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

environment.ec.europa.eu

531–540 of 894 posts

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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If part of it is sold, isn't it better than if it had all been destroyed? It's literally what that law is for.

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.

Given how absurdly efficient shipping stuff in container ships is, I don't believe its actually worse. Specially if the company can just save money by being slightly more conservative in terms of how much they manufacture in the first place.

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

#532

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…

Climate change will probably solve itself within 10 years due to exponential growth of solar panels, batteries and electric cars.

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

#533
post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly enough you doing what you want with your stuff in your own home is different from operating a business at scale, and we can make different laws for the different situations.

If I were these companies, I would just give them all in truckloads to the CEO's son, and have them dispose of it.

It might surprise some people that courts are wise to this sort of thing. Lawmakers generally empower them to ignore such legal fictions.

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

#534

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…

>If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.

This is a certainty.

Scientists have been ringing the bell since at least the late 60's and our only reaction was to laugh at them and floor the accelerator pedal and continuously increase our emissions over 5 decades. It is unlikely to change with the AI boom.

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

#535
post #415

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…

I feel like you accidentally flipped a minus sign in your equations and then doubled down on your conclusions. Who would pay you to take something away and destroy it for you? It's fine to come up with creative solutions using an LLM, but you have to apply some critical thing before throwing your weight behind the conclusions!

What's stopping the price from being extremely low? Plenty might pay $1 to take a bundle of 1000 items of clothing, pick through it and find 20 items they like, then destroy the 980 other items.

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

#536
post #516
post #513

Earlier 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.

It is not a group of people. It’s a legal entity that represents their economic interests.

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

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. We were told creative destruction is good, if some companies exit the market and are replaced by others that offer better value then resources are being allocated more efficiently, no?

Just like other companies came along and offered a better Sears catalog when the internet killed their revenue? People don't voluntarily lose money. Understand that and the world will way more understandable.

It does appear that people prefer the convenience of internet shopping, though I also see that other firms still successfully apply the catalog model in specific markets, eg Harbor Freight which does this for construction tools.

People don't voluntarily lose money. Understand that and the world will way more understandable.

But nobody is arguing that they do. Rather, I'm saying that if some companies lose money on selling clothes and exit the market, there's nothing wrong with that.

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

#538
post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Climate change will probably solve itself within 10 years due to exponential growth of solar panels, batteries and electric cars.

That is delusionnal. The growth is globally way too slow and too late to have a major impact, especially when the climate is already provoking chain reactions like the large emissions from melting permafrost.

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more. It's good exactly because of this. Every company is pushing us to consume more, and Wall Street is at the top of this, growth at all costs (including human lives, mental health, just anything) Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine. We should be making s…

> Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine. Wall Street here is a boogie man. Using resources to make life better is actually good. And we keep getting better at it, and doing so in more sustainable and efficient ways. And if it’s not - you fundamentally believe technology is not beneficial. Then all of industrial society needs to be reversed.

wall street != technology.

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

#540

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…

> micro-targeted > mandated USB-C on Apple devices There is no law that states specifically Apple must specifically use USB-C. IIUC, the law is that all brands/manufacturers should use the same type of charger, an industry standard. That was apparently USB-C. Apple was the odd one out and had to change. If something better comes along, the industry as a whole can upgrade.

Americans always ask - but who decides - the industry decides. The industry gets to decide what they want to use.
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