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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

#681

Post by [deleted] »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #480
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The additional shipments aren't going to drastically go up over a few more companies throwing second hand clothing on ships. Large crate ships are relatively efficient for what they tow. As basic napkin math, if there's 1000 cargo ships moving in and out of the EU in a year, and this law adds 10 more. That's 1% increase. It's a bigger 1%, but I wouldn't be surprised if the emissions are less than the 9% of discarded…

[deleted]

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

#682

Post by gruturo »

wedog6 wrote: post #653
nerdsniper wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.

Selling for a negative price is completely different from buying, because the flow of 'goods' is in the other direction.

Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.

There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.

They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.

The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.

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

#683

Post by imtringued »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #288
JoshTriplett wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The appearal industry is among the most exploitive in the world. It's good to kill it before it springs up. Bangladesh is not anyone's example of a model country.

I read this as "We've had our industrial revolution. No, we don't want you to get yours."

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

#684

Post by philipallstar »

estimator7292 wrote: post #198
philipallstar wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just businesses being intrinsically incentivised to not produce waste by the loss of profit is already a good motivation.

If that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model. Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying…

> Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.

This is an odd thing to say. Governments will happily shovel the taxes of people's entire working lives into pointless spending. They'll also happily shovel young men to their actual deaths in wars. Now you know this, will you be hyper-cynical about governments, or are you just blaring your bias?

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

#685

Post by mvdtnz »

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…

If the choice is between destroying the product and giving it away you give it away. End of story. Stop trying to make it more complicated than it is.

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

#686

Post by philipallstar »

kube-system wrote: post #117
philipallstar wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.

Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.

The answer is simple: despite so much money given and forgiven, and people going over all the time to build toilets and basic human-scale improvements, most countries with real deprivation have a massive corruption problem, mainly culturally induced, that stops real improvement. Saying "it's not people stepping up" elides the cultural issue.

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

#687

Post by manuelmoreale »

troad wrote: post #646
camillomiller wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can try to reason with the people who post comments like the one you're responding to, but the truth is they are just there waiting for anything a regulator does to desparage it, defend corporate and capital, and change nothing about the status quo. The worst part is that they do it thinking they are so edgy for knowing exactly why just another piece of regulation will clearly not work. Funnily enough, the EU tra…

> you can try to reason with the people who post comments like the one you're responding to, but the truth is they are just there waiting for anything a regulator does to desparage it, defend corporate and capital, and change nothing about the status quo. The worst part is that they do it thinking they are so edgy for knowing exactly why just another piece of regulation will clearly not work. Funnily enough, the EU t…

> The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.

I'd personally disagree with that assessment. I think the vast majority of people want what's best for them and the cohorts they're in. Which is quite different from wanting what's best for society as a whole.

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

#688

Post by mvdtnz »

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…

Do you live in the EU? No? Then it's none of your business.

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

#689

Post by BoredomIsFun »

epolanski wrote: post #549
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

1. Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business. 2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it. 3. No…

> Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.

Hard disagree. Live in Central Asia, buy locally produced relatively cheap clothes and they have been lasting years so far.

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

#690

Post by manuelmoreale »

tossandthrow wrote: post #210
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.

Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities. It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies. One can speculate that this is an easy way to force the companies to pay for their externalities - given that production in third countries are much harder to touch for the EU.

> Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.

No they shouldn't. Sometimes it's not a matter of paying for the externalities. If you're doing harm at scale the only sane option is to stop doing that, period.

When we figured out that leaded gas was bad we didn't make companies pay for their negative externalities. We banned that shit and that was it.

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