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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

#641

Post by globular-toast »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #272
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, 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…

> Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer

This is something that's scared me ever since I learnt about air conditioning and how it works in the 90s when I was like 10.

Air con heats up the outside, so air cons are fighting with each other to cool down their respective buildings. So, more air con, using even more power, all heating up the outside a little bit more. The snowball effect is going to be enormous.

I guess I thought as a 10 year old that some adults would have this under control. Or maybe I realised, even back then, that the only thing really separating adults from children is big bodies and that you don't get told off for being greedy any more.

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

#643

Post by hilbert42 »

Nevermark wrote: post #620
hilbert42 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2." The world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong. That EU regulators actually saw need for such regulations makes me both sad and annoyed because they ought not be necessary. What's wrong with clothing…

> What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste To the degree ethics (which I am using here to mean, accounting for negative externalities) are not incorporated into economics, with very few exceptions, every company will optimize their profits with no thought to externalities. Shareholders might care about waste as individuals, but are not coordinated in anyway that moves corporations. And any corporations tha…

"Asking/convincing companies or individuals to be voluntarily ethical, one at a time, is not a solution. ...just increases the opportunity, profits and incentives for less-altruistic actors."

Exactly, it's why we need to reintroduce regulations many of which were removed or weakened from the late 1970s onward. Moreover, we need intelligent regulation not just gut reaction to an immediate problem. That's proving much more difficult (reigning in the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism that were let out of the bag ~50 years ago with deregulation won't be easy).

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

#644

Post by quotemstr »

joe_the_user wrote: post #637
quotemstr wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles If that's so bad, why is doing so the cheapest option? What makes you think you know better than the market what's wasteful?

What makes you think that what's cost effective (in terms of money, of course) for a given company involves optimally conserving resources? The obvious counter-example is that polluting is very cost-effective in an unregulated environment there are others - such as this.

> What makes you think that what's cost effective...involves optimally conserving resources

The words "cost" and "effective "perhaps?

> Polluting

Pollution is an economic externality. If I buy a shift and throw it out unworn, I've wasted only my own resources. (I'm paying for the landfill of course.)

You could argue that my wasting that shirt hurt you because I could have instead spent those resources on productive activity that benefits you, and therefore I had a duty to keep it -- but that's just communism with extra steps.

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

#645

Post by FarmerPotato »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #503
gwerbin wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are anecdotes about trash incinerators requiring less kerosene to finish the burn, because of the plastic content.

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

#646

Post by troad »

camillomiller wrote: post #586
ragall wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you can try to reason with the people who post comments like the one you're responding to, but the truth is they are just there waiting for anything a regulator does to desparage it, defend corporate and capital, and change nothing about the status quo. The worst part is that they do it thinking they are so edgy for knowing exactly why just another piece of regulation will clearly not work. Funnily enough, the EU tra…

> you can try to reason with the people who post comments like the one you're responding to, but the truth is they are just there waiting for anything a regulator does to desparage it, defend corporate and capital, and change nothing about the status quo. The worst part is that they do it thinking they are so edgy for knowing exactly why just another piece of regulation will clearly not work. Funnily enough, the EU track record proves that, apart from some exceptions, these type of regulations work really well. USB-C. Data Roaming across all of Europe. Laws on single use plastics. Etc. But yeah, it's just another regulation! EU BAD!

How about extending others some good faith?

These are political disagreements with decades (sometimes centuries) of history, and unless you're fifteen years old, there's a better explanation for the fact that others disagree with you than "I am the single smartest person in the universe, and all my political opinions are so irrefutably correct that anyone who disagrees must be doing so in bad faith and out of ignorance".

The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.

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

#647

Post by tossandthrow »

FarmerPotato wrote: post #642

Turning the issue on its head, if 4-9% is unsold, then the whole supply chain's success at predicting consumer preferences is 90-95%. Wow! When I think of unsold, I see that some sizes run out, leaving odd sizes as surplus.

That assumes that they need to predict demand 1:1 which is not true.

They are more than welcome to have an over supply ready, they just need to use it productively is they can't sell it.

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

#648

Post by quotemstr »

mulmen wrote: post #632
quotemstr wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles If that's so bad, why is doing so the cheapest option? What makes you think you know better than the market what's wasteful?

Regulation is not about knowing better than the market. It is about correcting harmful externalities that markets would not solve on their own.

If disposing of my own shirt in a landfill I pay for is an "externality[y]" justifying state intervention, then every domain of life is subject to top down control. I don't want to live in a society in which resources are allocation in general by edict instead of the market.

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

#649

Post by globular-toast »

bee_rider wrote: post #374
linehedonist wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

This has been a decent, classic winter. It’s an important part of the regional character. We need to have snow occasionally, remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society. Sorry about the pipes.

> remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.

Are they still doing it?

I had a few "proper winters" in the UK during my early 20s. The roads are gritted (and ploughed if necessary) by local councils in lorries, but the footpaths are supposed to be done by residents. The first proper winter, after the snow had refrozen a few times overnight, the paths were lethal. We have these yellow grit bins scattered everywhere that residents are supposed to use to get grit to do the paths. But nobody was doing it. Anywhere. As a pedestrian you just had to walk in the road. This was a real "society has failed" moment for me.

Not that it matters any more, though. Such winters seem a distant memory. The last I can remember was 2018's "beast from the east", but that was more of a freak event than a normal winter.

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

#650

Post by pembrook »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #526

Why don’t they do the same with food then? There is a similar issue where truly vast amounts of food is destroyed every year. Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint. Countless tons of e.g. wheat straight to the landfill, not even used as animal feed. The demand for the product is unpredictable and they need to produce and sell enough to cover the investment in producing it at all on average. There…

Are you arguing against yourself to provide an example of why this law is bad…or do you actually want to force people to eat rotten/spoiled food?

You seem to provide a great example of why Eurocrats regulating a highly efficient market will not cause the desired outcome…due to reality.

> Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint.

Yes, keeping 8 billion humans alive does have non-negligible energy costs. Again I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or if you’re an anti-human environmental terrorist.

If you actually care about agriculture emissions though, population decline will cause this to go down faster than any Eurocrat will with silly laws based on some clickbait news article they read about an industry they understand nothing about.

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