201–210 of 322 posts
I don’t understand why they would ban this rather than charge for it. It seems very likely that destroying unsold clothes is sometimes the socially efficient thing to do, even after taking into account the environmental externalities.
Because it promotes recycling instead of being another tax.
> To prevent misuse, businesses relying on these exemptions must provide proof (e.g. documents or test results) and publish annual reports on what they have discarded. I wonder if anybody is keeping track of everything a mid size business needs to take care of. Each particular report probably sounds like a reasonable request, but by now they're probably well into hundreds, and they're all outside the actual scope of…
This whole story that Europe suffers from overregulation is just in parts true, and mainly lazy thinking. In fact there was a study by an American law school that came to the conclusion that the US has more bureaucracy than many European countries… Recommended read: https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/04/the-lazy-myth-that...
> The debate around chlorinated chicken was never really just about chicken. It became a symbol of something larger: the fear that “market access” would become a polite way of saying, “please lower your food and safety standards so our companies can sell more easily into your market.” You can dismiss that as protectionism if you like. From a European perspective, it often looks like defending standards that citizens broadly trust.
Chemical washing of chicken is a safe and effective way to reduce pathogens. European food agencies agree that it's safe and effective, there's really no dispute about this, and in the US that's the end of the regulatory story. But in Europe the regulators see it as their job to consider esoteric second order effects: if we make it too easy to clean your chicken meat, might that cause you to underinvest in efforts to keep pathogens from getting there in the first place? It might, and the status quo achieves acceptably low rates of foodborne illness, so there's no need to permit innovations in chicken processing.
It's true, I would concede, that regulatory agencies requiring businesses to do stuff in a way that citizens consider normal will produce strong standards that citizens broadly trust.
Wouldn't that drive textile manufacturing out of the EU?
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You could internalize the cost of waste more generically by charging appropriately for landfill use and letting producers decide how much it's worth avoiding waste. Instead of just banning a particular waste stream by a particular industry, with distortive consequences.
Yes, and that sounds like a better plan, but evidently that requires more political capital than is available.
Governments tend to be annoyed at having to regulate and will often ‘somewhat’ regulate the worst excesses and then do the equivalent of a staring contest with those regulated. If business push right up to the wire and fight every tiny loophole then they risk being hit with a second wave of much more severe regulations; if they generally comply and don’t embarrass regulators and politicians, then there isn’t need to spend more capital on better regulation. At some level it’s very costly to micromanage business regulation gestures at California but so there’s definitely some decisions to be made about How Far To Go Each Time that aren’t simply due to a lack of political willpower.
Is this a problem in the EU? I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once. Those can easily fill a dumpster with tons of garbage. That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing.
I did a remodel last year. I filled 2 largeskips by the end of it. This is the first large job this house has had in 10 years, and it’s a 130 year old house. The cafe at the bottom of my street has roughly that amount of waste collected every 2 weeks - they fill their commercial trash bin every 2 days. I don’t know how much of that is waste vs old food but they generate orders of magnitude more waste than I do even w…
https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/food-waste/eu-food-was...
Here, too, they consider “stop overproducing” to be the biggest problem on the pyramid. I’m not as familiar with this effort (nor if it, or any related initiative, affects to-go / disposal-ware) but one can reasonably imagine they are targeting all severely wasteful overproduction given enough time.
I don’t understand why they would ban this rather than charge for it. It seems very likely that destroying unsold clothes is sometimes the socially efficient thing to do, even after taking into account the environmental externalities.
Destroying unsold clothes is financially the most efficient thing to do. It remains unclear to me how taking actions to maintain higher markups on products would be socially efficient in any way. Companies of course can keep doing it, they just will face financial and legislative repercussions for it.
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Destroying unsold clothes is financially the most efficient thing to do. It remains unclear to me how taking actions to maintain higher markups on products would be socially efficient in any way. Companies of course can keep doing it, they just will face financial and legislative repercussions for it.
If you can't sell clothes to anyone, then it may be more socially efficient to destroy them than (a) keep them in a warehouse or (b) ship them overseas. Both (a) and (b) can have substantial environmental costs. I don't think it should be hard to come up with other plausible cases. You're assuming there's only one reason companies do this. I don't deny that that's a possible reason. I also don't see why taxing that b…
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Is it? What is the proof for that? I think we've seen time and time again that self-regulation of the industry doesn't work and that businesses will gladly fuck over society if they can get away with it and make more money. Usually that behavior is even defended with saying "Well, it's not their responsibility to solve society's issues. They are there to make money." Barring nationalization of an industry, heavy regu…
»If some businesses get killed in the process, so be it.« The problem with this attitude is that the rest of the world often doesn’t have these strict regulations and as result, businesses aren’t killed but just leaving the country.
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Is it really the case that Nike is a wealth signalling brand? In the investigation I think you're referring to ( https://www.fastcompany.com/90697259/nike-appears-to-be-shre... ), I find Nike's side of the story much more plausible: if they find in processing returns that a shoe appears to have been altered, they prefer to reuse the shoe materials for other purposes, rather than carefully inspecting individual shoes…
Regarding ‘wealth signaling’, a similar lens to mine would be ‘brand dilution’, which is certainly a more widely-accepted concept in business management; see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959809 The EU has disagreed with Nike, and the law is now in effect.
I do agree that this law will have a more meaningful effect on luxury clothing brands, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if certain kinds of fast fashion become impractical to offer in the EU. More power to them, as long as people don't start complaining in a few years when Zara's trendsetting new line of blouses isn't available in European stores.
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If you can't sell clothes to anyone, then it may be more socially efficient to destroy them than (a) keep them in a warehouse or (b) ship them overseas. Both (a) and (b) can have substantial environmental costs. I don't think it should be hard to come up with other plausible cases. You're assuming there's only one reason companies do this. I don't deny that that's a possible reason. I also don't see why taxing that b…
Or (c) lower the price to the market clearing price point and your clothes will be gone.
[1] https://theclothingbank.org.uk/what-happens-to-the-clothes-y...