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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

#351

Post by peterfirefly »

linuxhansl wrote: post #260

First, seems like a good thing. I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start. Second, in the short term this is going to lower profits for some companies. Third, hopefully in the long run it will lead to less waste. Is it perfect? Of course not, no real legislation ever is. If there's a better way to get started on reducing waste I'd like to hear it, though.

> I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.

They didn't. You can look at the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) yourself. It's fairly long but it should be easy to scroll until you find some of the lists.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng

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

#352

Post by Ekaros »

dollylambda wrote: post #346
LorenPechtel wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have already gotten two answers showing why this causes the manufacturer to lose money. A third: I hike, enough that pretty much all my gear out there is the good stuff. I do not care one bit about brands and would prefer not to be an ad for the outdoor companies--but I am anyway because it's not just a name. Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. People…

This feels like the argument for why not deflationary currency. Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary. Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.

That is inflationary. Goods costing more monetary units is inflation. In deflation same amount of monetary units buys more goods. So you would want to sell your house now if you have other options and then next year you could buy similar house and still have monetary units left over...

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

thewebguyd wrote: post #350
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and…

It’s honestly terrifying. I’m in the PNW and we haven’t had winter yet. Extremely low snowpack in the mountains and not even a single day below freezing where I live. I’ve been observing the change for the past 10 years or so here and this is the first year that’s it’s been so “in your face” obvious instead of just subtle changes and effects. If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a m…

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by engineer_22 »

linehedonist wrote: post #337
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and…

sure, though New York has gotten a real honest-to-goodness winter this year. There's been a foot on the snow on the ground continuously for the last month, and it's been cold enough that the pipes in one of my bathrooms froze. I think it's easier from the West Coast to bemoan the end of East Coast winters than to live through one :)

It has been brutal, and very cold, and we have not seen the sun. Send help!

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

#355

Post by apparent »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #323
apparent wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP was referring to donations, which are not subject to dumping rules AFAIK.

People living in the tropics don't need clothing suited for temperate climates.

People who live in temperate climates wear tshirts, underwear, and socks, if I'm not mistaken.

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

#356

Post by zdragnar »

bluebarbet wrote: post #297
graemep wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's partly explained by all the non-US contributors here. That's my theory. Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.

Most software developers are not founders, but they like to hang out here for the news and community anyway. It used to be a lot more libertarian back when I joined (even more so when I only occasionally lurked) but things have shifted rather dramatically over time.

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

#357

Post by 1718627440 »

Sol- wrote: post #81
softwaredoug wrote: post #20

Fashion production is responsible for 8-10% of all carbon emissions https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-s...

Cheap clothing is a civilizational achievement and good for human welfare. So carbon emissions are bad, but then we should price carbon and not micromanage clothing inventory.

Getting common goods less expensive is good, making them too cheap is not. Imagine you are optimizing a math model, but nothing actually has prices. You just get a garbage point as optimum. You need to have scarcity, so that a system that optimizes the allocation of scarce goods actually works.

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

#358

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#359

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

Took me a while to find the actual rules: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/commission-del...

Overall, seems reasonably sensible.

It's still ok to destroy products if (among many other reasons) "the product can reasonably be considered unacceptable for consumer use due to damage, including physical damage, deterioration or contamination, including hygiene issues, whether it is caused by consumers or occurs during the handling of the product [...] and repair and refurbishment are not technically feasible or cost-effective;" but cost-effective means "the cost of repairing or refurbishing a product not outweighing the total cost of destruction of that product and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product."

So essentially, they have to offer all the clothing for donation first, if nobody wants it, it can still be destroyed (that's one of the other exceptions).

Unfortunately another exception is if "it is technically unfeasible ... to remove ... labels, logos or recognisable product design or other characteristics that are ... protected by intellectual property rights". So a luxury brand can probably still go "well our design is protected and we don't want the poors wearing our fancy clothes".

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

#360

Post by peterfirefly »

exizt88 wrote: post #256

The "Less Growth for Europe" party strikes again.

It's regulation from the previous European Parliament and the first von der Leyen Commission. The new parliament from 2024 has a lot fewer red/green members (still enough to cause trouble, though) and the second von der Leyen Commission has a different agreement with the current parliament. The current Council is also a lot different than the council of just a year ago -- not in terms of members but in terms of opinions. A lot of the craziness is being rolled back, maybe this will also be rolled back.

The link is not about the 2024 framework regulation (from just before the elections) but about some new supplementary regulation that the 2024 regulation allowed for and required -- in order to provide clarifications and fix some of the mistakes of the initial regulation.

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