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Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug: "Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."
Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away. IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
There are more clothes produced worldwide than there are people to wear them. Shipping unwanted refuse to poor counties is treating them as a landfill and patting yourself on the back.
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I wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean) What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so.…
I'm not particularly big into fashion (I think my newest clothes are 4-5 years old), but why is the thing you want "common [expletive] sense" and someone choosing to spend their money a different way, by extension, nonsensical?
Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug: "Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."
Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
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>What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
That doesn't really make sense, losing your whole investment is already a strong incentive to not produce something you can't sell.
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You can steer where donations go with regulations. I don't see any downsides of warm coats to homeless shelters for example.
That is a slightly different scenario than taking cheap "fast fashion waste", compressing it into bales, shoving it into shipping containers, transporting/dumping it and flooding local countries/markets. (And many of these large shipments do not end-up as donations by the time they get to their destination, but are actually sold by weight and then resold again) But yes - distribution/logistics of donated goods needed…
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It's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300. This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited supply they control - is inherently predatory and should be restricted. Not because I'm the morality police and want to stop people from buying a bag that says "I spent $2000 on a bag", but because there is nothing that stops the company from cost-reducing that to oblivion. If you are going to sell a $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.