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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

#551

Post by philwelch »

apparent wrote: post #320
philwelch wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn’t use to be this way but through evaporative cooling, most of the founder types stopped posting here.

Can you explain the connection to evaporative cooling?

In evaporative cooling, the warmer particles are more prone to evaporate and escape leaving the remaining substance cooler than it was. Likewise, as individuals with more of a libertarian or founder-sympathizing mindset stopped contributing to HN as much, the overall tone of the site turned more negative against business and successful founders.[1] I don't want to speculate too much on why they started leaving--I hope it's because they all got too busy being successful founders--but once the effect started to happen and HN turned into less and less of a site for founders to discuss their startups and turned more and more into the proverbial peanut gallery, I think a feedback loop started pushing more of them away.

mftrhu is probably correct in attributing the origin of the analogy but I don't specifically remember where I got it from and I think some of the examples EY gives in that essay would be uncalled for to apply as a direct analogy to HN. HN was never a doomsday cult and I'm not even trying to say that all of the smart and reasonable people left HN, but rather that there was a specific attitude and mentality that's not well represented here anymore.

[1] This is oversimplified. Classic HN still had lots of people complaining about big tech companies, it's just that the criticism was usually voiced from the perspective of another founder rather than from the perspective of a progressive critic. For instance, I remember lots of complaints about Apple's arbitrary and capricious App Store policies, but then that directly affects the startup founder who wants to build an iPhone app.

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

#552

Post by [deleted] »

ryantgtg wrote: post #430
eddythompson80 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now. It took China putting on regulations on their side to disrupt that industry. Now you have to find other smaller economies to do that.

You appear to be agreeing with the person you’re replying to.

[deleted]

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

#553

Post by [deleted] »

CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #364
usefulcat wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economically, producing less to start with is not very different from what is currently done, destroying excess inventory. Therefore I don't think it's at all a given that prices will go up.

Destroying the inventory has a cost though.

[deleted]

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

#554

Post by groundzeros2015 »

prmoustache wrote: post #539
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

exactly. wall street here is a personification of "bad effects of industrial society"

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

#555

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

panick21 wrote: post #531
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.

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.

Sure, let's conveniently not count the horrifically-polluting trucks in to distribute them across the interior.

You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?

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

#556

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #488
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then they won't take the donations, problem solved?

The problem is that they do and leave massive piles of winter clothing laying around as garbage.

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

#557

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

awesome_dude wrote: post #502
johnnyanmac wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh cool, so I can fly commercial all I want at zero marginal CO2 emissions just because they don't have to build an extra plane just for me? I can burn that jet fuel and not feel bad because they were going to burn that gallon of fuel anyway?

Some of these arguments are so silly that I'm starting to understand why the EU thinks regulations are a free lunch to improve the environment with no costs whatsoever.

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

#558

Post by belorn »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #440
ryantgtg wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be agreeing with the person you’re replying to.

I'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law say…

There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.

The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.

The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.

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

#559

Post by wakawaka28 »

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.

There's already strong financial incentives to not over-produce. Nobody wants to dump cash into inventory that can't sell. Trying to force them to sell it all is going to reduce choice and availability for consumers, unless the businesses find a workaround. I'm pretty sure they will find a workaround, and it won't be to sell at a steep loss to the same market that refused the products to begin with. But these workarounds will cost money, and consumers will pay for the fantasy that waste is being reduced.

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

#560

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

jazz9k wrote: post #516
lores wrote: 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.

Your reasoning makes sense only if it's just as easy to sentence the group to jail time as it is to sentence the individual--and pretty much everything else about a corporation is set up to make it harder to do that.
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