What's the best case scenario for the positive impact of this regulation?
EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
571–580 of 894 posts
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#572Earlier 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.
You have to pay to burn them, at home or abroad, and the cost is likely a few % of a clothing piece, where the margin is already >70%.
Tl;dr the EU will say "Mission Accomplished" because no clothing has been burned in the EU since 2026(tm), while all of the emissions are produced abroad.
The same show has been going on with industry, where the dirtiest parts are done in India or China, so that we can say that we are "clean".
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#573Earlier 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.
I’ve heard there’s a practice of selling bundles of clothes to Africa and then the purchases pick through the bundle for what’s good and what’s useless. The impression I was left with is that this used to be more lucrative but now you’re almost as likely to get complete garbage as something good. So it’s like a sad loot box.
It's a big issue in Africa, as it completely destroyed to local clothing industry. As a side effect, you see people wearing westerner style clothing even in the midst of Africa, which is quite unsettling.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#574Ha! Communism solved that. Just produce less so there is scarcity rather than abundance. But jokes aside this is a great move.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#575I'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…
> most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare. It shouldn't be cheap. The world got used to the luxury of cheap meat by being unethical and harmful to the environment (humans' environment) and animals. Cows are insanely resource-intensive to farm, bad for the air, bad for the water, bad for the land. Factory-farm…
For all the grievances people made against food pyramid, this is actually the real reason why it was instituted. Meat has always been expensive, and with limited money people had, they'd rather spend it all on grains and save the money for something else. Food pyramid encourages people to at least add some proteins in their diet. And it works, people's height had been increasing decade-by-decade.
In a way, the movement to disparage food pyramid because it institutes too much grain really seems like a first world problem. Especially any that encourages more meat.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#576It’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.
They absolutely do, source: warehouse job where you occasionally just opened boxes of unsold merchandise and smashed them. Something something tax write off. I never understood it. US based personal experience from almost two decades ago so take it was a grain of salt.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
What they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently. Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society. You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fa…
Fashion changing all the time (on the order of seasons rather than years) contributes to a lot of waste. Your claim that it "factually something that provides value to society“ is unsubstantiated. Just as unsubstantiated as "You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing". All fast fashion does is waste money for consumers who buy into the craze, compared to buying quality that lasts.…
> Your claim that it "factually something that provides value to society“ is unsubstantiated.
Fashion is fundamentally an art form that has deep social, cultural, and anthropological meaning. This is high school level social studies.
> Just as unsubstantiated as "You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing".
Are you saying you might not be entitled to an opinion? Okay...?
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how absurdly efficient shipping stuff in container ships is, I don't believe its actually worse. Specially if the company can just save money by being slightly more conservative in terms of how much they manufacture in the first place.
Sure, let's conveniently not count the horrifically-polluting trucks in to distribute them across the interior. You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?
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Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#579Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you accidentally flipped a minus sign in your equations and then doubled down on your conclusions. Who would pay you to take something away and destroy it for you? It's fine to come up with creative solutions using an LLM, but you have to apply some critical thing before throwing your weight behind the conclusions!
What's stopping the price from being extremely low? Plenty might pay $1 to take a bundle of 1000 items of clothing, pick through it and find 20 items they like, then destroy the 980 other items.
Isn't that still better than it all getting destroyed?
Also if someone is buying new goods for pennies on the dollar, I'd expect them to find some value in more than 2% of the stock.