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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

#511

Post by csense »

I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor.

But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no."

And what if there's genuinely no demand? For example, suspenders went permanently out of style at some point in the 20th century. If this law had been in effect at the time, there might be an "orphaned" truckload of suspenders somewhere, getting wastefully shipped from warehouse to warehouse for decades because they're impossible to sell and illegal to destroy.

Fashion is fickle, prone to fads and flights of taste. Suspenders are by no means an isolated case.

An efficient economy needs a means to delete an item when its current owner doesn't want it, nobody else wants it either, and it imposes ongoing storage costs on whoever holds it.

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

#512

Post by gwerbin »

gwerbin wrote: post #324
rapnie wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you can make a shirt for $1 and sell it for $10, you can throw out literally half of your inventory and still make $5 per shirt.

Update: I made a silly math mistake. That's $9 profit per shirt. So if you make 100 shirts but only sell 50 and burn the rest, that's $450 profit. You make $4.50 per shirt manufactured.

Stated another way: you can total up the manufacturing cost of the shirts you destroyed ($50) and distributed evenly among the ones you sold (50/50=$1 each) and just add that to the cost of each shirt you sell when calculating profit. Same result.

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

#513

Post by lores »

csense wrote: post #511

I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor. But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to t…

If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.

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

#514

Post by laurex »

csense wrote: post #511

I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor. But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to t…

This argument might have made sense when property rights were assumed to trump all other concerns, but at this point, that isn't logical. We live in a world where "owning" everything has led to complete lack of responsibility for the effects of corporate behaviours serving short-term profit while all living systems are paying the price. At some point we need to introduce more tension between property rights and common welfare if we plan to make it through the next century.

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

#515

Post by bamboozled »

lores wrote: post #513
csense wrote: post #511

I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor. But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to t…

If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.

Agree, a corporation can do orders of magnitude more harm than an individual can. It’s called “regulation”.

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

#516

Post by jazz9k »

lores wrote: post #513
csense wrote: post #511

I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor. But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to t…

If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.

A company isn't AI or a bot. It's essentially a group of people. It should have the same rights as an individual when it comes to private property.

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

#517

Post by s3p »

jazz9k wrote: post #516
lores wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.

A company isn't AI or a bot. It's essentially a group of people. It should have the same rights as an individual when it comes to private property.

I'm sorry you think that.

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

#518

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

csense wrote: post #511

I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor. But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to t…

Surprisingly enough you doing what you want with your stuff in your own home is different from operating a business at scale, and we can make different laws for the different situations.

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

#519

Post by gwerbin »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #503
gwerbin wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can make a shirt for $1 and sell it for $10, you can throw out literally half of your inventory and still make $5 per shirt.

If you throw some plastics into a coal fired power plant it is almost the same as if you would burn oil.

I have a feeling nobody is paying particularly close attention to capturing usable energy from this process

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

#520

Post by jazz9k »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #518
csense wrote: post #511

I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor. But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to t…

Surprisingly enough you doing what you want with your stuff in your own home is different from operating a business at scale, and we can make different laws for the different situations.

If I were these companies, I would just give them all in truckloads to the CEO's son, and have them dispose of it.
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