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

environment.ec.europa.eu

131–140 of 894 posts

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

#131
post #118

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…

> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process. (all as…

The problem is the eBay sellers always label defective stuff as simply new product.

People buying it may or may not be ok with the defect.

Think bad welds, usually they're fine for a while and then they're very much not.

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

#132
post #118

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…

> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process. (all as…

> all assuming the product is not sold as "new"

And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.

The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.

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

#133

Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes. If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this. I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the pe…

Wow, you know what never happens? People changing size.

And that's why companies destroy unsold stock? How?

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

#134

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…

> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?

Isn't this why Ross exists? It's where I first heard the phrase "slightly irregular".

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

#135
post #63

Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes. If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this. I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the pe…

The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out. Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability. HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.

GLP-1's solve this, now you're basically only losing weight and eventually (i.e. the 2030s) most people won't fluctuate much in weight. So, try again on "changing sizes". Yes I'm aware that children grow up rapidly and need new clothes. Don't buy goodyear welted boots for your 7 year old.

The best fashion is timeless, and that's why heritage fashion is far superior to trends. Coincidentally, it's why the brands I listed above are exclusively heritage brands, who have basically no regards for trends.

There's a reason HN is poorly dressed. I'd rather take the "only dresses with startup T-shirt" guy over the "I've gotta have the Sydney Sweeney Jeans" person, and especially over the sneakerhead crowd which now thinks Hoka and NB is superior to Nike.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can steer where donations go with regulations. I don't see any downsides of warm coats to homeless shelters for example.

Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.

Why do you want those brands to die?

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

#138
This is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell.

So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.

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

#139
Might be to hinder large companies of moving fast-fashion storages into EU, so they cannot circumvent the 150EUR free import limit when it is dissolved, as that would move them into the supposed jaws of this "ban of destruction of fast-fashion" act.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.

Not really, the EU is just introducing additional weighing in favor of smaller order quantities.

They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)

So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.

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