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

environment.ec.europa.eu

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

#291

Post by stevekemp »

ragall wrote: post #224
Aurornis wrote: post #35

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 if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? If you had bothered to read TFA, you'd have understood that the rules only apply to products that have fully passed QA, were being kept as stock but ended up not selling. They don't apply to experimental batches, to defective or damaged items, etc...

From the site guidelines:

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

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

#292

Post by fn-mote »

behringer wrote: post #269
babybjornborg wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparel firms exist not to clothe people as common sense would suggest but to make a profit, and this practice of erring on the side of overproduction is more profitable than under production. The perfect solution would be to produce exactly the number of goods they will sell, but forecasts aren't perfect so they overproduce. Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste, so this adds another incentive and re…

If they ship unused crates to Africa then they get cheap clothes. Win win all around.

Assuming there was no /s there:

The US and I assume Europe have laws against "dumping" - selling a product for below cost - because it drives local competitors out of business. That is exactly what shipping containers full of clothes to Africa does.

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

#293

Post by LorenPechtel »

motbus3 wrote: post #204

I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only. This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches. In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that m…

You have already gotten two answers showing why this causes the manufacturer to lose money. A third: I hike, enough that pretty much all my gear out there is the good stuff. I do not care one bit about brands and would prefer not to be an ad for the outdoor companies--but I am anyway because it's not just a name.

Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. People like me don't want that big X on our stuff, if we learn Y is the same thing we are going to buy Y. And next year their sales of X drop because people like me waiting for the secondary stuff. Thus even if you do not consider brand dilution it's still in their interest to not sell the technical stuff in the secondary channels. When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.

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

#294

Post by krackers »

Doohickey-d wrote: post #114
WalterBright wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 repa…

There is this insane video where someone actually does repair one of the prototype boards that have been drilled

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q

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

#295

Post by InsideOutSanta »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #272
motbus3 wrote: post #204

I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only. This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches. In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that m…

> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and…

People used to ice skate on the lake near my house during Winters up until the 70s. Now they're swimming there throughout the winter. We had a ski lift fifteen minutes from my house 20 years ago. Now in a good winter, we have a week where there's enough snow for kids to go sledding.

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

#296

Post by XorNot »

Aurornis wrote: post #113
dlcarrier wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not like you wouldn't have this problem anyway though? Like customers have a % of crazy people regardless.

I mean the "ididnthaveeggs" subreddit exists purely to make light of people who post reviews on recipe sites where they overtly use the wrong ingredients and then downvote the recipe as a result.

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

#297

Post by bluebarbet »

graemep wrote: post #241
wackget wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet. The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay…

Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.

It's partly explained by all the non-US contributors here. That's my theory.

Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.

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

#298

Post by jesse__ »

motbus3 wrote: post #204

I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only. This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches. In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that m…

> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.

I was in the bar in Revelstoke (where I lived, at the time) chatting with an old-timer the other year, and I asked him "is it just me, or did it used to snow more?"

He laughed, and told me that when he was a kid growing up, they weren't allowed to play on the tops of snowbanks because you'd get electrocuted by the high tension power lines. At the time, mid-winter, it was raining outside with a sad pile of slush maybe 1 foot deep.

Even when I was a kid in Revy, snowbanks were 10' deep mid-winter, every winter. It's been raining in town for the last 5 years, all winter. Winter's over. Time to start surfing, I guess.

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

#299

Post by apparent »

fn-mote wrote: post #292
behringer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they ship unused crates to Africa then they get cheap clothes. Win win all around.

Assuming there was no /s there: The US and I assume Europe have laws against "dumping" - selling a product for below cost - because it drives local competitors out of business. That is exactly what shipping containers full of clothes to Africa does.

I think GP was referring to donations, which are not subject to dumping rules AFAIK.

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

#300

Post by dijit »

peterfirefly wrote: post #287
dijit wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

textile waste, largely, is plastic waste. Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic). in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee. fa…

So is rayon... kinda. It's cellulose from trees and other plants, without the original cells. Where is the dividing line between cellulose, lignin and "plastics"?

rayon is a regenerated cellulose fibre: it biodegrades.

polyester is a thermoplastic polymer synthesised from petrochemicals: it doesn’t.

that’s the dividing line. one breaks down in the environment, the other persists for centuries and sheds microplastics into waterways every time you wash it.

rayon has its own environmental problems (deforestation, chemical processing), but “is it plastic?” is not one of them. the chemistry here isn’t ambiguous.

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