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EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

environment.ec.europa.eu

61–70 of 894 posts

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#61
post #24

Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life. Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free st…

You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.

> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.

While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?

Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#62

In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason. For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these…

What became of the relationship with the recycling company?

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#63

Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes. If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this. I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the pe…

The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out.

Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.

HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#64
post #58
post #11

> an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. That is a crazy amount.

This number seems low, so >90% of unsold clothes are worn? Are they all donated? 4-9% of unsold clothes could be defective/damaged or something.

I would have guessed, with no real basis whatsoever, that 4-9% of all manufactured clothes would be destroyed without ever being used.

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#65
post #11

> an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. That is a crazy amount.

Is it? 4-9% of unsold portion seems reasonable. Unless they actually mean 4-9% of all manufactured.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...

Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.

>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#66

In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason. For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these…

> had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.

Couldn't this be prevented by, say, sticking it on a drill press and drilling a large hole in it, and then recycling it?

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#67

Can they ship it outside the EU and then destroy it? What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? Why not just put a carbon tax per weight?

Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.

Ive read some years ago that companies do not donate and destroy instead because of whatever wierd tax-regulation

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think the incentives to produce things no one wants would already be pretty low.

Supplier MOQs can create significant incentives to overproduce. For example, you get 9000 things someone wants and 1000 that no-one wants. This can be profitable for the customer, if they can't just easily get rid of those 1000 they can't sell, it's presumably less profitable.

Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#69
Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug:

"Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."

Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

#70

Can they ship it outside the EU and then destroy it? What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? Why not just put a carbon tax per weight?

I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).

The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.

Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.

This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.

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