311–320 of 894 posts
Can they ship it outside the EU and then destroy it? What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? Why not just put a carbon tax per weight?
European politicians will wear the clothes nobody wants so they can be decommissioned lawfully.
Also if really no one wanted it, why are companies destroying the items instead of giving them away?
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Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.
The worth is zero because the producer doesn't pay for the externalities (pollution, landfill usage etc). So essentially it is "free" because it is subsidized by everyone. The "headache" is just : produce what you sell, sell what you produce, don't fill the world with your shit.
I'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…
Apparel firms exist not to clothe people as common sense would suggest but to make a profit, and this practice of erring on the side of overproduction is more profitable than under production. The perfect solution would be to produce exactly the number of goods they will sell, but forecasts aren't perfect so they overproduce. Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste, so this adds another incentive and re…
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If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.
If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it! But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some winters are colder than average. This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there…
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Assuming there was no /s there: The US and I assume Europe have laws against "dumping" - selling a product for below cost - because it drives local competitors out of business. That is exactly what shipping containers full of clothes to Africa does.
I think GP was referring to donations, which are not subject to dumping rules AFAIK.
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> so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded. But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as…
> ... the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer... Maybe this is the problem. Retailers should cover the statutory warranty on any product they sell.
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…
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But then the prices might drop and the shareholders might lose value. Rather have all people spend all of their money to the cent to buy clothes, to pay rent and to buy water tbh
The shareholders losing value means that either all clothes drop to shein quality or they just stop making clothes.
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Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.
It didn’t use to be this way but through evaporative cooling, most of the founder types stopped posting here.