does a product become waste? When the owner says it is.
wiz21c 7 hours ago [-]
At least they're trying.
tliltocatl 3 hours ago [-]
At that point they might skip the bonfire part (or the locals would without asking their permission), which is kinda the whole point.
wolvoleo 7 hours ago [-]
That can be penalised too.
We really have to get away from the idea that curtailing intentional industrial waste production is futile. Perhaps in American style capitalism it is because the system is rigged and the biggest money bag always wins. But we don't want this here at all.
We have to get forward as humanity and treat our planet with respect. Otherwise we won't have one worth living on. Making money isn't the only thing that counts.
graemep 7 hours ago [-]
I agree we should, but that does not mean that a particular regulation is the right way to do it. Its very hard to close loopholes and exploitation of exemptions.
ChrisLTD 7 hours ago [-]
You have to start somewhere, no? We have laws against stealing and murder and folks don’t usually go around saying they should be removed from the books because some people still steal and commit murder.
graemep 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, but those laws are pretty effective. They do deter murderers and thieves, and take them out of society so they cannot repeat their offences.
Ill thought out regulations can make things worse - I am convinced this is the case for the UK's Online Safety Act, for example. That (and the proposed ban on social media for under 16s) is also promoted on "we must do something" grounds.
I am very much in favour of some proposed changes under the law - e.g. improving repairability and reusability of some product categories.
I have doubts that some discouragement of destruction of new products fixes the big underlying problem with clothing: the production of cheap junk not designed to last. Under these regulations (at least as summarised in the article), they offer it to charity, charity rejects it, then they are free to destroy it.
csydas 3 hours ago [-]
>Yes, but those laws are pretty effective. They do deter murderers and thieves
This is really not true at all for violent crimes. Acts of violence are not really done by rational actors, same with many crimes. The death penalty / life in prison does not deter someone who has already decided that violence is an acceptable response to situations, and the story is similar with non-violent crimes; deterrence isn't really considered when someone has already made the decision to steal or do drugs. Deterrence doesn't change the conditions that contribute to those sorts of crimes; the law is more about restoring society as best it can, and in many countries it's about retribution / revenge more than anything.
With corporations, the conditions that lead to the undesired behavior is economical, and addressing the undesired behavior through economic methods seems appropriate -- if it's no longer economical to perform the undesired behavior, the company has to decide where they want to eat the cost.
In the case of the EU ban from the article, I suppose some companies may make the decision to pack up and leave, but my experience is many in the EU would be pretty okay with this with regards to clothing. There is a lot of interest in EU regarding sustainable, made in EU clothing and reusability, etc.
So if the goal is just to reduce clothing product waste in EU, losing fast-fashion companies and some luxury brands that most of the population won't / can't buy anyways probably isn't going to be such a big deal.
wolvoleo 9 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I think we should also move from giving financial penalties to bad corporate actors, to custodial sentences to their top execs and board members. If their own safety and livelyhood is at stake they will be a lot more careful. If we just fine the company they'll just take it as an extra cost in their business equation.
After all these people often say they deserve the high pay due to the high responsibility they have. But they don't, really. They screw up and they get a golden parachute. It was really sickening how the top of volkswagen got off scot-free after doing this calculated manipulation of their diesels. The buck should stop there. They blamed their lower engineers but it's not fair, either the top did know (the most likely option IMO) or they set such unattainable goals for their lower staff that they had no choice but to do this. Either way, it is the top's fault.
And indeed, the goal of the EU is to minimise fast-fashion. I have to say the quality of Shein stuff is also awful which makes these things something you buy and wear two or three times before they rip. Especially with the kind of stuff I buy.
I tend to buy handmade pieces that last me for years if you look after them. Made from real materials by craftspeople. I spend 100-200 euro on one but they really stand out between all the cheap shein/temu crap.
ChrisLTD 5 hours ago [-]
Why would this law make things worse?
What would your proposal be for fixing what you’ve identified as the underlying problem?
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
1. Come up with a regulation idea
2. do a bunch of studies to validate it
3. go through a pretty complicated, comprehensive, pretty long review process to debate and make it work within the existing regulatory system
4. eventually implement it
5. measure its impact
6. adapt or revoke according to the results
We are at the 4th step. Why would you assume your concerns haven’t been already taken in account in all the previous steps? It’s all public, you can look for the reasoning and justification
eastbound 5 hours ago [-]
Because we say this every time. Paper straws, anyone?
Leading a country through neutral scientific studies is the idea of “modernism”, a pipe dream from the 1960 implemented, for example, by Disney in EPCOT. We don’t live in modernist countries - perhaps post-modernist for some, but secular for 2/3rd of the world.
In Europe, our leaders have been unable to explain why we all know someone who was raped, bombed or killed with a machete in our close social circles. Countless crimes are being done by leaders who say “It is proven by science that these side-effects won’t happen.”
All your scientific studies mean nothing at the moment that legislators want to twist them to reach a solution.
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
I have no idea what you’re responding to. I don’t see how your comment has anything to do with mine
sorokod 7 hours ago [-]
Naming and shaming is a reasonable first step.
amelius 7 hours ago [-]
We need judges that don't just look at the letter of the law. We can already use computers for that.
thesmtsolver2 6 hours ago [-]
Wasn’t it the US that caught European companies in the emissions scandal
I'm pretty sure they're docking the ship right now.
skybrian 4 hours ago [-]
It sounds like charities will be getting a lot of unsalable clothing to go through. Maybe they could charge businesses for taking it?
It seems rather similar to what Ross Clothing does.
altairprime 4 hours ago [-]
The EU is definitely studying the donations / tax-credit economy across its states; I expect that working group will be paying very close attention to donation outcomes union-wide in the coming months.
Why would this ever happen? Is it cheaper to destroy than sell at discount?
ascorbic 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, clothing companies and stores will very commonly destroy clothes if they determine that selling at a discount would undermine the brand value. They do things like cutting holes in the soles of shoes before discarding them.
thrance 7 hours ago [-]
> The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
groundzeros2015 17 minutes ago [-]
Yes. The primary cost is distribution, storage, and sales.
A likely outcome is you need to buy clothes online in the EU.
embedding-shape 7 hours ago [-]
Some stuff you basically have to give away for people to buy, some stuff just isn't so attractive to most people. With limited store space, you could miss out on profits if you don't update what you have available. Every item you carry is another item you cannot fit to carry.
kryptiskt 6 hours ago [-]
I think this largely is about brand protection. They worry that discounting the clothes means they will just cannibalize sales of that brand's full-price clothes.
artisinal 7 hours ago [-]
If the full price is €6, there isn’t much room for a discount. Destroying and freeing up store space for something that does sell can easily be profitable.
cbg0 3 hours ago [-]
Donating to charity is cheaper than destroying.
brainwad 1 hours ago [-]
Not at scale. Charities only can move so much merchandise themselves, because only a small slice of the population goes to charity shops and/or accepts charitable donations.
Allllso maybe the junk that is trashed by Zara is just junk that charities don't want to be burdened with?
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
Thats also the case for a lot of electronics, it’s not just a problem with clothes
thaumasiotes 7 hours ago [-]
> Is it cheaper to destroy than sell at discount?
Yes.
thibaut_barrere 6 hours ago [-]
Artificial scarcity + the urge to impose fashion cycles, sadly
hawk_ 7 hours ago [-]
Selling cheaper cannibalizes next season's fashion.
close04 7 hours ago [-]
Particularly for “luxury” brands as selling at a discount devalues the brand. I use quotes because most of those brands sell cheap stuff (double digit manufacturing cost using forced labor [0]) but with a fancy logo making them worth 4 figures.
Luxury brands don't want the poors to be seen wearing their merchandise.
It hurts brand perception.
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
That’s pretty outdated, luxury brands have been selling cheaper clothes since decades at this point. It’s not uncommon to see people without wealth wearing luxury branded clothes (though of course they are mass produced and aren’t the actual luxurious clothes, just a way to wear the brand name)
christkv 2 hours ago [-]
The problem with the EU is that it only approaches problem solving with regulation. It’s incapable of doing anything else. Meanwhile none of the Chinese platforms dumping cheap clothes and crap into the market are held to any of these standards for safety or destruction.
cheeze 2 hours ago [-]
The EU can control companies that operate within the EU, they can't stop a Chinese company operating in China from destroying things. They could prevent the sale in EU without proof that the companies don't do that, but this is a good start.
This also isn't targeting the waste that comes from temu. This is targeting luxury brands that create artificial scarcity and destroy items rather than sell them at a discount. Think Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc.
carlosjobim 6 hours ago [-]
What I admire the most about this is that already months before passing this law, all the members of the European Commission signed a document that they as individuals will not purchase any new or expensive clothes during their time in office, as an act of solidarity and to show they also take their individual responsibility to reduce waste.
5 hours ago [-]
parisiansam 5 hours ago [-]
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aaron695 6 hours ago [-]
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iammjm 6 hours ago [-]
Great! “Fashion” is capitalism’s toxic way of having people discard perfectly good clothes and buy new ones every 12 months. It’s stupid, wasteful, and disgusting
josephcsible 6 hours ago [-]
This has nothing to do with consumers throwing away their old clothes. It's specifically about companies throwing away clothes that were never bought by consumers.
ezfe 4 hours ago [-]
Which they do to maintain their fashion reputation and image. It absolutely is related.
roysting 6 hours ago [-]
So the corporation can just sell or donate them to their own shell entity in some tax preferred jurisdiction and then destroys them and take a loss that can be shuffled back to the corporation?
UltraSane 6 hours ago [-]
It should be illegal for stores to throw away edible food.
charlieyu1 6 hours ago [-]
Makes it more expensive for everyone and also decentivize donating food to homeless or anyone in need.
UltraSane 6 hours ago [-]
how does NOT destroying edible food make food more expensive?
groundzeros2015 16 minutes ago [-]
Because it costs money to store and distribute.
s1artibartfast 5 hours ago [-]
They have to deal with less sales and or storing excess inventory.
Let's say you have some bruised bananas. You either have to keep them on the shelf till they rot (less space for sellable product) or donate them and then people won't buy as many bananas, so you need to raise the price.
IneffablePigeon 5 hours ago [-]
People eating donated bananas are not buying bananas if there are none available for free. They are just not eating bananas.
jandrewrogers 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, there is an issue with food pantries where people who are not in need use them because free food. People can be shameless. It is a minority but still too common and doesn't come with the stigma it deserves in some places. In Seattle, I've even heard a few anecdotes of people trying to resell food from the food pantries.
This behavior does impact prices in the normal market at the margin, particularly if it becomes normalized.
charlieyu1 14 minutes ago [-]
In UK there is an app called Too Good To Go where you can buy food for about one third of normal price when they are near expiry. As the name implies, there is no particular stigma about using it, you are helping to reduce food waste. It’s often some form of advertisement too
s1artibartfast 5 hours ago [-]
Says who?
Would you prefer free bananas or paying?
zb3 4 hours ago [-]
Or.. lower the price?
s1artibartfast 2 hours ago [-]
Lowering the price doesnt solve the problems of lost revenue and higher costs.
Most goods are priced such that you cant make more money on increased volume by lowering the cost.
zb3 1 hours ago [-]
While my sibling comment said it all, note that destroying them also costs money, hence if those can't be sold, it's a loss of profit already, lower the price and let people eat..
> higher costs.
Higher costs of what? Of those new fruits? Well, maybe wasting food should cost?
s1artibartfast 49 minutes ago [-]
Destroying food is pretty cheap. you put it in the dumpster. Picking through it, sending it to a shelter, and vetting the people at the shelter seems more expensive.
> Well, maybe wasting food should cost?
Why? Wasting food should be be free. The owner paid for it.
UltraSane 2 hours ago [-]
The concern isn't lost revenue it is empty stomachs. You should care more about the empty stomachs.
s1artibartfast 54 minutes ago [-]
If people dont make money, then nobody grows the food or the store closes.
I also dont think hunger is a real problem in the US. Death from gluttony is far more common. For those who are hungry, there are already oppurtinities to get food. Putting more free food there doesnt help if they dont have access, or if they are a crackhead.
UltraSane 4 hours ago [-]
Supermarkets and stores throwing away edible food is pure waste and fundamentally immoral when people are going hungry.
s1artibartfast 3 hours ago [-]
Why? the two are generally unrelated.
Lack of food isnt the bottleneck, there is no shortage.
It is usually a host of complex problems.
Is throwing away water in a rainforest immoral when there are thristy people in a desert? The problem is connecting the two.
UltraSane 2 hours ago [-]
"the two are generally unrelated"
This is some truly bizarre logic. The perfectly good food being thrown away can be given to the hungry for free since the company is saying it has no value if they are willing to throw it away. You seem to be intentionally misunderstanding this basic logic.
groundzeros2015 14 minutes ago [-]
> The perfectly good food being thrown away can be given to the hungry
This is incredibly disconnected from the problem. In the US most people in poverty receive food stamps and have preferences about what they like to eat. They want cosmic brownies with their breaded chicken, not your bruised banana.
Total of volume of edible material is a non-issue.
s1artibartfast 14 minutes ago [-]
Who packs it up? Who finds the hungry? Who reviews their financial situation? Who delivers it?
Alternatively, do you imagine anyone can walk into the store and get it, and decide if they feel like paying today at the register?
khalic 5 hours ago [-]
Fiction, there are places that already do this without any of these fabled effects
cbg0 3 hours ago [-]
There are actually laws in EU countries to prevent this. Supermarkets have to discount food that is soon to expire instead of throwing it away, perishables from restaurants and fast food joints can be taken home by employees at the end of the day, and even donations to charities of said goods, or farms for produce unfit for human consumption is encouraged/regulated.
nullorempty 5 hours ago [-]
They should really follow up with a similar policy on food.
At a nearby whole foods a large portion of produce goes to waste. It's heartbreaking to see.
OptionOfT 5 hours ago [-]
This is already the case in France since I believe 2016.
There's was uptick around this story 4 months ago, so I'm not sure if those were bots resurfacing it or whether something changed in the law.
TiredOfLife 5 hours ago [-]
1. There are no Whole Food in europe
2. Clothes don't go bad and poison people in general
okr 5 hours ago [-]
So i buy from my own money fabrics, machines and also i pay handy people to make clothes out of it. I can not sell them all. My Risk. And as an additional punishment i lose the right to do whatever i want with my own property? Mad world.
tacomagick 5 hours ago [-]
So I buy my own factory and produce my own pollutants and I dont have the right to do whatever I want with them, mad world.
no-name-here 5 hours ago [-]
And per OP article:
1. This only applies to companies above a certain size.
2. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of textiles are destroyed each year in the EU before use.
3. In Germany alone, companies destroy tens of millions of garments per year under just one of the existing justifications for destroying garments before use.
psalaun 5 hours ago [-]
On a planet with infinite resources it may be a mad world. On one where oil will be depleted at some point and fast fashion brands are collectively creating thousands of disposable plastic clothes models in dozen of millions of nuits per month, it's common sense to limit the madness of this industry
loeg 5 hours ago [-]
Our planet has effectively infinite resources. We're probably past peak oil extraction and have plenty left, nevermind that the vast majority of clothes aren't made of plastic. This policy is dumb as hell.
mistrial9 5 hours ago [-]
it is not the year 1800 any more, some things have changed
zkmon 6 hours ago [-]
Industrial production would far exceed the needs of people in the target markets. Supply chains are also highly streamlined. Some amazon boxes would go to dump unopened, after delivering to customer.
The state of perishable goods is much worse. A lot is dumped in food and short shelf-life items. Nothing can be done here. This is not even a brand issue.
Do not give license to industrial production or imports that far exceeds the needs of people in that region.
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
> The state of perishable goods is much worse. A lot is dumped in food and short shelf-life items. Nothing can be done here.
That’s already regulated in multiple countries
zkmon 6 hours ago [-]
That's interesting. Mind telling how regulation would stop dumping of expired or unconsumed food and other stuff?
I wonder if anybody is keeping track of everything a mid size business needs to take care of. Each particular report probably sounds like a reasonable request, but by now they're probably well into hundreds, and they're all outside the actual scope of the business (e.g. it may seem manageable for the bureaucrats designing them, because that's what they deal with all day, but not for a small organization doing... something else).
You only write a report if you want the exemption.
The hypothetical business you're imaging shouldn't be looking for an exemption.
The law's effect on small business is conceptually not too different from eg laws against dumping toxic sludge.
No one bothered to make any of the other options easier, only the previously simplest option was barred behind trying everything else. This is what over-bureaucratization looks like.
To use a different example: No one wants to switch to public transport (which is already crowded anyway)? No problem, just ban driving unless you can prove that it's orders of magnitude faster and it's not feasible to move your residence. No further preparation is done; no thought goes beyond the horizon. "Eat this rule and deal with it, you don't have to deal with the paperwork if you're willing to spend 2 hours more on commuting". That's the line of thought here. There are no plans to make it actually viable to use the train, the other options are just barred behind this veil of plausible optionality. You can do it, of course. The issue arises from doing this with literally anything you tackle.
You essentially only add rules and special cases without ever consolidating them or even considering possible impact on adjacent topics. Everything grinds to a halt by doing this and nothing ever gets simplified. It is a huge issue on a landscape that favored small businesses (that can't afford divisions dealing with this) when the way the law is written suddenly requires structures only big companies or consultancies can provide. It entombs the market structure and drowns any competition in regulatory capture. We haven't even seen what happens once the markets are dominated by oligopolies and monopolies. By that time the only way to deal with the fall out will be even more rules, as the competitive landscape will already be dead.
I'm not against the goal of this regulation, but the recent way the rules have been made favor a market structure I consider incompatible with the goals of the EU.
Small retailers that process returns by taking the item out of the envelope, studying it, and then putting it back up for sale (either at full or reduced price, depending on new or cosmetic defect) will be entirely unaffected because their production costs vastly exceed their return inspection costs and they’ve been recording ‘sellable’ vs ‘worn’ vs ‘cosmetic defect’ somewhere this whole time anyways (or else they’d collapse even without these regulations!), and medium businesses will likely find their profits temporarily reduced — but since they were disposing of sellable products to begin with, they can either sell them to recover profits, donate them to reduce taxes, or accept the fractional inspection charge against profits and continue as-is.
Some possibilities: Reduce production defects (slower production/qa times), return rate), Reduce size variability (slower production/qa times), Improve fabric quality (higher production costs, lower future sales), Provide more detailed sizing charts (higher sales cost, lower return rates), Provide more consistent sizing (eg. band size 85 is not 80-90cm between different models and different brands), Reduce production batch sizes (less waste, more shipping costs), Reduce overseas manufacturing (higher cost production, lower cost/time shipping), Sell entire batches until sold out (increased inventory costs, maintains brand wealth-image), Donate wearable clothing to charity (tax deductions, goodwill), Switch from overseas large-batch production to domestic JIT (reduces inventory of never-sold products to zero), and so on.
In fact there was a study by an American law school that came to the conclusion that the US has more bureaucracy than many European countries…
Recommended read: https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/04/the-lazy-myth-that...
‘Europe’ is not substitutable by ‘Germany’: a one state counter-example does not substantiate a disproof of a union. Texas is not representative of how U.S. patent law works. Florida is not representative of how U.S. business regulation works. So, the recent HN post about German incorporation slowness fails, in isolation, to disprove the claim above that the US is more regulated than the EU; you’ll need to make your own case (or relevant citations!) about the EU (or Europe) rather than just Germany to be taken seriously here. Do you argue that “many” is the minority case out of all European countries? Are you evaluating difficulty weighted by GDP? Are you evaluating EU and non-EU together or separately? etc.
> The debate around chlorinated chicken was never really just about chicken. It became a symbol of something larger: the fear that “market access” would become a polite way of saying, “please lower your food and safety standards so our companies can sell more easily into your market.” You can dismiss that as protectionism if you like. From a European perspective, it often looks like defending standards that citizens broadly trust.
Chemical washing of chicken is a safe and effective way to reduce pathogens. European food agencies agree that it's safe and effective, there's really no dispute about this, and in the US that's the end of the regulatory story. But in Europe the regulators see it as their job to consider esoteric second order effects: if we make it too easy to clean your chicken meat, might that cause you to underinvest in efforts to keep pathogens from getting there in the first place? It might, and the status quo achieves acceptably low rates of foodborne illness, so there's no need to permit innovations in chicken processing.
It's true, I would concede, that regulatory agencies requiring businesses to do stuff in a way that citizens consider normal will produce strong standards that citizens broadly trust.
At the end of the day people want to impose their morality on on others. Whether it is crazy Christians or leftist eco warriors- don't let them take away your freedom. Keep on buying shit from China.
But for you to do your "small organization", shouldn't you be required to have to consider the environment around you?
A bar of course doesn't want to care about the noise the patrons do on the terrace for example, but because we live in the world with other people, they do have to care about this, even if it's "something else" than what they want to do.
Or data centers as another (maybe more contemporary) example, where sometimes they have things that needs to be disposed of in a certain way. Yes, the data center operators aren't in the business of "toxic waste management", but if you want to run a data center, you need to figure out how to deal with the byproducts.
I don't think clothing companies should somehow be magically excepted from having to care about others.
I think we've seen time and time again that self-regulation of the industry doesn't work and that businesses will gladly fuck over society if they can get away with it and make more money. Usually that behavior is even defended with saying "Well, it's not their responsibility to solve society's issues. They are there to make money."
Barring nationalization of an industry, heavy regulation and/or taxation/subsidizing are the only ways to reliably protect the interests of society. If some businesses get killed in the process, so be it.
The problem with this attitude is that the rest of the world often doesn’t have these strict regulations and as result, businesses aren’t killed but just leaving the country.
Nike's unsold, defective, or returned shoes are ground up to make carpet padding. They're processed by the truckload in a large grinding machine.
It seems that under these rules, this would be illegal - ?
The law reduces wasted production inputs — materials, energy, and labor — as well as production outputs — wearable shoes, here. This directly regulates a practice by brands where they destroy wearable clothing rather than see their latest branded fashion worn by people who bought it at a discount or received it for free. This also directly regulates corporations from using grinders, melters, incinerators, landfills, and overseas ‘recycling’ (=landfills) to replace warehouses with retailers, accelerate product cycle times and derive FOMO sales benefits without the cost of reducing their batch sizes. The apparel industry is destroying something like one third of what it produces, so it’s certainly earned regulation of its ‘this shall not be sold’ decisions to its disfavor.
I would expect Nike in the EU market to either increase product prices and/or decrease release intervals until their inventory supply is lowered to meet demand while claiming that it’s the EU’s fault that their hottest shoes aren’t yet available, rather than maintaining their existing cycle times and quantities by donating their wearable, branded, wealth-signaling shoes to be worn by poor people. (Perhaps that’s already begun?)
The EU has disagreed with Nike, and the law is now in effect.
I do agree that this law will have a more meaningful effect on luxury clothing brands, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if certain kinds of fast fashion become impractical to offer in the EU. More power to them, as long as people don't start complaining in a few years when Zara's trendsetting new line of blouses isn't available in European stores.
As far as I can tell (although I'm no lawyer, sorry Nike), the point is to reduce waste and to increase recycled content in use. With these two main objectives, what Nike is doing seem to be fitting within that. It's not the "destruction" itself that is bad, but what you do with that after the destruction, recycling it doesn't create waste (or maybe, as much waste) as outright destroying+throwing all of it.
Down-cycling is a thing. Even aluminum and steel get down-cycled.
I have no sympathy for recycling fetishism.
> The concept of destruction as outlined in this Regulation should cover the last three activities on the waste hierarchy, namely recycling, other recovery and disposal. Preparation for reuse, including refurbishment and remanufacturing, should not be considered destruction. Preventing destruction will reduce the environmental impact of those products by reducing the generation of waste and by disincentivising overproduction.
Basically, does it end up as waste or does it end up being repurposed in some good way? If the former, we should find a way of getting rid of it, if it's the latter, it's A-OK!
1. Destruction is conversion of any usable product X to any non-X form (even if the new form is usable).
2. Destruction is prohibited (for large businesses, right now).
Usable is not perfectly defined and will be a judgment call, but one can construct a common sense set of ‘what is unusable?’ definitions that an inspector or judge would accept — so long as sellers have not explicitly caused such outcomes:
- Product lacks structural integrity (a loose thread doesn’t count, a missing sleeve does count)
- Product is contaminated (tried on and didn’t fit doesn’t count, motor oil stains does count)
- Product is unsafe (tried on and didn’t fit doesn’t count, underwear returned with safety liner removed may count, product has been worn for more than try-on period may count)
Note that, for example, the EU is likely to say ‘launder it first, then donate it’ for products that are worn and returned but can be safely donated after laundering; so they are specifically aware of some of the loopholes that corps will aim for first.
If they want to achieve their goals they should be aiming for demand destruction on _new_ clothes, once the clothes are unwanted it's too late.
But seems better to somehow incentivize fabric recycling and higher quality clothes. Even expensive clothes fall apart these days.
I hope this will result in lots of _new_ clothes being sold very cheaply in discount outlets.
When the manufacturer wants to destroy unsold stock - revoke the license to the design. You can now fully legally destroy unsold stock for "violating ip rights"
Downcycling is when you reuse something for a less refined purpose. For instance you can use contaminated plastics (im the sense of somewhat mixed types, bits and bobs of labels etc) to make humble park benches, but you won't be then reusing that low grade park bench plastic to make the Hubble space telescope with.
Still, downcycling into carpet is better than dumping the shoes on a coral atoll of course. Yet it's a step below recycling.
The EU cannot control every avenue you might be sneaking products out for destruction. The goal is not to prevent all sort of destruction, just make it risky enough not to be worth it: Since it's illegal to do, you now have something to fear when you try to get away with your (now) crime.
ESPR regulates the entire placement of products, not only the destruction, e.g. the Digital Product Passport (DPP) which every product has to have (it's slowly being phased in over the coming decade) gives information about repairability, resource used, recyclability,... To do the exporting for destruction you would need to fake the entire paper trail of the product, committing countless numbers of document forgery.
In general the "you are not allowed to destroy unsold goods" part is arguably the small element of ESPR. ESPR also contains the right-to-repair legislation, where ESPR introduces requirements (or at the very least disclosure requirements) for - Design for durability - Availability of spare parts - Access to repair information - Software support obligations - Design for repairability / Restricting design practices intended to hinder repair
The "don't destroy working items" is just a one component of this. The more important component is the DPP which makes the product lifetime traceable.
Though that will obviously incur a larger cost than today.
So some slightly damaged shirt, or a shirt returned and such, ends up sold by these secondary sellers as new. This is part of why people destroy clothes upon return, so that secondary sellers can't buy their own returned product at $1, and sell it making more than the original seller would have.
Not to mention, all returns I've been noticing, resold from Amazon, are heavily treated now with some sort of spray. I can only presume bedbugs were getting returned with used clothing...
* people buy something on Amazon, return it due to defect or just don't like it
* product is currently sold in lots via auction by Amazon via bids, wholesale (not on amazon.com, but via other channels)
* 3rd parties buy the lots, sort, and re-package and sell on Amazon
As Amazon joins all listings for "shirt brand $x colour $y" into one product listing, this means that the original seller of the shirt, even the brand owner, now is competing with its own returns.
Not sure how to make this clearer.
I can't tell if this is coming from jealousy or incompetence—or perhaps a combination of both. They see the rest of the world, especially the United States and China, getting richer and more advanced, and their response seems to be to shield themselves from it instead of competing.
Volkswagen in Germany is going to lay off 100,000 jobs and shutter plants. Half of the EU is recklessly in debt. And Germany is supposed to be the good country with the good economy.
The EU is a $23 trillion economy, hardly a slouch even though it is underperforming.
The VW example is actually something you probably don't understand - they're failing because they're an inefficient business, not because of EU regulations or Germany not having a "good economy". Toyota produces almost twice as many vehicles per employee.
The main problem they have is that you just need a fraction of the number of people to build an electric car than what you need for a combustion car. You no longer need complex transmission, exhaust filtering, turbos, highly complex combustion engines,... all of which are marvels of engineering but no longer necessary for EVs. VW "main" (i.e. excluding sub-brands like audi) was already rather highly staffed (though part of this is due to them taking over some duties for their sub-brands), so the employee impact is higher than what you would expect, but even for a reasonably staffed car company this would imply huge layoffs and changes in the structure of the company.
There is often an underlying sensible economic reason for doing things like destroying perfectly wearable shoes or burning edible crops. Understanding involves admitting things people don't want to admit to themselves.
Nike destroying shoes: the shoes they make are just cheap synthetics and foam, and the per-pair materials and manufacturing cost is a small part of the cost of the shoes. Nike is a marketing company that sorta does shoes. The shoes themselves aren't a very important part of the value they provide to people who buy their shoes. People who buy their shoes are buying a social signal about who they are and how much money they have that doesn't work if the shoes are too cheap.
My hope, however, is that this reduces overseas manufacturing in favor of domestic, which would allow retailers to dramatically reduce the shipping costs for small production batches, so that they’re able to simply produce more small batches of less-common sizes in response to demand. Sure, they might see a few percent lower profits per item, but they’ll be able to sell considerably more of their product simply by raising their supply to meet demand with finer granularity than the cheaper ‘produce an entire season one-time only and store it in a cargo container’ model offers today.
Why is a charity supposed to be able to magically conjure sales the original seller was unable to find?
I just think if it was as easy to doing this, there's already be nothing for regulators to be complaining about.
For example: if Nike is willing to destroy 100$ shoes, instead of selling them at 40$ discount, for brand protection, another shoemaker could try make identical shoes and sell them at discount. But the alternative shoemaker is not allowed to make identical shoes, this would infringe Nike trademark.
No say you estimate that you will sell 10 items of "less common size", you stock 10 items, and hope that you sell all of them. You end up selling 9, you have a remaining 10%.
How does that make a difference?
If you start a sentence with "so what you are saying", and then say something obviously silly ...
The argument would be that it's a large burden to have to write a report if you forage 10 mushrooms and toss one away.
Low volumes, higher fixed costs.
It would be very expensive for the global factory to customize the distribution of sizes manufactured for a retail store in Des Moines, Iowa. The order is tiny and it would require customized logistics, all of which greatly increases cost and complexity.
If you make more units, it's cheaper per unit. But doesn't it mean that waste is always a loss?
Production processes that require more production and supply chain customization for each order have significantly higher costs that need to be amortized. It is cheaper to pack and ship identical boxes at the factory than to customize the contents and logistics of each box for every retailer or customer. The more variation and complexity you allow into the supply chain, the more capital infrastructure, equipment, and people you need, all of which must be amortized into the retail unit cost.
The costs of increased supply chain variability and customizability can easily exceed the cost of wasting a few units. You may have wasted hundreds of t-shirts but you also didn't have to invest the millions of dollars in systems and equipment that would have prevented that waste. These are low-margin businesses, everyone is carefully tracking and attributing these costs.
Supply chains in most industries continuously and ruthlessly optimize to squeeze out waste while trying to increase flexibility. The number of items that are produced on demand -- and therefore produce little waste -- has grown dramatically over the last couple decades. However, many goods intrinsically have long, slow supply chains which makes waste all but unavoidable.
That really only applies to luxury designer brands where selling at a discount can dilute the brand prestige, is Gucci, Versace, etc. really destroying unsold inventory at large volumes vs. standard retailers?
Storing the clothes until they come back in fashion is expensive... and some materials really won't be useful after sitting for 10 years anyway. (Elastic bands really are perishable)
False. Not all apparel demand is for street cred, and non-‘season’ clothes can still be fashionable. ‘Last season’ is about wealth signaling and FOMO, and while I do love fashion as an entertainment and my hobby in design of it, the level of flux we have now in everyday clothing shapes and fabrics is openly hostile to the non-wealthy being clothed well. I don’t know if the EU’s regulations will work in full or at all, but I’m cheering them for trying.
A while back someone on Tumblr noted that they would buy and wear a full 360° hue spectrum of 360 t-shirts in spectrum order from 0..359, just to fuck with people’s minds as their shirt is the same color day after day until suddenly “wait, I thought your shirt was green” makes the people around them feel like they’re hallucinating en masse. This joke — well, it’s not a joke, this product with great fit would sell out even at 30° intervals! — T-shirts are shaped the same year after year, and fast fashion has had to resort to mining old brand imagery to try and convince people to buy them. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to find unprinted t-shirts at outlier sizes, because that’s slightly less profitable than waves of shapeless L-XL junk. Yes, I’m fine with Hot Topic collaborations, but they need to stop being the market majority.
A key insight is that what constitutes an "unpopular size" is a very local phenomenon. Every point of retail sells a different, semi-predictable distribution of sizes. It is much cheaper to ship sizes no one will buy than to manage the logistics of exactly matching local demand for a specific distribution of sizes.
I asked the same question to someone who works in this business and got an eye-opening detailed explanation that made it obvious in hindsight why things the work the way the do. The difference in product cost and logistics infrastructure was not small.
Or you sell the extras off at a discount and it's fine.
For a high-end designer dress, may be better to not manufacture large or small sizes that don't sell frequently.
[1] https://theclothingbank.org.uk/what-happens-to-the-clothes-y...
Or they could also just levy higher taxes/fees on synthetic fibers and clothing that cannot be repaired (there are several reasons), and at the same time support the industry for natural, truly biodegradable fibers and their research?
This seems like more ivory tower navel gazing.
And that doesn’t even touch on all the jurisdictional and financial shenanigans that immediately come to my mind how you can circumvent that.
Government legislatures really should have red team groups that have to be included in legislative processes with the objective of punching holes into legislation.
i think it should be expanded to cover more categories than food and clothes when reuse and recycling infra grows to take the demand. its not just good for the environment it also prevents producers from restricting supply to keep their profits high.
the ultimate goal is make it illegal to destroy or intentionally damage anything usable before it reaches consumers. that would create a new ecosystem of discount stores and giveaway centers, and save everyone a ton of money.
If those costs are paid for by taxpayers then the consumers are in effect involuntarily buying products they would not have otherwise bought, just with more steps. We already see this with agricultural subsidies.
If those costs are charged back to the producer then it becomes economically optimal to under-produce, which will cause prices to rise and risk shortages but eliminate waste. One can make the argument that higher prices for basic goods to reduce waste is a social good but it also impoverishes consumers.
All of these scenarios have happened empirically countless times. That almost every producer over-produces to some extent at no profit to themselves when allowed has strong "Chesterton's Fence" characteristics.
What you've said is: Looking only at the internalized costs, pointless-wasting a percentage of clothes costs X but reduces clothes cost in the store by Y, with Y being larger than X.
Okay. Irrelevant - that math doesn't include externalized costs. It may well be that this is a stupid idea, but "market decided destroying some clothes was more efficient" doesn't prove anything unless you can show that the size of the externalized costs to this process are 0 or close enough to 0 to have no meaningful relevance.
Governments tend to be annoyed at having to regulate and will often ‘somewhat’ regulate the worst excesses and then do the equivalent of a staring contest with those regulated. If business push right up to the wire and fight every tiny loophole then they risk being hit with a second wave of much more severe regulations; if they generally comply and don’t embarrass regulators and politicians, then there isn’t need to spend more capital on better regulation. At some level it’s very costly to micromanage business regulation gestures at California but so there’s definitely some decisions to be made about How Far To Go Each Time that aren’t simply due to a lack of political willpower.
Or not. Who knows. The point is, this 'economically it is more efficient' is not a proven case because the externalities need to be taken into account, and so far the person I've been responding to seems to not understand this part, or is ignoring it.
The tradeoff may be worth it in some contexts, but if you don't understand that there are tradeoffs, you're going end up proposing silly policies like the original commenter's idea that nobody should ever be allowed to destroy any object a consumer could use.
If the benefit they get from waste is like 10% of the value they're destroying, then in a broad sense it is pointless.
And nobody is arguing against oversupply. Oversupply itself is fine.
Clothing is of course a bit easier to deal with (it'll still grow mildew if you don't protect it from moisture!), but the source link explicitly anticipates there will be some circumstances where it's impossible to give away clothing and authorizes destruction in that case.
This isn't some random guy. Their entire job is dealing with the logistics of big piles of clothes, and they have months in advance to plan.
All the examples I know of (Austria, Switzerland) are social clubs/associations (whatever that is called) and DO NOT depend on tax payer money.
No. The real cost storage and selling, not the finished product. You don't magically get competent organizations to sell that popping out of the ground.
I have worked at a donation center like goodwill before. They get tons of stuff and throw away most of it. People won't buy it and they don't have time or space.
But then of course they cry a lot when they realize how easy it has become for China and USA to squeeze them.
Tough consequences of stuff like this.
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?
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.
High margin industries get more complicated to model, of course.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://changingmarkets.org/report/trashion-the-stealth-expo...
And it's not just old clothes being discarded, another related study showed that around 30% of clothes returned from online stores are not even looked over to see if they're worth selling again and are discarded straight away.
https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/...
We really have to get away from the idea that curtailing intentional industrial waste production is futile. Perhaps in American style capitalism it is because the system is rigged and the biggest money bag always wins. But we don't want this here at all.
We have to get forward as humanity and treat our planet with respect. Otherwise we won't have one worth living on. Making money isn't the only thing that counts.
Ill thought out regulations can make things worse - I am convinced this is the case for the UK's Online Safety Act, for example. That (and the proposed ban on social media for under 16s) is also promoted on "we must do something" grounds.
I am very much in favour of some proposed changes under the law - e.g. improving repairability and reusability of some product categories.
I have doubts that some discouragement of destruction of new products fixes the big underlying problem with clothing: the production of cheap junk not designed to last. Under these regulations (at least as summarised in the article), they offer it to charity, charity rejects it, then they are free to destroy it.
This is really not true at all for violent crimes. Acts of violence are not really done by rational actors, same with many crimes. The death penalty / life in prison does not deter someone who has already decided that violence is an acceptable response to situations, and the story is similar with non-violent crimes; deterrence isn't really considered when someone has already made the decision to steal or do drugs. Deterrence doesn't change the conditions that contribute to those sorts of crimes; the law is more about restoring society as best it can, and in many countries it's about retribution / revenge more than anything.
With corporations, the conditions that lead to the undesired behavior is economical, and addressing the undesired behavior through economic methods seems appropriate -- if it's no longer economical to perform the undesired behavior, the company has to decide where they want to eat the cost.
In the case of the EU ban from the article, I suppose some companies may make the decision to pack up and leave, but my experience is many in the EU would be pretty okay with this with regards to clothing. There is a lot of interest in EU regarding sustainable, made in EU clothing and reusability, etc.
So if the goal is just to reduce clothing product waste in EU, losing fast-fashion companies and some luxury brands that most of the population won't / can't buy anyways probably isn't going to be such a big deal.
After all these people often say they deserve the high pay due to the high responsibility they have. But they don't, really. They screw up and they get a golden parachute. It was really sickening how the top of volkswagen got off scot-free after doing this calculated manipulation of their diesels. The buck should stop there. They blamed their lower engineers but it's not fair, either the top did know (the most likely option IMO) or they set such unattainable goals for their lower staff that they had no choice but to do this. Either way, it is the top's fault.
And indeed, the goal of the EU is to minimise fast-fashion. I have to say the quality of Shein stuff is also awful which makes these things something you buy and wear two or three times before they rip. Especially with the kind of stuff I buy.
I tend to buy handmade pieces that last me for years if you look after them. Made from real materials by craftspeople. I spend 100-200 euro on one but they really stand out between all the cheap shein/temu crap.
What would your proposal be for fixing what you’ve identified as the underlying problem?
2. do a bunch of studies to validate it
3. go through a pretty complicated, comprehensive, pretty long review process to debate and make it work within the existing regulatory system
4. eventually implement it
5. measure its impact
6. adapt or revoke according to the results
We are at the 4th step. Why would you assume your concerns haven’t been already taken in account in all the previous steps? It’s all public, you can look for the reasoning and justification
Leading a country through neutral scientific studies is the idea of “modernism”, a pipe dream from the 1960 implemented, for example, by Disney in EPCOT. We don’t live in modernist countries - perhaps post-modernist for some, but secular for 2/3rd of the world.
In Europe, our leaders have been unable to explain why we all know someone who was raped, bombed or killed with a machete in our close social circles. Countless crimes are being done by leaders who say “It is proven by science that these side-effects won’t happen.”
All your scientific studies mean nothing at the moment that legislators want to twist them to reach a solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
It seems rather similar to what Ross Clothing does.
Tax incentives for donations to social economy entities: Models, trends, and challenges (2025) https://social-economy-gateway.ec.europa.eu/document/downloa...
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
A likely outcome is you need to buy clothes online in the EU.
Allllso maybe the junk that is trashed by Zara is just junk that charities don't want to be burdened with?
Yes.
[0] Better link: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/jul/24/made-in-ital...
It hurts brand perception.
This also isn't targeting the waste that comes from temu. This is targeting luxury brands that create artificial scarcity and destroy items rather than sell them at a discount. Think Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc.
Let's say you have some bruised bananas. You either have to keep them on the shelf till they rot (less space for sellable product) or donate them and then people won't buy as many bananas, so you need to raise the price.
This behavior does impact prices in the normal market at the margin, particularly if it becomes normalized.
> higher costs.
Higher costs of what? Of those new fruits? Well, maybe wasting food should cost?
> Well, maybe wasting food should cost? Why? Wasting food should be be free. The owner paid for it.
I also dont think hunger is a real problem in the US. Death from gluttony is far more common. For those who are hungry, there are already oppurtinities to get food. Putting more free food there doesnt help if they dont have access, or if they are a crackhead.
Is throwing away water in a rainforest immoral when there are thristy people in a desert? The problem is connecting the two.
This is some truly bizarre logic. The perfectly good food being thrown away can be given to the hungry for free since the company is saying it has no value if they are willing to throw it away. You seem to be intentionally misunderstanding this basic logic.
This is incredibly disconnected from the problem. In the US most people in poverty receive food stamps and have preferences about what they like to eat. They want cosmic brownies with their breaded chicken, not your bruised banana.
Total of volume of edible material is a non-issue.
Alternatively, do you imagine anyone can walk into the store and get it, and decide if they feel like paying today at the register?
At a nearby whole foods a large portion of produce goes to waste. It's heartbreaking to see.
There's was uptick around this story 4 months ago, so I'm not sure if those were bots resurfacing it or whether something changed in the law.
1. This only applies to companies above a certain size.
2. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of textiles are destroyed each year in the EU before use.
3. In Germany alone, companies destroy tens of millions of garments per year under just one of the existing justifications for destroying garments before use.
The state of perishable goods is much worse. A lot is dumped in food and short shelf-life items. Nothing can be done here. This is not even a brand issue.
Do not give license to industrial production or imports that far exceeds the needs of people in that region.
That’s already regulated in multiple countries
And the more recent non-food waste ban follow-up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Waste_and_Circular_Econom...