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.
They quite clearly are. Burberry was caught a while ago https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983 , but it's well known that every major upmarket brand was doing it to avoid the loss of prestige of sending the items to outlets.
EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
521–530 of 894 posts
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.
A company isn't AI or a bot. It's essentially a group of people. It should have the same rights as an individual when it comes to private property.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#523I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor. But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to t…
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#524In 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…
I used to work in IT Recycling and I feel like I was for some time, this process.
We would take stock to be destroyed from refurbishment/replacement pipelines, fix it up "just enough" and if we werent worried about serialisation, it would go out via eBay, otherwise it would be gifted to clients who would say it was for their kids but I had suspicions that sometimes it was going back into retail eventually.
I still have a lot of shit that should have been destroyed.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
> most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare. It shouldn't be cheap. The world got used to the luxury of cheap meat by being unethical and harmful to the environment (humans' environment) and animals. Cows are insanely resource-intensive to farm, bad for the air, bad for the water, bad for the land. Factory-farm…
How are pigs, rabbits, goats and venison more sustainable? Unless you mean eating meat twice a year. I live in a farmer family; our cattle needs around one hectare each, because we don't feed them processed food, only grass; because concentrated food is even less sustainable, and more importantly, more expensive than letting them roam (fenced areas) Rabbit is not sustainable. There were some people trying to commerci…
Rabbit is one of the most sustainable livestock. It requires less food to produce more rabbits and they don't need much land. A single female produces ~50 kits per season, taking 8-12 weeks to come to market. Ironically, they aren't considered livestock by USDA, so you can skip most of the red tape. As far as feed goes, there are many options that will depend on the farmer; pelleted feed is the best but most costly, so you can mix in either foraging or supplement with various other feeds like different hays, oats, etc. Whether it's economical depends on a number of factors, but there's over 3,000 rabbit farms in USA right now.
Same with goats, very sustainable. In many places like islands, goat is the preferred livestock as it requires less land and feed. And obviously you can forage goats in places most animals won't since they'll eat nearly any plants.
Pigs (and other livestock) historically were raised through the year and only slaughtered in winter. It's the last 100 years that has completely changed how and when people in the West eat meat, people's assumptions about how we must farm, how we must eat, etc. Our diets don't have to remain the way we are. For example, since Chinese people prefer to eat pork, they actually have half the world's pig livestock. We like beef so we have a lot of cows. It could've been reversed if our cultural tastes were different. Similarly, we could just eat less meat, and our tastes would develop towards the whole universe of non-meat foods.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#526The underlying dynamic is simple: the value of the product in every market exceeds the logistics cost of moving the product to that market. In other words, the market clearing price is globally negative. Because most of the cost of production is in the logistics, and destruction can be done close to the point of production, the resource and environmental footprint of destruction is smaller than every alternative.
People don’t produce excess inventory for fun, that is a pure loss. The production is highly optimized to eke out a thin average margin in an unpredictable business. If the product is not destroyed, it necessarily increases the average cost of those products because either logistics costs go up or supply goes down.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#527Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#528That’s excellent news. I always find it strange that companies would go as far as to destroy unsold items instead of just donating or recycling them.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea they will, they'll resell what they can, and destroy the rest, probably by throwing them into a giant burn pit in a place with zero environmental regulations.
Ok, let's say that happens. Seems like a net win over throwing all of them in a burn pit.
Re: EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
#530I'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…
I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet. The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay…
Some of us like the intent of the law but are wondering what the consequences of the law are.
We have already seen all the schemes that corporations use for greenwashing. We have already seen all the recycling that isn't. Most of us assume that these corporations will simply do the absolute minimum they have to do to comply with the letter of the law. That likely means "selling" crates of these clothes back to some country willing to discard or destroy them.
In addition, we already have a ton of problems from Always Late Inventory(tm), and this seems like it's going to add to that. Are you even slightly outside of the normal body shape? Sorry, no stock for you evermore.
I think the law is a good idea, but, sadly, laws mean nothing without implementation. The devil is in the details.