Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

environment.ec.europa.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 894 posts

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

#691

Post by hnlmorg »

Sleaker wrote: post #564
hnlmorg wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t these non-EU then just sell the goods in those countries? It would mean they turn a cost (destroying) into revenue (sales). It’s not like there isn’t already a massive industry selling counterfeit goods. So in your hypothetical scenario, if those companies are already shady then I could easily see them selling those surplus stock in the same shady markets.

Because the cost of doing business in those markets is probably more than what they could get for the product. And if they lower the price in that market, it might devalue the product line as whole and potentially causes brand damage.

The brand isn’t the one doing the business. It’s the 3rd party who we’ve already established is unscrupulous. So why should they care about the brand value?

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

#694

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

This is also how plastic "recycling" goes. Stuff gets collected, sorted, baled up, and a checkmark for "this is recycled" is placed. Then it gets loaded onto a ship and exported and ends up in landfill or incinerated anyway. And every step in the chain gets a ton of money, ultimately from taxpayers.

I'm sure some plastic gets recycled / reused. But as long as it's cheaper to just produce new plastics, the problem will remain. Recycling plastic is only viable for goodwill points and marketing (e.g. if people actively seek it out) and with government subsidies or rules.

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

#695

Post by mns »

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.

But why are you lying? It's not about you, no one is stopping you to go and throw everything you own in a landfill, this is about the companies that act environmental in their marketing, but then go ahead and destroy new and unused products.

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

#696

Post by ahartmetz »

simianparrot wrote: post #660
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…

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 somewh…

Food is actually pretty cheap in the EU (in absolute prices compared to the US and relative to income compared to most other places), so I don't know what you mean.

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

#697

Post by mns »

xp84 wrote: post #125
lores wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of reply is so cliché it's tiresome. "Someone makes small step to avoid waste and environmental damage" -> "if it's not perfect it's no good at all, let the free market sort it out at t=infinity". Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.

Where even are all the people wandering around naked for lack of clothes? There's so much donated clothing already out there. And the homeless here mainly 'need clothes' because they have no way to wash their clothes. It'd be less wasteful to get them access to laundry facilities. And the developing world always gets the "PATRIOTS - Super Bowl LX Champions" gear and a ton of other cast-offs - I doubt they need more.…

Unlike virtue-signaling corporations that burn the planet down just to get more shareholder value in the next quarter.

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

#698

Post by imtringued »

dollylambda wrote: post #346
LorenPechtel wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have already gotten two answers showing why this causes the manufacturer to lose money. A third: I hike, enough that pretty much all my gear out there is the good stuff. I do not care one bit about brands and would prefer not to be an ad for the outdoor companies--but I am anyway because it's not just a name. Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. People…

This feels like the argument for why not deflationary currency. Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary. Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.

Deflationary currency is like a highway that you're allowed to park on. People will park their car on the highways and then charge you a fee to let you through.

>Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary.

Uhm, if money is deflationary, your house will be worth less than X denominated in the deflationary currency. This means if the money grows in value faster you'd sell all your assets as quickly as possible and replace it with a useless scrap of paper.

>Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.

Again, if money is deflationary, you'd hold onto money and wait for house prices to drop with the aforementioned mechanic.

You might say this is appealing, but the problem is that your income depends on other people's spending and they have the same incentive as you do, which is to earn more than you spend. That's something that is not possible in aggregate, where total aggregate spending and total aggregate income must always be equal. This is a zero sum game purely mathematically and this is not a moral judgement but an explanation how the rules work.

When people follow the rules of the game, something weird happens. The promised outcome of a wealthy society from everyone being prudent savers doesn't emerge. The reason is as follows: If you have 1 million paper notes that represent the wealth of the entire nation and the value of the paper notes goes up, the represented wealth of the entire nation goes up, but the nation still has the same 1 million paper notes. No matter how much value people try to save in the form of money, they will still only have paper notes.

Those paper notes do not have intrinsic value and that is for a good reason. Giving the paper notes intrinsic value doesn't change the fundamentals, it just makes the tokens more expensive to produce. It's like having a golden toilet.

If money is worthless, then trying to give it non-transient value is a fools errand. Trying to say that a house is equally as valuable as a small bundle of cotton fabric is only acceptable for the purposes of accounting, but saying that the same bundle of cotton fabric (whose value is decreed) ought to buy more house next year is batshit insane. You couldn't come up with a better system to reward laziness and idleness.

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

#699

Post by epolanski »

BoredomIsFun wrote: post #689
epolanski wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business. 2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it. 3. No…

> Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business. Hard disagree. Live in Central Asia, buy locally produced relatively cheap clothes and they have been lastin…

You're not really describing fast fashion, aren't you?

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

#700

Post by em-bee »

WalterBright wrote: post #658
em-bee wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

this is not about protecting businesses. this is about providing jobs for locals. many african countries are struggling with that.

providing an income for everyone is important. keeping everyone satisfied is too. not to mention not loosing your cultural identity. and if the clothing industry is able to provide jobs by keeping cheap low quality products out of the country, why would that be bad? clothing is not the biggest expense people have, so making clothing a bit more expensive is not going to hurt that much.

Post reply on HN