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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

#651

Post by arlort »

dash2 wrote: post #626
camillomiller wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s a fair criticism, but note the Draghi report: “The regulatory burden on European companies is high and continues to grow, but the EU lacks a common methodology to assess it. The Commission has been working for years to reduce the "stock" and "flow" of regulation under the Better Regulation agenda. However, this effort has had limited impact so far. The stock of regulation remains large and new regulation in the…

> pieces of legislation were enacted and around 2,000 resolutions

I'm wondering if this includes regulatory agencies which in the US operate under the executive

I would guess it's included but the wording (act, resolution) is very "legislative" coded

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

#652

Post by troad »

schubidubiduba wrote: post #491
ars wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should. That just means the business will raise prices.

I'll happily pay more if that means less trash, less microplastics and less CO2. The current consumerism is not sustainable in the long run.

And when all those unnecessary increases in the cost of living lead to increasing vote share for the far right - eventually maybe even a far right government - what then? How sustainable will that be?

Have you actually read the science on microplastics? [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...

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

#653

Post by wedog6 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #584
appreciatorBus wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you negotiate the price to ”sell” at, it’s perfectly legitimate for that price to be negative.

Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.

Selling for a negative price is completely different from buying, because the flow of 'goods' is in the other direction.

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

#654

Post by pembrook »

digiown wrote: post #166
Sol- wrote: post #83

Seems like policy ripe with unintended side effects. At the very least, it'll likely raise prices for consumers because the companies aren't allowed to manage their inventory as efficiently as they wish. Now of course this might be a totally acceptable price to pay, I'm not necessarily arguing against it. It will just be conveniently omitted from public communications on the topic by the EU. For regulators, there nev…

Brand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail…

That’s not what will happen. You will not be seeing Chanel at the local discounter.

And for non-luxury brands this law will simply increase costs for companies operating in the EU and therefore cause people to spend more on clothes.

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

#656

Post by Eupolemos »

linehedonist wrote: post #337
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #272

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…

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 :)

We all have in Europe and the US - but it too is a sign of harsh climate change, because the reason it is cold "down here" on our latitudes is that the arctic is super hot, pushing the cold down to us.

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

#657

Post by DeathArrow »

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.

>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.

I think now the incentive is to produce less.

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

#658

Post by WalterBright »

em-bee wrote: post #545
WalterBright wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preventing imports will force them to pay the higher prices for the local stuff. Maybe it's better to let them decide what they want to buy.

that's how you protect your local economy. that's pretty normal everywhere. in europe people go on strike if imports threaten their livelyhood. dumping cheap clothing on an economy that can't handle it is not really helping. it's going to make the local stuff even more expensive because there is less demand for it. local development simply does not happen if outside products are allowed to dominate. if we were talkin…

Yes, I know this practice is commonplace. What it does is "protect" a specific industry, but that results in less choice for consumers and higher prices.

Protectionism has value when applied to strategic industries, like chip making, that you cannot afford to have cut off.

Making local garments is not a strategic industry.

P.S. Every businessman believes in the free market for everyone except his own business, which the government should protect from competition. The same for unions.

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

#659

Post by OrangeMusic »

quotemstr wrote: post #648
mulmen wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look it's not that hard. Is (in this case, pollution) a problem that needs solving? If the answer is yes, then it needs to be regulated even if you personally don't like laws. Sorry!

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

#660

Post by simianparrot »

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…

Same as when the EU puts a ton of restrictions on farmers within the EU countries -- Co2, fertiliser requirements, etc. -- making food so expensive to produce many go out of business and the remainder become practically luxury food, and then countries just end up having to import food from countries outside the EU _without_ those restrictions, simply offloading the environmental burden on "some other countries somewhere".

It's a farse.

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