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

environment.ec.europa.eu

661–670 of 894 posts

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

#661
post #535
post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

sounds like an improvement on the current system, no?

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

#662
post #39

That’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.

I mean, most of the destruction is recycling that I am aware of. Turning into rags is the fate of most unwanted clothing. Do the euros burn it instead?

"the euros"? As opposed to what, "the hillbillies"?

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

#663
We would have been better served by setting minimum clothing standards instead of this bs to get at the fast fashion. Also educate young people about the cost of their cheap clothes to the world especially young women who are the majority consumers of fast fashion.

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

#664
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt cheap to produce, that they have less of an incentive to let it go to waste. When I buy socks they get holes after wearing them 7 times, and then they go in the bin too.

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.

This would been that more competition would be good for the environment because it would drive down prices and margins, and thus the incentive to overproduce. But this rule actually decreases the competitive pressure and increases margins because market exit barriers = market entry barriers

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

#665
post #208

Fashion is a deeply irrational market that preys on the worst of human nature. There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. You might say ok, if people are dumb enough to buy that then that's not my problem. So now there are companies creating the environmental cost of destroying viable products just to sustain this kind of grifting. On top of that I think that society, as a genera…

"There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. ..."

I used to be very tolerant of people's idiosyncrasies but with the internet, social media etc. that brings out the worst in people I'm now much less so.

Agreed, fashion is deeply irrational but it's always been with us. The real problem now is the degree to which the fashion industry exploits the excessively 'vulnerable'—you know, the oddballs who were once ignored. It's why a $5 can now cost $500.

Moreover, something in fashion one day is out of fashion the next, and it's a damn nuisance. It's gotten completely out of hand. Recently, I bought a pair of cargo-style work pants and they were fine. About a month later I bought another pair of the same brand, size and type (going on the label they were same model and style, and there was only one type--supposedly). Got them home and the cut was not only different and they were less comfortable but the legs were cut narrow (they were now too tight).

Took them back and the sales assistant said "oh that's normal, styles usually change with every new shipment, you're supposed to check them first".

For fuck's sake they are ordinary utilitarian work pants—not something you'd expect to see on the catwalks of Paris. I ought to be able to buy exactly the same product time after time like I used to be able to do with Levi jeans by just by looking at the tag/label (nowadays you can't even rely on Levis being the same fit).

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

#666

If manufacturers are banned from destroying unsold clothing won't they respond by producing less to avoid excess inventory? And if supply decreases while demand stays the same wouldn't that push prices up for everyone?

if you have so much supply that it makes sense to destroy some of it, why would reducing that supply to meet demand drive up prices?

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

#667

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…

Why would they destroy the clothes instead of selling them to consumers? Developing countries already have huge markets for selling, altering, and repairing second-hand clothing that gets sent by thrift shops in developed countries.

If anything this would be displacing lower quality used clothing (often graphic t-shirts) that currently makes up a large part of the textile markets in developing nations.

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

#668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How low is your population density, that there is no other person, who might have this size? > A company can't prevent a consumer from ruining the wasted clothes. When a consumer ruins clothing during try on he needs to buy it. I have always expected that rule to be the same everywhere.

I personally I don't want to wear clothes that some unclean person or weirdo tried on before. I get value in being the only person who wore it.

But that is how physical stores currently work, where you can try the stuff on, before you buy it? If you care about this, you can of course take the upper one to try on, like all do and then buy the lowest one. But you wash the clothing anyways before actually wearing them, so it doesn't really matter. Honestly I don't get your point.

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

#670
post #667

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…

Why would they destroy the clothes instead of selling them to consumers? Developing countries already have huge markets for selling, altering, and repairing second-hand clothing that gets sent by thrift shops in developed countries. If anything this would be displacing lower quality used clothing (often graphic t-shirts) that currently makes up a large part of the textile markets in developing nations.

Because at some point it becomes cheaper to ship and destroy than to store and sell.

Inventory is "dead money" in accounting books!

Money has been converted to Obtainium and Obtainium just sits there until it is converted back to (hopefully more) money, taking valuable space that could be filled with more Obtainium as soon as it goes away.

At some point that Obtainium sitting there unsold just becomes un-space and destroying it becomes the cheapest move.

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