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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

#301

Post by anigbrowl »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #271
behringer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not always a win. There have been a few reports that sending large numbers of clothing donations to areas that don't specifically need them has the result of harming local industry that would otherwise be able to produce and sell clothes.

OK, send them somewhere else or sell them at a discount

but brand dilution

I don't care. If you over produce then you made a bad economic decision, tough luck. Destroying goods for accounting reasons is an abhorrent policy driven by greed.

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

#302

Post by cogman10 »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #295
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As a kid (I was born in the 80s), my home town would get 3ft of snow almost every winter. We even saw 10ft some winters.

By the time I hit highschool, seeing a 3ft snow in the winter was pretty rare.

Over the last 4 years, there's never any snow on the ground. They are lucky if 1 inch sticks around.

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

#303

Post by rapnie »

babybjornborg wrote: post #230
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…

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…

> Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste

Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt cheap to produce, that they have less of an incentive to let it go to waste. When I buy socks they get holes after wearing them 7 times, and then they go in the bin too.

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

#304

Post by shakna »

dandanua wrote: post #265
graemep wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think this forum has significant costs of running, especially considering it is not in development.

They switched the backend to Common Lisp in 2019, and at the time had two seperate Arc-to-JS compilers in development. [0]

The site may feel less changeable than many, but I would be very surprised if it is not "in-development".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550123

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

#305

Post by sschueller »

PhoenixFlame101 wrote: post #217
anymouse123456 wrote: post #189

It’s shocking to see this legislated. As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead. I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.

Luxury brands do in fact intentionally destroy old stock to make sure their value doesn't drop due to excess supply. I suppose the next step is making everything extremely limited like hypercars?

However hypercars are not purposely limited. It takes an enormous amount of time and labor to build them unlike a handbag where the limit is artificial to sell more.

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

#306

Post by bluebarbet »

smt88 wrote: post #275
saubeidl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the poor in their own countries that might not be able to afford clothes?

Any name brand would rather send their unsold clothes to a landfill in India rather than allow their wealthy customers to see poor people wearing the clothes.

A perhaps inadvertent but nicely succinct indictment of capitalism.

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

#307

Post by Mordisquitos »

jadenPete wrote: post #252

I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources? I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get invo…

You have an odd perception of what constitutes "micro-targetting".

Why apparel specifically? Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles.

Why was USB-C mandated specifically on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: it wasn't. It was mandated on smartphones in general, and Apple was the only company that specifically tried to fight the regulation because apparently they're special.

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

#308

Post by philwelch »

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 didn’t use to be this way but through evaporative cooling, most of the founder types stopped posting here.

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

#309

Post by anigbrowl »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #189

It’s shocking to see this legislated. As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead. I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.

Not sure if sarcasm or cluelessness.

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

#310

Post by charcircuit »

teraflop wrote: post #235
cm2012 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.

If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.

What about cases where 2 pieces of clothing when bundled together have value due to making it more efficient for people to find the right size, but over the right size is found the other becomes waste? A company can't prevent a consumer from ruining the wasted clothes.
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