Companies' response: we'll just sew these unsold clothes into a large curtain, which is not apparel so we can then just burn it.
I do hope they come up with something like that.
EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
111–120 of 894 posts
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poor countries don't need clothes. They have clothes. It's just more (mostly plastic pollution) that fills their landfills and rivers. https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/the-messy-truth/
Just because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#113In 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…
I buy mostly from liquidators, where everything is sold as-is, but that doesn't stop end users from trying to make a claim, so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty. For example, Ryobi brands the items with a plastic welder, leaving a tell-tale wavy mark. A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who part…
> so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty
With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.
But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as not eligible for warranty. They just want that coverage
We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products they bought through gray market channels.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#114In 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?
This does happen: for example in Macbook repair, it is common to buy defective motherboards, in order to salvage the chips off them (which are apple-specific, hence not purchasable elsewhere). Those boards often come from China, and often have holes drilled in them, I guess exactly to prevent them from being repaired.
It's a shame, because some of those boards could (and would, they are valuable enough) be fully repaired by a skilled repair person. Instead, the chips are picked off and the rest goes to waste.
I did buy a batch once that didn't have holes drilled, and they all turned out to have all sorts of strange, often random issues, so I suspect those were RMAs that somehow "fell off the back of a truck" and escaped the drilling.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300. This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
Related note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company. My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited suppl…
Clothing items tend to have quality roof that past that, it doesn't matter and it's not 2000$ for handbag.
Clothing has been used as wealth/class indicator for thousands of years, trying to change that will be extremely difficult lift.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can steer where donations go with regulations. I don't see any downsides of warm coats to homeless shelters for example.
Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#118In 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…
> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
(all assuming the product is not sold as "new")
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#119What keeps them from selling 1000 pieces for a cent to offshore companies in Africa/Asia that then burn what they bought?
That they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
That would be a carbon tax. This is plain overregulation.
Just businesses being intrinsically incentivised to not produce waste by the loss of profit is already a good motivation.