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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

#451

Post by ch4s3 »

grayhatter wrote: post #371
ch4s3 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.

> Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems. You mean something like, to signal to voters they're trying to solve a problem voters want changed? Or a problem voters say they have? I didn't mean to imply it would fix the problem, or that the problem would be fixed. Just that there's desire for [thing targ…

EU regulations aren’t set by people who are directly elected though, so the incentives are really weird. It seems like largely a non-problem, the likes of which gets obsessed over by the types of also ran politicians who end up as members of the European Parliament or filtering into the Brussels bureaucracy.

Call me when they stop buying Russian gas.

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

#452

Post by flir »

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.

Very similar pattern here (UK): circa 1900, ice skating on the local pond every winter. The ice was thick enough to walk on the pond twice in the 1980s. For the last decade, the pond hasn't completely frozen over once. We got about two days of 30% coverage this Jan.

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

#453

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

cyclotron3k wrote: post #398
miki123211 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how this law is actually going to work. Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to…

This is a fantasy. No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them. So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

They will be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar so that some fraction of them can be resold for cheap in Africa or somewhere else poor. Those companies can then dispose of them however they wish.

The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever.

And, as usual, EU regulations achieve absolutely nothing -- if anything, this is worse than nothing.

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

#454

Post by toofy »

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.

> I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand

if a manufacturer finds it too complex to not overproduce and not add all kinds of negative externalities then their business model is flawed or they’re not up to the task.

either way, it isn’t “the bureaucrats” fault they’re overproducing, and they absolutely are overproducing.

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

#455

Post by [deleted] »

birdsongs wrote: post #406
code4life wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary. I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.

Your anecdote may be true, but doesn't hold at a global scale, and science is not on your side: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/ I can't believe I'm debating climate change on HackerNews. What happened here?

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by riffraff »

mrighele wrote: post #442
miki123211 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how this law is actually going to work. Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to…

What is going to happen is that what is left of European manufacturers in the sector are going to move production and warehouses abroad, and from there they will move to EU only about what they need. They will continue to operate as they used to, the only difference being less business (and less jobs) being done in EU.

cheap clothing is for the vast, vast majority not done in the EU, so this does not matter.

But also, this regulation applies to the company _selling them to customers_, so it's completely irrelevant.

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

#457

Post by fatherwavelet »

wackget wrote: post #229
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…

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…

I am not against this in spirit but what are the higher order effects and unintended consequences?

The only thing that is more annoying to me than market fundamentalist, neo-liberal bullshit is emotional appeals that sound right on paper but have a total disregard for higher order effects and unintended consequences.

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

#458

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

nkrisc wrote: post #402
miki123211 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how this law is actually going to work. Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to…

> manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes? Surely these companies aren’t paying H&M for the privilege of destroying their surplus clothes, so by reselling them they’ll be gettin…

Yea they will, they'll resell what they can, and destroy the rest, probably by throwing them into a giant burn pit in a place with zero environmental regulations.

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

#459

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

seszett wrote: post #448
niels8472 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would destroy clothing because it is not sold. This already happens to second hand clothing that is shipped to Africa. Part of it is sold, part of it is dumped. This is well documented.

If part of it is sold, isn't it better than if it had all been destroyed? It's literally what that law is for.

Define what you mean by "better". Putting them on a giant CO2-burning ship to transport around the world to find every last person who wants a $1 shirt is much more harmful to the environment than just throwing it into a hole in the ground and making another one.

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

#460

Post by jen20 »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #453
cyclotron3k wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fantasy. No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them. So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. They will be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar so that some fraction of them can be resold for cheap in Africa or somewhere else poor. Those companies can then dispose of them however they wish. The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever. And, as usual, EU regulations achieve absolutely nothing -…

Both of those situations sound like a net win.
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