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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

#501

Post by apparent »

> “If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice,” Pesca said, but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI “slop,” a term for spammy, commodified content. “They have banter, but it’s very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they’re always saying, ‘Yeah, that’s so interesting.’ It’s really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?”

Totally disagree. NotebookLM isn't always right, but it can go deep on complex scientific and other academic content. It is absolutely not "surface-level" unless you're feeding it shallow content.

I have never heard this Greene fellow, but I can say that all of the summaries generated by NotebookLM for me have been more nuanced and higher quality than the content created by NPR in recent years.

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

#502

Post by awesome_dude »

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…

I'm going to speculate that it won't "add" ships at all

As you say, ships are moving in and out of the EU each year - the question is, how many have "back loads" - if some percentage of the ships leave Europe empty to return to Asia for more manufactured goods, then it seems very likely that they can have the containers of unwanted clothes as part of the trip.

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

#503

Post by randomNumber7 »

gwerbin wrote: post #324
rapnie wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt cheap to produce, that they have less of an incentive to let it go to waste. When I buy socks they get holes after wearing them 7 times, and then they go in the bin too.

If you can make a shirt for $1 and sell it for $10, you can throw out literally half of your inventory and still make $5 per shirt.

If you throw some plastics into a coal fired power plant it is almost the same as if you would burn oil.

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

#504

Post by James_K »

nullocator wrote: post #470
cyclotron3k wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fantasy. No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them. So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.

China for decades paid the U.S. and Europe for their "recycling", this practice was only banned in recent years. Clothes seem more valuable than plastics waste.

That was because you could make money by turning old things into new things. Not so with garbage disposal, a service for which you almost always have to pay.

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

#505

Post by im3w1l »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #377
peterfirefly wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry Because it is very visible to low information voters who are also red/green voters.

Are you a high-information voter? If so, could you please provide information about any consumer industry that comes even close to the apparel industry in terms of a) ubiquity and market scale and b) destruction of unsold but undamaged items while still producing equally functional equivalents for market? Is there such a thing as fast-cutlery? Or fast-furniture? Maybe fast-book or fast-vehicle? Fast-whitegood perhaps…

I feel like there is a lot of waste in packaging specifically. Like way, way more colorful plastic polymers go into the trash way faster making products look appealing on the shelf than from clothing. Don't have the numbers to back it up though.

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

#506

Post by tw04 »

miki123211 wrote: post #373
motbus3 wrote: post #204

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…

Here's how this law is actually going to work. Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to…

> Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.

This isn’t going to happen. But if it did, they would 100% sell them in local markets, not destroy them.

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

#507

Post by ragall »

ch4s3 wrote: post #477
ragall wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not think that, but EU citizens think otherwise.

Did they vote for the bureaucrats in Brussels that wrote the regulation?

Irrelevant. If you want to put it that way, USians don't vote for their president either.

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

#508

Post by swat535 »

tw04 wrote: post #506
miki123211 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how this law is actually going to work. Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to…

> Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. This isn’t going to happen. But if it did, they would 100% sell them in local markets, not destroy them.

Yea, I'm not sure I understand how destroying the items would benefit these "resellers" ? What's in it for them?

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

#509

Post by mbrumlow »

cyclotron3k wrote: post #398
miki123211 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how this law is actually going to work. Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to…

This is a fantasy. No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them. So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.

You are right. What will happen is somebody will pay “x” for the clothing, but the same company will charge “2x” for transport.

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

#510

Post by gwerbin »

Uvix wrote: post #245
babybjornborg wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How will apparel be cheaper? When they lower production runs, it'll be less available, which will mean prices will go up.

This isn't exactly a supply and demand situation that might cause prices to increase by restricting supply, like what you sometimes see with global commodity cartels such as oil.

What's happening in this case is that they are overproducing because profit margins are high enough that they can overproduce and still be happy with the profit after discarding the extra, in the hope of capturing the stochastic upside of extra sales from never being out of stock.

This might cause various random fast fashion junk items to occasionally go out of stock when they wouldn't have in the past, but it's not like you're going to see long waiting lists or high aftermarket prices. People just won't buy that stuff because there will be lots of alternatives, are they just won't buy anything at all and realize they don't need it.

So yes, in an abstract textbook sense, the price might go up in the sense that you might experience some probability of your desired items selling out when that probability was lowered before. But I don't think anybody in their right mind would argue that's a serious economic detriment.

Maybe there's a case to be made that this is a crude way to address what is essentially an allocation failure. But that alone doesn't mean that we shouldn't try it or that it's bad policy.

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