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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

#861

Post by krisoft »

kshacker wrote: post #190
michaelt wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't that good though? It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker. Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling. If the r…

What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels? Or why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill? I suspect this will need to be a cultural change. If ExampleCo does it but not RandomCo, of course your reputation will suffer. But if the law is for all of EU, it gives everyone an equal footing.

> What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels?

They can. Doesn’t help with the reputational damage though. People who think they bought an ExampleCo jean will still think that the company quality has slipped. They will still tell all their friends that the “new jeans made by ExampleCo are not like they used to”. Not all of them all the time, but some of them some of the time.

> why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?

That doesnt help with their reputation.

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

#863

Post by sehansen »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #555
panick21 wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how absurdly efficient shipping stuff in container ships is, I don't believe its actually worse. Specially if the company can just save money by being slightly more conservative in terms of how much they manufacture in the first place.

Sure, let's conveniently not count the horrifically-polluting trucks in to distribute them across the interior. You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?

The point is to change what companies believe is the optimal number of products. Right now companies produce what they expect to sell, with errors in both directions being valued equally. In the future they will have to produce only what they are certain they can sell.

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

#864

Post by ETH_start »

hilbert42 wrote: post #643
Nevermark wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Since the 1970s, some industries were deregulated, but overall legal and compliance complexity has still grown over time, according to all studies that I'm aware of on the subject of the regulatory burden.

The studies indicate that a few large early regulations aimed at clear externalities — like major air pollution — delivered substantial benefits on the balance, but many of the smaller restrictions added afterward, especially as they accumulated, mostly generated paperwork (huge compliance industries) and fixed costs (that made smaller firms less competitive) with diminishing returns.

The sensible goal should be to massively reduce the regulatory thicket, while keeping the small set of restrictions that have clear, major benefits and are straightforward to enforce, and replacing the rest with simpler standards or pricing mechanisms that prevent negative externalizations without dragging down productivity through top-down micromanagement of the economy that regiments the actions of private citizens.

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

#865

Post by sehansen »

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…

EU is a net food exporter and the only agricultural products the EU isn't self-sufficient in are animal feed, sugar, and tropical fruits & vegetables.

So, no, EU farmers are struggling at the moment because they aren't as competitive on the global markets as they used to. Not because Europeans aren't buying their food anymore.

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

#866

Post by ETH_start »

Waste isn't automatically a social loss. It only becomes a problem when the cost is pushed onto other people. If burning excess goods pollutes the air or fills landfills, charge for the pollution or disposal. Once the real cost is priced in, companies will naturally waste less without needing thousands of permutations of actions being restricted in an attempt to micromanage them. You still hold them accountable for harm — you just do it through prices instead of micromanaging behavior. And again, don't just assume waste is net-harmful

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

#867

Post by ragall »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #846
ragall wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My claim is that if they could have sold that inventory at a profit, they would have. That's utterly incorrect. They don't just want profits - that would be easy to obtain by sending the merchandise to an outlet - they want high profits in a way that maintains high profits in the future too. Any discount "cheapens" the brand by giving customers the expectation of low(er) prices in the future. > It's theirs to do wi…

Agreed. A good business will take both short and long term profit into consideration when making a decision. They will strive to maximize profit (within reason) in whatever they do. I don’t presume to know anything about the fashion industry and generally find it uninteresting. My point is that I assume the people running those businesses know what they’re doing. Many of them have been around for many decades. I’m ad…

> My point is that I assume the people running those businesses know what they’re doing.

I agree, but their profit-seeking is myopic and there's no reason why it should be allowed.

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

#868

Post by ragall »

troad wrote: post #860
ragall wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who did I call stupid (except for you personally ?). The current owners are not stupid, they're self-interested, hypocritical and parassitical.

And they love your style of politics for being profoundly unthreatening to them.

What politics ? We're talking on an irrelevant site here.

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

#869

Post by xp84 »

WalterBright wrote: post #202
xp84 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise: 1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell t…

Or people do other things. Around 1800, 95% of people worked on the farm. Today it is 2%. People do different things now.

This doesn't address my point though. You're talking about how it's okay if we lose all our factories to make the cars, computers, and whatever else is in the Crates. And sure, if all those workers can find new careers like they did when we industrialized farming, that's all well and good.

I'm talking about how our usage of the "Crate Goods" makes us incredibly vulnerable to a disruption in Crate delivery.

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

#870

Post by xp84 »

WalterBright wrote: post #257
ragall wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not is a net loss for the planet as a whole is irrelevant. Africa countries need jobs to sustain a middle class so they no longer accept donations of clothes.

Just send them money, then, rather than breaking windows to provide fake jobs.

"Just send them money" implies that we don't use them as a dumping ground for the imperfect/unwanted goods, implying that we do destroy those goods.

If you want to compare this to broken windows, the controversy is: the developed countries produce so much glass that we don't know what to do with it. When we have extra and irregular pieces of glass, we can either melt the extra panes down, or we can just ship boatloads of "free glass" to Africa every week (likely result: Their glass factories will eventually shut down). Doing the former is simply not the same as breaking windows to make work for glaziers as in the analogy you're referencing.

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