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 most of it are produced in small sets anyway.
Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea?
My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
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 the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2.
The disclosure paperwork and the s/contracts/bribes/ needed to do this will also serve as a nice deterrent for anybody trying to compete with H&M.
China for decades paid the U.S. and Europe for their "recycling", this practice was only banned in recent years. Clothes seem more valuable than plastics waste.
They will be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar so that some fraction of them can be resold for cheap in Africa or somewhere else poor. Those companies can then dispose of them however they wish.
The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever.
And, as usual, EU regulations achieve absolutely nothing -- if anything, this is worse than nothing.
Isn't it a thing that poor countries can't get their own textile and clothing companies going because of donations or cheap used clothes? I'm fairly certain that's a thing.
lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now. It took China putting on regulations on their side to disrupt that industry. Now you have to find other smaller economies to do that.
I'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law says we must do this. Please contact your representatives you dumb fucks"
The original comment says "sell them to «resale» companies". Selling goods means being paid for it, while you and the parent comment are both saying money goes in the opposite direction.
> 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.
Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes?
Surely these companies aren’t paying H&M for the privilege of destroying their surplus clothes, so by reselling them they’ll be getting paid to take the clothes and paid again when they resell them. Why would they ever destroy them?
Yea they will, they'll resell what they can, and destroy the rest, probably by throwing them into a giant burn pit in a place with zero environmental regulations.
They would destroy clothing because it is not sold. This already happens to second hand clothing that is shipped to Africa. Part of it is sold, part of it is dumped. This is well documented.
Define what you mean by "better". Putting them on a giant CO2-burning ship to transport around the world to find every last person who wants a $1 shirt is much more harmful to the environment than just throwing it into a hole in the ground and making another one.
What is going to happen is that what is left of European manufacturers in the sector are going to move production and warehouses abroad, and from there they will move to EU only about what they need. They will continue to operate as they used to, the only difference being less business (and less jobs) being done in EU.
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.
I thought you were going to go somewhere else with that. With excess clothing they'll unload it in Africa and Asia for cheap, weakening local clothes manufacturers. A bit of what happened with Tom's Shoes
I live in a poor country. People here buy "American clothes" which importers get inside "pacas" (random bundles). Those clothes come USED from rich countries.
My assumption is these clothes are dumped to someone to get rid of them, and then that person bundles them and ships them to poor countries. Once here, someone buys the bundles, sort the content according to their expected retail price and sells them to resellers.
There is junk that can't be sold and is destroyed. Except in some cases, like in Chile, where they are just dumping the used junk "intact" in the desert.
Prohibiting destroying new clothes is a net positive. There is market for clothes in poor countries, but it is already being exploited. Some clothes will always be dumped in poor countries, but not all of it can be resold. The manufacturers will make less clothes, there is no way around it.
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!
> 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 it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring.
Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at.
People used to ice skate on the lake near my house during Winters up until the 70s. Now they're swimming there throughout the winter. We had a ski lift fifteen minutes from my house 20 years ago. Now in a good winter, we have a week where there's enough snow for kids to go sledding.
Very similar pattern here (UK): circa 1900, ice skating on the local pond every winter. The ice was thick enough to walk on the pond twice in the 1980s. For the last decade, the pond hasn't completely frozen over once. We got about two days of 30% coverage this Jan.
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 :)
This has been a decent, classic winter. It’s an important part of the regional character. We need to have snow occasionally, remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.
The problem is that one cold winter doesn't mean we fixed the problem. We need to look at the average change throughout the years, and that's very worrying.
It’s honestly terrifying. I’m in the PNW and we haven’t had winter yet. Extremely low snowpack in the mountains and not even a single day below freezing where I live.
I’ve been observing the change for the past 10 years or so here and this is the first year that’s it’s been so “in your face” obvious instead of just subtle changes and effects.
If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.
Climate change needs to be the number one focus and policy for every nation on earth right now. Not AI, not economic growth, not wars.
Here in the Seattle area, plenty of sub-freezing days (which is itself unusual for the area, in 25 years of living here), just no precipitation. And you know what Seattle is known for, especially in the winter? But when we do get precipitation, it’s warm enough in the mountains that it comes down as rain, not snow. Rough year to be a ski area.
It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
You should check out "Ascension" (it is on Paramount unfortunately). It gives a pretty close up look at China and factory culture and how their entire country is mobilized to push maximum consumption. The corporation's don't view Americans high per-capita consumption as a problem but instead wonder how to drive the rest of the world to consume the same absurd amount. It gives you a sort of fly on the wall view of the whole thing and it really makes you question what kind of psychotic road we are barreling down.
I agree with you about food though. I care about food and healthcare, very occasionally transportation. Can we focus on those instead of all the bullshit "amenities" corporations are churning out, are we really gonna decimate the planet for clothes, cosmetics and plastic conveniences?
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
It's good exactly because of this. Every company is pushing us to consume more, and Wall Street is at the top of this, growth at all costs (including human lives, mental health, just anything)
Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.
We should be making shoes which lasts 4 years, clothes which last at least 2 years with no "fashion" industry pushing us to change it every 2 days.
Shoes which last 4 years and clothes which last 2 years are widely available, if you want them. They're not particularly expensive. But many consumers prefer to buy less robust items that won't hold up to daily wear and then complain about longevity.
Not trying to pick apart your point but I rotate a small set of staple clothes and they’re in fine condition after two years (haven’t had much time for clothes shopping since toddler arrived), despite me abusing “quick wash” and “drycare 40c” constantly on Miele W1/T1 stack for “90 minute, good to fold” laundry.
I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.
Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)
Plus, I may be deluded but I’m of the opinion that polo shirts and jeans/neutral trousers are a multi-decade winning combination.
It is ok companies think like that. It is not ok we let them do it without any limits or regulations. We just need to be careful with unintended side effects and tighten the controls carefully
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
This regulation is not about consumption but about production. Yes, this would not solve the potential over-consumption (I agree generally with what you say) - people actually buying shit they use once - but imagine how bad it is if for each shit used once the company produce 3x that shit...
Apparel firms exist not to clothe people as common sense would suggest but to make a profit, and this practice of erring on the side of overproduction is more profitable than under production. The perfect solution would be to produce exactly the number of goods they will sell, but forecasts aren't perfect so they overproduce. Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste, so this adds another incentive and removes the pollution externality they have been enjoying. So now either they err closer to under-production and risk missing out on sales or secondary market supply of their goods increases leading to possible brand dilution. So in the end the value of these companies ends up lower than before, less pollution, and apparel is cheaper. I'd like to know more about the equity and carbon effects of the process they will need to now follow. So they trade destruction with shipping a crate to Africa. What is the difference? Firms will be less profitable, manufacturing is reduced, who is impacted by that?
> 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.
Economically, producing less to start with is not very different from what is currently done, destroying excess inventory. Therefore I don't think it's at all a given that prices will go up.
The only error in the whole post. I think it's more productive to ignore that and focus on the important stuff... which is about why this kind of market interference isn't going to work out the way a naive optimist would hope.
The funny thing is that textbook economics has all of the answers about why laissez-faire market economics doesn't work as a foundation for economic policy. It's almost as if it's never been about making good policy and always about doing whatever is best for big businesses and the small number of wealthy people who stand to gain the most from minimizing consumer surplus.
Overproduction is not an issue. The issue is that they damage unsold things instead selling them for a market price dictated by supply and demand.
This is not only clothing and apparel, also sporting goods and many other items.
This should be forbidden across all industries. Unsold stock should be delivered to non-profits at no cost for further distribution.
If you can't prove that you either sold or transfer to non-profit an item you manufactured then you should be fined for each unaccounted item proportionally to their market price.
Not always a win. There have been a few reports that sending large numbers of clothing donations to areas that don't specifically need them has the result of harming local industry that would otherwise be able to produce and sell clothes.
OK, send them somewhere else or sell them at a discount
but brand dilution
I don't care. If you over produce then you made a bad economic decision, tough luck. Destroying goods for accounting reasons is an abhorrent policy driven by greed.
This is kinda the real thing at play here... and the 'wave' in the economics;
After all, the company could have arguably instead produced fewer product, sold what they have already sold for the same price, paid their workers the same amount of money to do less work, they wouldn't have to pay for the destroyed goods, and wouldn't have had to pay for the wasted input materials...
The appearal industry is among the most exploitive in the world. It's good to kill it before it springs up. Bangladesh is not anyone's example of a model country.
You seem so certain despite having it backwards as likely as not.
the western ordered cheap quality overproduction solution of swamping developing countries with it, where much also ends in a trash heap, means they can continue the exploitive and environmentally destructive mass production.
Smaller local industries would be economically better for the countries, supply more aligned so less waste, and there’d be less of the bad factories in Bangladesh.
I'm specifically talking about local, small business. Giant companies usually have better labor protections in the 3rd-4th world than small buisness does.
The US and I assume Europe have laws against "dumping" - selling a product for below cost - because it drives local competitors out of business. That is exactly what shipping containers full of clothes to Africa does.
This is a big blow to High-end Luxury Branded Companies, Many of these companies willfully destroy unsold inventory to not devalue their Brand. Manufacturing costs are just 1/20th of the marketed price.
Most probably, the returned items just sit in the warehouse of the companies than selling to ordinary customers. Golden times for warehouse companies.
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 like me don't want that big X on our stuff, if we learn Y is the same thing we are going to buy Y. And next year their sales of X drop because people like me waiting for the secondary stuff. Thus even if you do not consider brand dilution it's still in their interest to not sell the technical stuff in the secondary channels. When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
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.
That is inflationary. Goods costing more monetary units is inflation. In deflation same amount of monetary units buys more goods. So you would want to sell your house now if you have other options and then next year you could buy similar house and still have monetary units left over...
> Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y.
Does that actually happen? What I see happening instead in the bike clothing market is that either after the season, or if a new design is to be unveiled after several seasons, the items gets heavily discounted (often more than 50%). It's just your decision if you need the most expensive newest items right now or you buy possibly older or out of season designs much cheaper. But the branding is also very much integrated, so it would be hard to change the branding on an existing item.
There are a few brands that try to limit this and keep the discounts in check like Assos, but that only means it's harder to find a heavily discounted item, still possible.
> When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
Sure, if you can find customers that accept that, why not. In that case just manufacture fewer items.
> most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
It shouldn't be cheap. The world got used to the luxury of cheap meat by being unethical and harmful to the environment (humans' environment) and animals.
Cows are insanely resource-intensive to farm, bad for the air, bad for the water, bad for the land. Factory-farmed chicken meat is infamously inhumane, using genetic mutants to produce more meat faster, as well as being bad for the environment. They require more land and water use just to produce the feed for the animals. Both produce toxic runoff that goes into our water and land. Drugs pumped into animals land in us or our water, causing cancer or breeding superbugs. And we accept all these negatives so we can buy a cheap burger we don't need (we have plenty of other food).
Pigs are actually pretty sustainable, as are rabbits, goats, and venison. We used to eat a lot more of them, before the factory animal farms changed our diets to prefer cow and chicken.
How are pigs, rabbits, goats and venison more sustainable? Unless you mean eating meat twice a year.
I live in a farmer family; our cattle needs around one hectare each, because we don't feed them processed food, only grass; because concentrated food is even less sustainable, and more importantly, more expensive than letting them roam (fenced areas)
Rabbit is not sustainable. There were some people trying to commercially rise and sell them and it didn't work. They would need concentrated food, which is expensive.
Goat meat is much more expensive than cows because they are less efficient than cows and pigs and chicken. I know two people who rise goats to sell them, and it doesn't make them money; really, they do it because they kind of like the critters as a pet project.
Only pigs and chickens are more sustainable, precisely because of theirinhumane(?) short life and their genetics. They are very efficient meat producers.
I know poor people who rise chickens and pigs; those animals take longer to reach "maturity", and the meat is not tender; but since the animals are eating whatever they scavenge, it can't be done at scale; again, we would eat meat like twice a year (This might be an exageration, but chicken pig and cow farms really produce all the meat we eat; of those only cows eat grass under the sun)
"Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare."
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
I was in the bar in Revelstoke (where I lived, at the time) chatting with an old-timer the other year, and I asked him "is it just me, or did it used to snow more?"
He laughed, and told me that when he was a kid growing up, they weren't allowed to play on the tops of snowbanks because you'd get electrocuted by the high tension power lines. At the time, mid-winter, it was raining outside with a sad pile of slush maybe 1 foot deep.
Even when I was a kid in Revy, snowbanks were 10' deep mid-winter, every winter. It's been raining in town for the last 5 years, all winter. Winter's over. Time to start surfing, I guess.
I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet.
The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.
I am not against this in spirit but what are the higher order effects and unintended consequences?
The only thing that is more annoying to me than market fundamentalist, neo-liberal bullshit is emotional appeals that sound right on paper but have a total disregard for higher order effects and unintended consequences.
Why would it require becoming a billionaire to benefit? A lot of big companies are able to purchased by the public. There are even fractional shares which lowers the bar even further in being able to get exposure to these companies.
Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.
It's partly explained by all the non-US contributors here. That's my theory.
Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.
Most software developers are not founders, but they like to hang out here for the news and community anyway. It used to be a lot more libertarian back when I joined (even more so when I only occasionally lurked) but things have shifted rather dramatically over time.
Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.
If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.
If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it!
But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some winters are colder than average. This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
Do we really need warehouses full of "just in case" inventory? It's not life or death, it's just slightly more profitable for companies to overproduce than it is for them to attempt to meet demand exactly.
Climate change is coming, fast and brutal. I'm okay with these multi-billion-dollar revenue companies making a few points less in profits, if it means slowing climate change by even a fraction of a fraction of a point.
They don't need those profits. But our children need a viable planet.
Companies can't meet demand exactly, no matter what profit margin they take, because it's not possible to predict demand exactly. Biasing towards overproduction is how you minimize the risk of shortages when there's a bit more demand than you expected.
They could, but it’s a tradeoff. Inventory costs money and if you cut production, that means laying off workers and possibly selling productive assets, at which point it becomes more expensive to scale production back up.
Every business decision is a tradeoff. Smart government interventions in the economy add weight to that tradeoff to reflect externalities not otherwise accounted for; this is how cap-and-trade on SO2 emissions works. Hamfisted government interventions set hard and fast rules that ignore tradeoffs and lead to unintended consequences.
What about cases where 2 pieces of clothing when bundled together have value due to making it more efficient for people to find the right size, but over the right size is found the other becomes waste? A company can't prevent a consumer from ruining the wasted clothes.
The worth is zero because the producer doesn't pay for the externalities (pollution, landfill usage etc). So essentially it is "free" because it is subsidized by everyone.
The "headache" is just : produce what you sell, sell what you produce, don't fill the world with your shit.
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
> The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.
Where I currently live has about the same climate as it did 20 years ago. More variability, I think (people started complaining about weird harvest times about 10 years ago, and we're now all used to chaotic year-on-year yields), but roughly the same averages. Flood infrastructure needs maintenance, but not a redesign. However, the behaviour of the migratory wildlife has changed, and you only have to travel a few dozen miles before you reach somewhere that has needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure.
"A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.
If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust.
This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.
In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.
What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.
It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
I buy mostly from liquidators, where everything is sold as-is, but that doesn't stop end users from trying to make a claim, so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty. For example, Ryobi brands the items with a plastic welder, leaving a tell-tale wavy mark.
A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who participate, so finding ways to allow products to be truly sold as-is is vital, otherwise the next most logical option is to put those items in a landfill.
It's also important that there's no legislative hurdles to seelling items as-is, or there may be no legal way to sell a salvage products without completely overhauling them, which is usually not cost effective.
> so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty
With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.
But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as not eligible for warranty. They just want that coverage
We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products they bought through gray market channels.
This is mostly how statutory warranty works in most countries. It’s actually the retailer who bares the responsibility, but good/big manufacturers will just provide the same direct to consumers.
What do you mean, 'statutory warranty'? At least in the US, aside from a few specific circumstances (door to door sales for example with a '3 day cool off' period) there is no mandatory return policy or timeline.
There is a U.S. federal law which gives warranty of merchantability among others (not sure about E.U.).
A major store sold me an expensive item that didn't work, and the store's return policy didn't cover it, so the store said file a warranty claim with the manufacturer. I just did a credit card charge back instead, because the store has to sell me something that works.
If for whatever reason the credit card charge back didn't work, I could use the store in (small claims) court and win.
AI: "The implied warranty of merchantability is a legal guarantee that a product will function as expected for its ordinary purpose, such as a toaster toasting bread. It is automatically applied to most consumer goods sold by merchants and does not need to be in writing."
Resellers fraudulently claiming a liquidated item is new, or that they are an authorized distributor allowing for the product to be warranted, is its own problem. It's usually not a large enough fraud that it's worth it for law-enforcement to follow up on, but generally online marketplaces, like eBay, have their own enforcement practices to keep traffic away from fraudulent sellers.
On the author hand, Amazon has made it difficult to avoid fraudulent sellers, but they also don'e even sort items by price when that option is selected, so I avoid buying through their site.
> We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products
These days this is often the only recourse you have, because going the legal route you get stonewalled unless you are willing to spend serious money on pursuing a case. And it'll cost you gobs of time. An example is my mother buying new pants for 220 bucks from a reputable seller, the stitching starts to disintegrate after 7 months, and both the retailer and the manufacturer tell my mother to go pound sand.
So please do not portray customers trying to get their due as "ragebaiters".
It's not like you wouldn't have this problem anyway though? Like customers have a % of crazy people regardless.
I mean the "ididnthaveeggs" subreddit exists purely to make light of people who post reviews on recipe sites where they overtly use the wrong ingredients and then downvote the recipe as a result.
> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
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 recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:
1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.
2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation
3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then
the recycler will have undoubtedly violated a contract they have with ExampleCo and will lose in civil court and pay significant penalties greater than the money they made selling never worn ExampleCo jeans and also, undoubtedly, suffer from not having ExampleCo as a customer for their services in the future.
But the recycler has all the papers and documentation that they lawfully contracted an overseas company for wholesale recycle of the product. What's your civil court's jurisdiction? You might be able to play wack-a-mole with ebay, temu, alibaba express sellers through civil court in your jurisdiction assuming you have the money of course.
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.
Especially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.
No, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.
I think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.
It’s not hard to mark things as defective, liquidated, etc. so those eBay sellers can face fraud charges. We shouldn’t be sending stuff to landfills just to save a few pennies in permanent marker.
Had this recently, bought a dehumidifier for a good price, marked as new - arrived and had obviously been opened and didn't work. Out of a desire to have a dehumidifier sooner than later I was about to open it up when I saw it already had been, so I opened a return instead and sent it back.
I can only assume it is worth it for the seller to sell untested goods as new, a good number must work long enough for the buyer to be happy.
I still remember Fry's Electronics and trying to find anything that hadn't been opened-returned-reshinkwrapped. Often it was impossible. Not sure why they had so many but eh whatever, it mostly worked fine.
And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.
The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.
If I donate something on the premise that it's going to be used for some charitable cause and then it just ends up on some skuzzy listing on ebay, that would, at best, be deceitful. It's "good" insofar as the item is not being dumped in some landfill but it's not "good" insofar as it was obtained through deception.
Beautiful insight into processes that most of us never see, thanks!
My initial thought was "reusing an item is even better than recycling" but then realized that a warrantied item is quite likely to have flaws and get warrantied again very soon.
I have recently been trolling eBay for used computing equipment rather than buying new, after it was suggested I sell my old hardware that I don't think anyone would want. And man has that been a great experience, it's way more fun than browsing Newegg or doing pc part picking from new catalogs. I need neither the compute hardware nor the cost savings but it's a fun activity on its own, not unlike so many computer games where you do deck optimization or similar.
I heard that the clothes especially from high end brands are destroyed to keep the value of the brand high ie not to cannibalize sales. Which doesnt seem like good enough reason to burn 300.000+t of clothes (that created untold emissions)
Do high-end brands even produce 300 kilotons of clothing? Assuming, very generously, that a piece of clothing, with packaging and all, weights 1 kg, it would be 300M pieces of clothing; that could be an entire production run of something very ubiquitous (say, Levi's 501), but definitely not high-end.
I think that tonnage is for all textiles, not just high-end clothing.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
If you had bothered to read TFA, you'd have understood that the rules only apply to products that have fully passed QA, were being kept as stock but ended up not selling. They don't apply to experimental batches, to defective or damaged items, etc...
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
This is also very detrimental to buyer experience. When you search for a specific new product, prices from different sellers can vary widely. Most often there is no way to tell what is the reason for the difference. Is the cheapest offer simply the best deal, or is it a refurbished product, or even a fake?
This does happen: for example in Macbook repair, it is common to buy defective motherboards, in order to salvage the chips off them (which are apple-specific, hence not purchasable elsewhere). Those boards often come from China, and often have holes drilled in them, I guess exactly to prevent them from being repaired.
It's a shame, because some of those boards could (and would, they are valuable enough) be fully repaired by a skilled repair person. Instead, the chips are picked off and the rest goes to waste.
I did buy a batch once that didn't have holes drilled, and they all turned out to have all sorts of strange, often random issues, so I suspect those were RMAs that somehow "fell off the back of a truck" and escaped the drilling.
Probably, but part of the point of outsourcing the recycling was that you wouldn't have to set up infrastructure, process and people for that. If they weren't crooked, you could even have customers ship the products directly to the recycler. To drill it first, then you are paying for shipping twice, on an item that is already worthless to you.
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
Not covered by this regulation in spirit and (probably, haven't read it yet) in text. The spirit of the regulation is targeting fast-fashion on-prem retailers (think H&M, Primark, Zara and the likes) and online retailers like Shein, who have heaps of products that just aren't sold because they're not wanted - and also the occasional luxury brand trying to maintain scarcity [1].
> but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.
I think it's a reasonable idea. It's mostly going to affect the "luxury" brands who attempt to limit price reductions.
Perhaps it might encourage producers to do smaller runs to confirm interest before massively increasing volumes. The real issue is to get the lowest price you need to hit minimum volumes. It's cheaper currently to burn unused stock than store it for next year. This may change that model. If it doesn't work it can always be changed.
I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?
I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in.
It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.
You have an odd perception of what constitutes "micro-targetting".
Why apparel specifically? Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles.
Why was USB-C mandated specifically on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: it wasn't. It was mandated on smartphones in general, and Apple was the only company that specifically tried to fight the regulation because apparently they're special.
Are you a high-information voter? If so, could you please provide information about any consumer industry that comes even close to the apparel industry in terms of a) ubiquity and market scale and b) destruction of unsold but undamaged items while still producing equally functional equivalents for market?
Is there such a thing as fast-cutlery? Or fast-furniture? Maybe fast-book or fast-vehicle? Fast-whitegood perhaps? I'm at a loss here, I've only heard of fast-fashion.
> micro-targeted
> mandated USB-C on Apple devices
There is no law that states specifically Apple must specifically use USB-C. IIUC, the law is that all brands/manufacturers should use the same type of charger, an industry standard. That was apparently USB-C. Apple was the odd one out and had to change.
If something better comes along, the industry as a whole can upgrade.
I agree wholeheartedly, seems to be a symptom of bureaucracy. Rules upon rules that end up as the status quo without consolidation and a good refactor.
I dont really care about waste too much as I think it's a non-issue blown out of proportion, but mandating standards and interoperability creates a lot of value for consumers and prevents anticompetive behavior.
As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.
They quite clearly are. Burberry was caught a while ago https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983, but it's well known that every major upmarket brand was doing it to avoid the loss of prestige of sending the items to outlets.
Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.
It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies.
One can speculate that this is an easy way to force the companies to pay for their externalities - given that production in third countries are much harder to touch for the EU.
Clothing items are so cheap to make it's hard to believe. I used to work in a distribution warehouse for a national baby and children's clothing chain. Containers would arrive from China and we'd enter items into the warehouse stock system. Cost basis for most items was under 10 cents.
> As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I remember watching a documentary in which they tracked a package of coffee returned to amazon (unopened). It traveled through half of Europe to end up in an incinerator in Slovakia, which is funny because amazon doesn't even operate there.
Big companies are doing a lot of weird shit because at their scale if it's even 1ct cheaper to burn 10 coffee pods vs reprocessing them back in their store it's going to make a huge difference in the long run.
Of course they're not. They're destroying goods that they can't sell at a profit because, for example, the cost of processing some unworn but returned goods outweighs the potential profit from those goods.
In TFA it's estimated that between 4% and 9% of clothing put on the EU market is destroyed before being worn. An admittedly high uncertainty, but even 4% of all clothing sold in the EU is still a heck of a lot of clothes.
Luxury brands do in fact intentionally destroy old stock to make sure their value doesn't drop due to excess supply. I suppose the next step is making everything extremely limited like hypercars?
However hypercars are not purposely limited. It takes an enormous amount of time and labor to build them unlike a handbag where the limit is artificial to sell more.
Are you serious? Pricing theory includes both supply and demand, and limiting supply makes the remaining items more valuable by dint of rarity. Companies absolutely limit supply on items to maximize profits. How is this even a question?
I personally know that L’oreal will buy back and destroy products of theirs from outlets, just to keep the prices up. These items are often bought in bulk on grey markets by discount outlets. Not only does L’oreal destroy the products, they pay for them to do so. None of this is shocking IMO.
> I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand
if a manufacturer finds it too complex to not overproduce and not add all kinds of negative externalities then their business model is flawed or they’re not up to the task.
either way, it isn’t “the bureaucrats” fault they’re overproducing, and they absolutely are overproducing.
It couldn't have been easily sold because brands establish a floor below they don't want to go with value to maintain their perceived premium.
It's been known for ages that they operate like this. Some more ethical ones cut off the labels from the garment before they sell it in bulk. Most will destroy the items altogether.
This legislation targets this vanity and I applaud it.
It's about preserving brand image. Destroying a product is favourable compared to selling it at a discount and making the brand you spent so much marketing appear "cheap".
Yeah, it is shocking. And that's why it needed to be legislated. Companies prove time and time again that they will take the easiest route to minimise losses and maximise profits, even if that means destroying the environment or wasting perfectly good merchandise to do so.
They're not destroying clothing because it's inherently unsellable, or hazardous, or damaged beyond repair. They destroy it because it's easier to dump excess stuff than it is to set up responsible channels to get rid of it.
Many "high fashion" shithouses intentionally destroy excess stock so that their precious branded status symbols can't get into the hands of the filthy proles, which would dilute their brand recognition.
These "regulatory burdens", as you call them, are the only thing holding back companies from further messing up the planet and I welcome them with open arms.
I don't see anything shocking here. Corporations doing corporatey things, which is maximizing profits and that can easily literally mean destroying unconsumed stuff since it would cost them 2 cents more per tonne to ship it and sell someplace cheaper. Ever heard the term economies of scale for example? Those distort many things in money flows.
Those corporations don't give a fuck about mankind, environment, future, long term stuff etc. Any approach to similar topics which gives them benefit of the doubt is dangerously naive and misguided from the start. It's up to society to enforce rules if its healthy and strong enough. Some are better off, some worse.
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."
Don't be surprised if products are sent abroad for destr^Wrecycling.
No I am not joking, some german company hid an airtag in a old computer that went to recycling. It ended up somewhere in Thailand, being not very environmentally friendly taken care of.
If that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model.
Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying things like "you must stop a machine before putting a person inside it".
Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
We have something like 200 years of labor laws around this point. You should probably read some history and ask yourself why every government on the planet has been compelled to force legislation on business to protect the interests of the people.
I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).
The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.
Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.
This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.
That is not what they should do according to microeconomics because luxury goods are Veblen goods. Decreasing price would lower demand, at least until they lowered it enough that it was no longer a Veblen good.
Basic microeconomics is just that: basic and thus an oversimplification.
Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.
My wife worked for a cloth upcycling association (finding sustainable future for discarded clothes).
Reality is, there is just 10x more thrown out clothes in the west that any third world country on earth could need, same for shelters.
Associations distributing clothes to developing countries / shelters are filtering tightly what they accept.
In short, the vast majority of thrown out clothes in the west are just crapwear that not even the third world want. There are entire pipelines of filtering and sorting to only keep and distribute the good quality clothes.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".
Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.
(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)
Perhaps not but in the context of this discussion and legislation it is pertinent question to ask, perhaps not of you specifically but of the wider audience.
Brand value particularly for commodity products is usually just a form of information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers, and creates economic inefficiency since it diverts expenditure from other products that can materially improve lives. It also allows enshittification to happen since it creates inertia (brand loyalty) to switching, and the positive brand image sticks around for longer than the actual good quality products.
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 to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
OK. We were told creative destruction is good, if some companies exit the market and are replaced by others that offer better value then resources are being allocated more efficiently, no?
It's very very easy to spend much less on clothes. Buying a new handbag every 6 months vs maintaining a bag for 20 years isn't that much different in terms of effort, but one is unbelievably more expensive.
Any name brand would rather send their unsold clothes to a landfill in India rather than allow their wealthy customers to see poor people wearing the clothes.
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.
I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.
Well one link deeper says "Restrict the export of textile waste" but I'm still unclear why they preferred these measure over a carbon tax.
Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that
involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to
destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following
operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive
2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that
Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the
recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to
destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
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.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
If I had that kind of hustle, I'd be finding out who exports the losing teams T-shirts and reimport them. I'm sure some Pats fans would pay $50 a shirt to live in an alternative reality.
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
> Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
You mean something like, to signal to voters they're trying to solve a problem voters want changed? Or a problem voters say they have?
I didn't mean to imply it would fix the problem, or that the problem would be fixed. Just that there's desire for [thing targeted], is something enough people would want to change.
I also said "assume that" for the sake of the argument/discussion given you started by saying you didn't understand. I say it's trivial to understand if assume there are other incentives where destroying the product is desirable. Thus making the incentive you mentioned, not very strong, (in context).
EU regulations aren’t set by people who are directly elected though, so the incentives are really weird. It seems like largely a non-problem, the likes of which gets obsessed over by the types of also ran politicians who end up as members of the European Parliament or filtering into the Brussels bureaucracy.
maybe this will force factories to change their process. with manufacturing getting cheaper, smaller batches become affordable. at the extreme we can now print books on demand, and improved 3D printing allows one-off items in many more areas. that's the trend we need to push. to get away from wasteful mass production.
through demand at first. clothes designers are hopefully going to demand smaller batches to avoid getting punished for overproducing. but if that doesn't work, then yes, maybe regulation is necessary. tricky though because manufacturing is often outside of the EU.
overproduction needs to be made more uneconomical than smaller batches. if that is really the issue. i really doubt that large batches of production are actually the problem here.
Clothing has a huge profit margin (when manufactured overseas) especially at the higher end (for brands which do not invest in local production, which is most, because it is also hard to beat Chinese quality). It's better for these brands to over-produce on some items and lose the low-cost inventory, than to under-produce and not meet market demand, to not offer a range of sizes and varieties to meet individual taste, and not achieve wide distribution that's necessary to grow market demand. That's why regulation is needed here.
Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.
They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
You can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
Overproducing is often cheaper than losing sales because of the fixed costs of producing a batch and the externalities of destroying your inventory not being priced in. Some brands also find it more interesting to destroy stocks than reduce prices because it protects their brand values. Well, now, that's illegal.
Carbon is not the only concern here, it is also excessive water use, excessive land use, higher logistics pressure on ports and such which can be reduced if these are made to a higher quality and a reduced quantity.
For the same reason tax codes are complex. If you have a simple law, there's no way for a politician to say to a group of people: "If you vote for me, I will get you a special favour".
> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes?
from TFA
> companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
This already happens a lot for used clothes with the thrift store->poor country->landfill pipeline. That third step will likely be a lot less rare with new clothes.
Won't fungi and bacteria eat (cellulose-based) the clothes, releasing the same amount of CO₂, only a bit slower?
Synthetic fabrics can likely be buried as a form of carbon sequestration though.
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
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 the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
this is not destroying things to create jobs. this is about globalization negatively affecting local culture. clothing especially represents culture. if people can not afford to create their own clothes then that has a negative effect on their culture as a whole.
nobody buys the local style because it is more expensive than the imported stuff. as a result the local style dies out, or it doesn't get a chance to be developed in the first place.
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.
The intended effect of the law is that they get better at planning. It requires supply chain innovation similar to what happened in the automotive industry decades ago with JIT manufacturing. They can borrow from fast-fashion but now there’s a penalty for over producing.
Most clothes are manufactured in countries with cheaper labor costs to cut costs - the reality is clothes are cheap to make in terms of raw materials- and dumping unwanted clothes will just destory the local economy
Just because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
What country has a clothing shortage? Be specific.
The most desperate povert I've ever seen was in India. You know what people were using to make tents to live in? Clothes.
Poor people have been making clothes for thousands of years without any help from heavy industry, and it's incredibly cheap to produce long-lasting cotton clothing.
Clothing isn't really a perpetual need the way you frame it. A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
I’m not suggesting that any countries have clothing shortages.
However, countries don’t wear clothes. People do. People sometimes have shortages of clothing in many places.
For example, here in the United States people sometimes experience poverty and may sometimes experience a lack of suitable clothing. This happens at the same time that there are also people in the US throwing away clothing that they do not use. This is because those people are different people in different immediate locations.
The reasons that people lack clothing is not because there is not enough clothing in existence. It is because the clothing is not distributed universally to every person who needs it.
If I have seen this with my own two eyes in the US, then I am sure it happens in other places.
> A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
So? A person with the ass ripped out of their jeans or a hole in their shoe doesn’t give a fuck whether other clothes last 10 years.
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?
What they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently.
Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society.
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
It's just boring for consumers. Business provides value to customers. Customers dictate what gets produced. And there are customers (e.g. me) who do keep things for a longer amount of time - there's a reason why generally men's clothing makes up around 20% of the total clothing shopping floor space in any given city.
Sure? It seems to me that the companies dictate what I consume. Many many times I wanted to buy exactly the same clothes item or shoes to replace an old one (because I know exactly how it'd fit and wear) only to discover it has been discontinued with no obvious "heir". Sometimes only 6 months later...
Whats the percentage of people chasing "fashion", especially after mid 30s?
I suspect this end up like US "recycling" of plastic: pay another country to "reuse/recycle" the waste, and that country then dumps it in a landfill, dumps it in the ocean, or burns it.
And in pre-industrial societies, peasants (almost entirely women, ranging from children to the elderly) commonly spent around 100 hours of labor to produce a single square yard of fabric to clothe their families (fabric was too expensive for peasants to buy, so most spun it at home).
So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.
There has to be a sweet spot between someone hand spinning wool for 100s of hours and an automated factory spitting 80% polymer based clothing directly into a trash can.
Getting common goods less expensive is good, making them too cheap is not. Imagine you are optimizing a math model, but nothing actually has prices. You just get a garbage point as optimum. You need to have scarcity, so that a system that optimizes the allocation of scarce goods actually works.
Right, textiles are much bigger than fashion - bedding, furniture upholstery, curtains, some types of shelter, practical items like footwear, protective equipment, medical equipment and dressings, vehicle interiors... pretty much all aspects of human life depend on textiles. It ain't just cheap t shirts and dresses.
Every single country should follow suit, apply to food also.
The reason these companies get so greedy is because they can control the demand.
Companies have been found destroying their goods to keep the price high.
The whole Europe is pretty broken right now government wise, but they sure know how to have some decent laws in place when the politics aren't being an arse.
A good way to understand this is to think about Apple and how they refuse to run Black Friday or any other type of sales. They just don't. If they do, they're very modest.
This helps to maintain the value of the product and for consumers to not defer purchase until sale event.
Clothing companies are similar. The actual product is worth pennies, but they'll refuse to sell for 10% of RSP because who would be buying them at the full price? They'll do 50%, maybe 70 discount and that's it. They destroy whatever they don't sell. Rinse, repeat, four times a year in this crazy, fast fashion reality
It's a known practice and they've been going on like this for ages.
Fashion is vain by definition and this whole industry is very wasteful of our resources. This legislation is meant to help mitigate this.
What's gonna change long term is manufacturers will be keeping more items on sale for longer and the fast fashion cycles will slow down. Hopefully they'll start competing with quality and workmanship thus, in turn, giving EU textile industry a new chance to survive Asian competition.
> The ban on destruction of unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear and the derogations will apply to large companies from 19 July 2026. Medium-sized companies are expected to follow in 2030. The rules on disclosure under the ESPR already apply to large companies and will also apply to medium-sized companies in 2030
5 months is a pretty short timeline for a large company to change literally its entire business to handle one class of products differently. This affects returns, sales, shipping, contracts with disposal companies, etc.
The weirder part is that they're granting medium and small size companies 4 more years to figure it out. It will take any company a long time to deal with this. So why shaft the large companies? Spite? The difficulty this imposes on them, and any fines from their inability to comply, will be passed down to the consumer.
> I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.
They didn't. You can look at the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) yourself. It's fairly long but it should be easy to scroll until you find some of the lists.
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 never are tradeoffs, after all.
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 price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.
Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.
I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
Unsold apparel is a headache, but banning it probably won't work.
Something still has to be done with the stuff.
In the first dot-com era, I knew some startup people who were trying to create an online secondary market in used apparel, called Tradeweave. It flopped. You can see their web site on the Internet Archive up to 2004.[1] Then, suddenly, it's gone.
There's a Stanford Business School case for this company.[2] Amusingly, the Stanford case study is dated 2000, before the collapse, and makes it sound like a success.
considering H&M (Sweden), Zara (Spain), C&A (Netherlands) etc.. have lead the way into the clothes-that-self-destructs-in-a-year fashion, it was about time europeans did something about clothing waste, well done.
If you look at the backyards (so called garden) of homes of the advanced countries, from satellite maps, they mostly became junkyards of things. Inside homes are full of things that are rarely used. I have seen Amazon boxes going into bins unopened. Basically, homes are overflowing with goods, and throwing things away is going to become expensive. Advances in manufacturing, supply chains and online shopping have accelerated the saturation of markets.
Destruction of goods can't be stooped due the pace of inflow of inventory. This is like a conveyor belt jamming, where the downstream belts are draining slower than upstream ones.
It's still ok to destroy products if (among many other reasons) "the product can reasonably be considered unacceptable for consumer use due to damage, including physical damage, deterioration or contamination, including hygiene issues, whether it is caused by consumers or occurs during the handling of the product [...] and repair and refurbishment are not technically feasible or cost-effective;" but cost-effective means "the cost of repairing or refurbishing a product not outweighing the total cost of destruction of that product and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product."
So essentially, they have to offer all the clothing for donation first, if nobody wants it, it can still be destroyed (that's one of the other exceptions).
Unfortunately another exception is if "it is technically unfeasible ... to remove ... labels, logos or recognisable product design or other characteristics that are ... protected by intellectual property rights". So a luxury brand can probably still go "well our design is protected and we don't want the poors wearing our fancy clothes".
I anticipate a lot of unintended consequences lurking.
But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.
Might be to hinder large companies of moving fast-fashion storages into EU, so they cannot circumvent the 150EUR free import limit when it is dissolved, as that would move them into the supposed jaws of this "ban of destruction of fast-fashion" act.
It's a great idea, but this seems incredibly hard to enforce. Shipments sometimes go missing, products can be damaged "unintentionally", etc. I hope they can achieve what they intend.
Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.
>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.
A strange decision considering that high fashion is one of the few lucrative sectors of eu. LV cannot afford to give away their branded items , and i doubt they are willing to remanufacture or reuse. They may be a tiny fraction of the industry, but equally affected.
For some of these things I wonder if there are missing recyclable options. Like could you economically run a pile of defective clothing through a blender and and use it as fiber reinforcement in some kind of construction material or insulation?
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 general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product.
The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.
Give a man donated clothing and they will have clothes ... teach a man to become and indentured servant on minimum wage and they will be able to buy clothes every year for the rest of their lives.
This is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules.
The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.
Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.
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The linked page has this text:
"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."
Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.
The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.
I don't think that is very believable.
(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
A good chunk of unsold clothing destruction happens because the brand considers fire sales to be brand damage. I have to wonder if they'll comply with this regulation willingly, or if they'll do some stupid workaround to make sure they can continue to pointlessly destroy clothing for the sake of a brand image.
Makes sense. You’d rather burn a birkin than let a poor person get their grubby little mitts on it. So the only way to stop them burning them, is to force them to do something with them.
This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.
Very tongue in cheek: In the latest fully analyzed year (2024) Sweden was CO2 net negative. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.
It's regulation from the previous European Parliament and the first von der Leyen Commission. The new parliament from 2024 has a lot fewer red/green members (still enough to cause trouble, though) and the second von der Leyen Commission has a different agreement with the current parliament. The current Council is also a lot different than the council of just a year ago -- not in terms of members but in terms of opinions. A lot of the craziness is being rolled back, maybe this will also be rolled back.
The link is not about the 2024 framework regulation (from just before the elections) but about some new supplementary regulation that the 2024 regulation allowed for and required -- in order to provide clarifications and fix some of the mistakes of the initial regulation.
That they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.
That this is an actual rule that other versions of have been a thing for years makes further convinced we are on the falling edge of capitalist society.
Hopefully, what this should motivate is the emphasis on products which can be _disassembled_, taken apart, other than through destruction.
It may also become less costly to take products with flaws and fix them up: Right now, it's not profitable; but if one can't just chuck them away, then the cost-benefit analysis changes.
This is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell.
So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.
As a European, it seems absurd to me one would celebrate the short term benefits of being one of the by far most destructive (per capita) countries on earth regarding global climate (challenged only by a few oil states).
Is a temporary advantage worth destroying the planet forever?
Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes.
If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this.
I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got.
The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.
The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out.
Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.
HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.
GLP-1's solve this, now you're basically only losing weight and eventually (i.e. the 2030s) most people won't fluctuate much in weight. So, try again on "changing sizes". Yes I'm aware that children grow up rapidly and need new clothes. Don't buy goodyear welted boots for your 7 year old.
The best fashion is timeless, and that's why heritage fashion is far superior to trends. Coincidentally, it's why the brands I listed above are exclusively heritage brands, who have basically no regards for trends.
There's a reason HN is poorly dressed. I'd rather take the "only dresses with startup T-shirt" guy over the "I've gotta have the Sydney Sweeney Jeans" person, and especially over the sneakerhead crowd which now thinks Hoka and NB is superior to Nike.
I was curious why I no longer was able to wear pants I wore in my 20s. I could not get them over my hips. It wasn't because I was getting fatter, my weight is about the same.
I was also intrigued by young men looking slim in the hips, and older men not.
So I looked it up.
Turns out that your hips grow wider with age. I'd never heard of this before! Though I did know one's ears got bigger.
Too bad my shoulders never get wider, and my height shrinks :-/
My feet have gotten considerably wider with age, too.
Typical Eurocrat meddling in people's affairs. The owners of those items should be free to do whatever they want. If the government is concerend about environmental damage, they should raise landfill fees or tax carbon, not limit what firms are allowed to do with their own things.
Just another case of the EU being focused on unimportant things while looking away from real issues like cost of living crisis or energy costs. Though on the other hand, it may be for the best since they only make things actively worse.
Those 'On Sale' racks are going to take up half the shop now. Maybe they could have a deep discounted section where clothes are set at cost value. Should find an equilibrium and someone will buy them
EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic).
in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee.
rayon is a regenerated cellulose fibre: it biodegrades.
polyester is a thermoplastic polymer synthesised from petrochemicals: it doesn’t.
that’s the dividing line. one breaks down in the environment, the other persists for centuries and sheds microplastics into waterways every time you wash it.
rayon has its own environmental problems (deforestation, chemical processing), but “is it plastic?” is not one of them. the chemistry here isn’t ambiguous.
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.
> 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.
Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.
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.
Related note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company.
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.
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.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.
Counter point to the counter point: also all of human existence.
The "fuckton of failure and waste" which has brought technological advancements to humanity didn't come from destroying unsold clothing, and the risks involved in actual technological advancements are orders of magnitude larger than the risk of not being able to destroy unsold consumer products without penalty.
I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
Oh no, poor fast fashion companies won't be able to continue maximizing their profits by using slave labor to manufacture ginormous amounts of garbage that goes out of fashion in a week. Guess they'll have to reduce their garbage output or switch to manufacturing quality stuff that can hang out on a store's shelf for a bit longer. The fucking horror.
Fuck them.
Incredibly, unbelievably stupid law. Waste is made when something unwanted is created, not when it is thrown out. Destruction or landfill is often the best option for all involved and modern landfills are very safe and sustainable. I worked in recycled clothing for a few years and it is not always or even often efficient.
This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.
Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.
> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?
Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
Edit to clarify: things can't be put on sale, except for a few times during the year? I guess this is not every country, although I'm not sure which and when.
> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
Nonsense. They can.
> In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.
> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
To clarify, this is a consumer protection law which is set in all EEA countries. Discounts are regulated to prevent stores from tricking their customers into thinking they are getting a product at a lower then usual price. You can only claim a product is on discount if the price has been lowered from a previous price less then x-days ago (I think 2 weeks is not uncommon), after which this discount becomes the new price.
As a European immigrant to the USA, it infuriates me to no end that American stores are allowed to use the words “price” and “discount” interchangeably. When I get things “on a discount” I expect to be paying lower then usual price.
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 most of it are produced in small sets anyway.
Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea? My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
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 the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2.
The disclosure paperwork and the s/contracts/bribes/ needed to do this will also serve as a nice deterrent for anybody trying to compete with H&M.
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.
China for decades paid the U.S. and Europe for their "recycling", this practice was only banned in recent years. Clothes seem more valuable than plastics waste.
One man's trash is another man's treasure.
They will be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar so that some fraction of them can be resold for cheap in Africa or somewhere else poor. Those companies can then dispose of them however they wish.
The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever.
And, as usual, EU regulations achieve absolutely nothing -- if anything, this is worse than nothing.
Both of those situations sound like a net win.
Isn't it a thing that poor countries can't get their own textile and clothing companies going because of donations or cheap used clothes? I'm fairly certain that's a thing.
lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now. It took China putting on regulations on their side to disrupt that industry. Now you have to find other smaller economies to do that.
You appear to be agreeing with the person you’re replying to.
I'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law says we must do this. Please contact your representatives you dumb fucks"
The original comment says "sell them to «resale» companies". Selling goods means being paid for it, while you and the parent comment are both saying money goes in the opposite direction.
> 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.
Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes?
Surely these companies aren’t paying H&M for the privilege of destroying their surplus clothes, so by reselling them they’ll be getting paid to take the clothes and paid again when they resell them. Why would they ever destroy them?
Which is why this scenario won’t ever happen.
Yea they will, they'll resell what they can, and destroy the rest, probably by throwing them into a giant burn pit in a place with zero environmental regulations.
They would destroy clothing because it is not sold. This already happens to second hand clothing that is shipped to Africa. Part of it is sold, part of it is dumped. This is well documented.
If part of it is sold, isn't it better than if it had all been destroyed? It's literally what that law is for.
Define what you mean by "better". Putting them on a giant CO2-burning ship to transport around the world to find every last person who wants a $1 shirt is much more harmful to the environment than just throwing it into a hole in the ground and making another one.
What is going to happen is that what is left of European manufacturers in the sector are going to move production and warehouses abroad, and from there they will move to EU only about what they need. They will continue to operate as they used to, the only difference being less business (and less jobs) being done in EU.
cheap clothing is for the vast, vast majority not done in the EU, so this does not matter.
But also, this regulation applies to the company _selling them to customers_, so it's completely irrelevant.
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.
I thought you were going to go somewhere else with that. With excess clothing they'll unload it in Africa and Asia for cheap, weakening local clothes manufacturers. A bit of what happened with Tom's Shoes
I live in a poor country. People here buy "American clothes" which importers get inside "pacas" (random bundles). Those clothes come USED from rich countries.
My assumption is these clothes are dumped to someone to get rid of them, and then that person bundles them and ships them to poor countries. Once here, someone buys the bundles, sort the content according to their expected retail price and sells them to resellers.
There is junk that can't be sold and is destroyed. Except in some cases, like in Chile, where they are just dumping the used junk "intact" in the desert.
Prohibiting destroying new clothes is a net positive. There is market for clothes in poor countries, but it is already being exploited. Some clothes will always be dumped in poor countries, but not all of it can be resold. The manufacturers will make less clothes, there is no way around it.
Regardless of whether they respect the law, why would a business pay for goods just to destroy them? How does that make money?
And if they're NOT destroying the goods but are instead using them, then the law is doing exactly what it is intended to.
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!
>Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
Until one of them gets the bright idea to resell the clothes, which should take all of 30 seconds.
Your theory presumes the existence of a sketchy african company which will nonetheless remain scrupulously honest.
> 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 it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring.
Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at.
Serious change is afoot, that much is undeniable.
People used to ice skate on the lake near my house during Winters up until the 70s. Now they're swimming there throughout the winter. We had a ski lift fifteen minutes from my house 20 years ago. Now in a good winter, we have a week where there's enough snow for kids to go sledding.
Very similar pattern here (UK): circa 1900, ice skating on the local pond every winter. The ice was thick enough to walk on the pond twice in the 1980s. For the last decade, the pond hasn't completely frozen over once. We got about two days of 30% coverage this Jan.
As a kid (I was born in the 80s), my home town would get 3ft of snow almost every winter. We even saw 10ft some winters.
By the time I hit highschool, seeing a 3ft snow in the winter was pretty rare.
Over the last 4 years, there's never any snow on the ground. They are lucky if 1 inch sticks around.
https://xkcd.com/1321/
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 :)
This has been a decent, classic winter. It’s an important part of the regional character. We need to have snow occasionally, remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.
Sorry about the pipes.
The problem is that one cold winter doesn't mean we fixed the problem. We need to look at the average change throughout the years, and that's very worrying.
No disagreement there!
It has been brutal, and very cold, and we have not seen the sun. Send help!
It’s honestly terrifying. I’m in the PNW and we haven’t had winter yet. Extremely low snowpack in the mountains and not even a single day below freezing where I live.
I’ve been observing the change for the past 10 years or so here and this is the first year that’s it’s been so “in your face” obvious instead of just subtle changes and effects.
If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.
Climate change needs to be the number one focus and policy for every nation on earth right now. Not AI, not economic growth, not wars.
Here in the Seattle area, plenty of sub-freezing days (which is itself unusual for the area, in 25 years of living here), just no precipitation. And you know what Seattle is known for, especially in the winter? But when we do get precipitation, it’s warm enough in the mountains that it comes down as rain, not snow. Rough year to be a ski area.
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There are many things in the world that happen slowly right up until they suddenly don’t. It’s very possible the climate is one of these.
It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
You should check out "Ascension" (it is on Paramount unfortunately). It gives a pretty close up look at China and factory culture and how their entire country is mobilized to push maximum consumption. The corporation's don't view Americans high per-capita consumption as a problem but instead wonder how to drive the rest of the world to consume the same absurd amount. It gives you a sort of fly on the wall view of the whole thing and it really makes you question what kind of psychotic road we are barreling down.
I agree with you about food though. I care about food and healthcare, very occasionally transportation. Can we focus on those instead of all the bullshit "amenities" corporations are churning out, are we really gonna decimate the planet for clothes, cosmetics and plastic conveniences?
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
It's good exactly because of this. Every company is pushing us to consume more, and Wall Street is at the top of this, growth at all costs (including human lives, mental health, just anything)
Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.
We should be making shoes which lasts 4 years, clothes which last at least 2 years with no "fashion" industry pushing us to change it every 2 days.
> Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.
Wall Street here is a boogie man.
Using resources to make life better is actually good. And we keep getting better at it, and doing so in more sustainable and efficient ways.
And if it’s not - you fundamentally believe technology is not beneficial. Then all of industrial society needs to be reversed.
Shoes which last 4 years and clothes which last 2 years are widely available, if you want them. They're not particularly expensive. But many consumers prefer to buy less robust items that won't hold up to daily wear and then complain about longevity.
Not trying to pick apart your point but I rotate a small set of staple clothes and they’re in fine condition after two years (haven’t had much time for clothes shopping since toddler arrived), despite me abusing “quick wash” and “drycare 40c” constantly on Miele W1/T1 stack for “90 minute, good to fold” laundry.
I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.
Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)
Plus, I may be deluded but I’m of the opinion that polo shirts and jeans/neutral trousers are a multi-decade winning combination.
Where are the 8% annual returns going to come from to pay for all the defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare plans?
It is ok companies think like that. It is not ok we let them do it without any limits or regulations. We just need to be careful with unintended side effects and tighten the controls carefully
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
This regulation is not about consumption but about production. Yes, this would not solve the potential over-consumption (I agree generally with what you say) - people actually buying shit they use once - but imagine how bad it is if for each shit used once the company produce 3x that shit...
It isn't just "companies" that want you to buy more, our entire economic system encourages it.
Reduced consumption of non essentials is a good thing not a bad thing
+1 to Ascension, one of the most fine piece of filmmaking that tries to explain the world of today
Apparel firms exist not to clothe people as common sense would suggest but to make a profit, and this practice of erring on the side of overproduction is more profitable than under production. The perfect solution would be to produce exactly the number of goods they will sell, but forecasts aren't perfect so they overproduce. Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste, so this adds another incentive and removes the pollution externality they have been enjoying. So now either they err closer to under-production and risk missing out on sales or secondary market supply of their goods increases leading to possible brand dilution. So in the end the value of these companies ends up lower than before, less pollution, and apparel is cheaper. I'd like to know more about the equity and carbon effects of the process they will need to now follow. So they trade destruction with shipping a crate to Africa. What is the difference? Firms will be less profitable, manufacturing is reduced, who is impacted by that?
> 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.
How will apparel be cheaper? When they lower production runs, it'll be less available, which will mean prices will go up.
Economically, producing less to start with is not very different from what is currently done, destroying excess inventory. Therefore I don't think it's at all a given that prices will go up.
Destroying the inventory has a cost though.
The only error in the whole post. I think it's more productive to ignore that and focus on the important stuff... which is about why this kind of market interference isn't going to work out the way a naive optimist would hope.
If firms prodice less, prices will be higher.
more market economics framing of life, as if numerous very smart people haven't already tried to make this paradigm work for society, and failed.
The funny thing is that textbook economics has all of the answers about why laissez-faire market economics doesn't work as a foundation for economic policy. It's almost as if it's never been about making good policy and always about doing whatever is best for big businesses and the small number of wealthy people who stand to gain the most from minimizing consumer surplus.
Overproduction is not an issue. The issue is that they damage unsold things instead selling them for a market price dictated by supply and demand.
This is not only clothing and apparel, also sporting goods and many other items.
This should be forbidden across all industries. Unsold stock should be delivered to non-profits at no cost for further distribution.
If you can't prove that you either sold or transfer to non-profit an item you manufactured then you should be fined for each unaccounted item proportionally to their market price.
And suddenly the EU becomes #1 in private non-profits, the first ever non-profits to turn up revenue and reinvest them into stock from Gap and H&M.
Also the first non-profit to build gigalandfills in Africa.
If they ship unused crates to Africa then they get cheap clothes. Win win all around.
Not always a win. There have been a few reports that sending large numbers of clothing donations to areas that don't specifically need them has the result of harming local industry that would otherwise be able to produce and sell clothes.
OK, send them somewhere else or sell them at a discount
but brand dilution
I don't care. If you over produce then you made a bad economic decision, tough luck. Destroying goods for accounting reasons is an abhorrent policy driven by greed.
This is kinda the real thing at play here... and the 'wave' in the economics;
After all, the company could have arguably instead produced fewer product, sold what they have already sold for the same price, paid their workers the same amount of money to do less work, they wouldn't have to pay for the destroyed goods, and wouldn't have had to pay for the wasted input materials...
All in the name of profit FOMO.
The appearal industry is among the most exploitive in the world. It's good to kill it before it springs up. Bangladesh is not anyone's example of a model country.
You seem so certain despite having it backwards as likely as not.
the western ordered cheap quality overproduction solution of swamping developing countries with it, where much also ends in a trash heap, means they can continue the exploitive and environmentally destructive mass production.
Smaller local industries would be economically better for the countries, supply more aligned so less waste, and there’d be less of the bad factories in Bangladesh.
Note specifically that I said local industry. I don't mean some factory owned by a global chain.
I'm specifically talking about local, small business. Giant companies usually have better labor protections in the 3rd-4th world than small buisness does.
Assuming there was no /s there:
The US and I assume Europe have laws against "dumping" - selling a product for below cost - because it drives local competitors out of business. That is exactly what shipping containers full of clothes to Africa does.
I think GP was referring to donations, which are not subject to dumping rules AFAIK.
People living in the tropics don't need clothing suited for temperate climates.
People who live in temperate climates wear tshirts, underwear, and socks, if I'm not mistaken.
The effect is the same though (well, worse), that was GP's point.
This is a big blow to High-end Luxury Branded Companies, Many of these companies willfully destroy unsold inventory to not devalue their Brand. Manufacturing costs are just 1/20th of the marketed price.
Most probably, the returned items just sit in the warehouse of the companies than selling to ordinary customers. Golden times for warehouse companies.
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 like me don't want that big X on our stuff, if we learn Y is the same thing we are going to buy Y. And next year their sales of X drop because people like me waiting for the secondary stuff. Thus even if you do not consider brand dilution it's still in their interest to not sell the technical stuff in the secondary channels. When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
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.
That is inflationary. Goods costing more monetary units is inflation. In deflation same amount of monetary units buys more goods. So you would want to sell your house now if you have other options and then next year you could buy similar house and still have monetary units left over...
> Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y.
Does that actually happen? What I see happening instead in the bike clothing market is that either after the season, or if a new design is to be unveiled after several seasons, the items gets heavily discounted (often more than 50%). It's just your decision if you need the most expensive newest items right now or you buy possibly older or out of season designs much cheaper. But the branding is also very much integrated, so it would be hard to change the branding on an existing item.
There are a few brands that try to limit this and keep the discounts in check like Assos, but that only means it's harder to find a heavily discounted item, still possible.
> When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
Sure, if you can find customers that accept that, why not. In that case just manufacture fewer items.
I'm guessing EU bashing
> most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.
It shouldn't be cheap. The world got used to the luxury of cheap meat by being unethical and harmful to the environment (humans' environment) and animals.
Cows are insanely resource-intensive to farm, bad for the air, bad for the water, bad for the land. Factory-farmed chicken meat is infamously inhumane, using genetic mutants to produce more meat faster, as well as being bad for the environment. They require more land and water use just to produce the feed for the animals. Both produce toxic runoff that goes into our water and land. Drugs pumped into animals land in us or our water, causing cancer or breeding superbugs. And we accept all these negatives so we can buy a cheap burger we don't need (we have plenty of other food).
Pigs are actually pretty sustainable, as are rabbits, goats, and venison. We used to eat a lot more of them, before the factory animal farms changed our diets to prefer cow and chicken.
How are pigs, rabbits, goats and venison more sustainable? Unless you mean eating meat twice a year.
I live in a farmer family; our cattle needs around one hectare each, because we don't feed them processed food, only grass; because concentrated food is even less sustainable, and more importantly, more expensive than letting them roam (fenced areas)
Rabbit is not sustainable. There were some people trying to commercially rise and sell them and it didn't work. They would need concentrated food, which is expensive.
Goat meat is much more expensive than cows because they are less efficient than cows and pigs and chicken. I know two people who rise goats to sell them, and it doesn't make them money; really, they do it because they kind of like the critters as a pet project.
Only pigs and chickens are more sustainable, precisely because of theirinhumane(?) short life and their genetics. They are very efficient meat producers.
I know poor people who rise chickens and pigs; those animals take longer to reach "maturity", and the meat is not tender; but since the animals are eating whatever they scavenge, it can't be done at scale; again, we would eat meat like twice a year (This might be an exageration, but chicken pig and cow farms really produce all the meat we eat; of those only cows eat grass under the sun)
"Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare."
What an over exaggeration.
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
I was in the bar in Revelstoke (where I lived, at the time) chatting with an old-timer the other year, and I asked him "is it just me, or did it used to snow more?"
He laughed, and told me that when he was a kid growing up, they weren't allowed to play on the tops of snowbanks because you'd get electrocuted by the high tension power lines. At the time, mid-winter, it was raining outside with a sad pile of slush maybe 1 foot deep.
Even when I was a kid in Revy, snowbanks were 10' deep mid-winter, every winter. It's been raining in town for the last 5 years, all winter. Winter's over. Time to start surfing, I guess.
I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet.
The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.
I am not against this in spirit but what are the higher order effects and unintended consequences?
The only thing that is more annoying to me than market fundamentalist, neo-liberal bullshit is emotional appeals that sound right on paper but have a total disregard for higher order effects and unintended consequences.
all that said.. most of the clothes are not so "branded"? Who cares if a GAP or something ends up in outlet or wherever..
Why would it require becoming a billionaire to benefit? A lot of big companies are able to purchased by the public. There are even fractional shares which lowers the bar even further in being able to get exposure to these companies.
Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.
It's partly explained by all the non-US contributors here. That's my theory.
Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.
Most software developers are not founders, but they like to hang out here for the news and community anyway. It used to be a lot more libertarian back when I joined (even more so when I only occasionally lurked) but things have shifted rather dramatically over time.
I don't think this forum has significant costs of running, especially considering it is not in development.
They switched the backend to Common Lisp in 2019, and at the time had two seperate Arc-to-JS compilers in development. [0]
The site may feel less changeable than many, but I would be very surprised if it is not "in-development".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550123
It employs two full–time moderators.
It didn’t use to be this way but through evaporative cooling, most of the founder types stopped posting here.
Can you explain the connection to evaporative cooling?
It refers to evaporative cooling of group belief - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.
If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.
If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it!
But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some winters are colder than average. This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
So they externalize the cost of their own incompetence and you’re suggesting it’s bad to internalize that cost.
Do we really need warehouses full of "just in case" inventory? It's not life or death, it's just slightly more profitable for companies to overproduce than it is for them to attempt to meet demand exactly.
Climate change is coming, fast and brutal. I'm okay with these multi-billion-dollar revenue companies making a few points less in profits, if it means slowing climate change by even a fraction of a fraction of a point.
They don't need those profits. But our children need a viable planet.
Companies can't meet demand exactly, no matter what profit margin they take, because it's not possible to predict demand exactly. Biasing towards overproduction is how you minimize the risk of shortages when there's a bit more demand than you expected.
Could they overproduce and keep unsold stock for next winter, and if unsold stock gets too high, stop producing more until it reduces?
They mostly do keep unsold stock, only a fraction of it gets destroyed. See the EEA's full analysis from 2024 (https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...).
They could, but it’s a tradeoff. Inventory costs money and if you cut production, that means laying off workers and possibly selling productive assets, at which point it becomes more expensive to scale production back up.
Every business decision is a tradeoff. Smart government interventions in the economy add weight to that tradeoff to reflect externalities not otherwise accounted for; this is how cap-and-trade on SO2 emissions works. Hamfisted government interventions set hard and fast rules that ignore tradeoffs and lead to unintended consequences.
It seems to me that is exactly what could be enabled by this law. It is forbidding the destruction of last year’s winter coats.
What about cases where 2 pieces of clothing when bundled together have value due to making it more efficient for people to find the right size, but over the right size is found the other becomes waste? A company can't prevent a consumer from ruining the wasted clothes.
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.
The worth is zero because the producer doesn't pay for the externalities (pollution, landfill usage etc). So essentially it is "free" because it is subsidized by everyone.
The "headache" is just : produce what you sell, sell what you produce, don't fill the world with your shit.
What landfill doesn't charge fees?
The Pacific Ocean, I think.
That is not a landfill.
Or rather, since we know fast fashion is horrible because of the things you just said - it forces a more thoughtful approach to production.
If the headache causes companies to improve their product pipelines so that there is less waste then surely there will be less recycling.
Discouraging superfluous production is not nothing.
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
> The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.
What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.
Your anecdote may be true, but doesn't hold at a global scale, and science is not on your side:
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/
I can't believe I'm debating climate change on HackerNews. What happened here?
Where I currently live has about the same climate as it did 20 years ago. More variability, I think (people started complaining about weird harvest times about 10 years ago, and we're now all used to chaotic year-on-year yields), but roughly the same averages. Flood infrastructure needs maintenance, but not a redesign. However, the behaviour of the migratory wildlife has changed, and you only have to travel a few dozen miles before you reach somewhere that has needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure.
"A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.
You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.
If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust.
This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.
In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.
What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.
It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
I buy mostly from liquidators, where everything is sold as-is, but that doesn't stop end users from trying to make a claim, so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty. For example, Ryobi brands the items with a plastic welder, leaving a tell-tale wavy mark.
A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who participate, so finding ways to allow products to be truly sold as-is is vital, otherwise the next most logical option is to put those items in a landfill.
It's also important that there's no legislative hurdles to seelling items as-is, or there may be no legal way to sell a salvage products without completely overhauling them, which is usually not cost effective.
> so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty
With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.
But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as not eligible for warranty. They just want that coverage
We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products they bought through gray market channels.
> ... the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer...
Maybe this is the problem. Retailers should cover the statutory warranty on any product they sell.
This is mostly how statutory warranty works in most countries. It’s actually the retailer who bares the responsibility, but good/big manufacturers will just provide the same direct to consumers.
What do you mean, 'statutory warranty'? At least in the US, aside from a few specific circumstances (door to door sales for example with a '3 day cool off' period) there is no mandatory return policy or timeline.
There is a U.S. federal law which gives warranty of merchantability among others (not sure about E.U.).
A major store sold me an expensive item that didn't work, and the store's return policy didn't cover it, so the store said file a warranty claim with the manufacturer. I just did a credit card charge back instead, because the store has to sell me something that works.
If for whatever reason the credit card charge back didn't work, I could use the store in (small claims) court and win.
AI: "The implied warranty of merchantability is a legal guarantee that a product will function as expected for its ordinary purpose, such as a toaster toasting bread. It is automatically applied to most consumer goods sold by merchants and does not need to be in writing."
That sounds like another problem then :)
In the EU (or maybe just my country of origin?) there is certainly statutory warranty. Length and coverage varies per product category.
Resellers fraudulently claiming a liquidated item is new, or that they are an authorized distributor allowing for the product to be warranted, is its own problem. It's usually not a large enough fraud that it's worth it for law-enforcement to follow up on, but generally online marketplaces, like eBay, have their own enforcement practices to keep traffic away from fraudulent sellers.
On the author hand, Amazon has made it difficult to avoid fraudulent sellers, but they also don'e even sort items by price when that option is selected, so I avoid buying through their site.
> We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products
These days this is often the only recourse you have, because going the legal route you get stonewalled unless you are willing to spend serious money on pursuing a case. And it'll cost you gobs of time. An example is my mother buying new pants for 220 bucks from a reputable seller, the stitching starts to disintegrate after 7 months, and both the retailer and the manufacturer tell my mother to go pound sand.
So please do not portray customers trying to get their due as "ragebaiters".
It's not like you wouldn't have this problem anyway though? Like customers have a % of crazy people regardless.
I mean the "ididnthaveeggs" subreddit exists purely to make light of people who post reviews on recipe sites where they overtly use the wrong ingredients and then downvote the recipe as a result.
> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
(all assuming the product is not sold as "new")
> 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 recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:
1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.
2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation
3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
>and sends them for recycling.
>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then
the recycler will have undoubtedly violated a contract they have with ExampleCo and will lose in civil court and pay significant penalties greater than the money they made selling never worn ExampleCo jeans and also, undoubtedly, suffer from not having ExampleCo as a customer for their services in the future.
But the recycler has all the papers and documentation that they lawfully contracted an overseas company for wholesale recycle of the product. What's your civil court's jurisdiction? You might be able to play wack-a-mole with ebay, temu, alibaba express sellers through civil court in your jurisdiction assuming you have the money of course.
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.
> ExampleCo's quality control does its job,
Then this will be the pressure that is needed for the company's quality assurance to be improved.
How feasible is to remove tag, scratch serial number?
Especially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.
No, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.
I think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.
The problem is the eBay sellers always label defective stuff as simply new product.
People buying it may or may not be ok with the defect.
Think bad welds, usually they're fine for a while and then they're very much not.
It’s not hard to mark things as defective, liquidated, etc. so those eBay sellers can face fraud charges. We shouldn’t be sending stuff to landfills just to save a few pennies in permanent marker.
Had this recently, bought a dehumidifier for a good price, marked as new - arrived and had obviously been opened and didn't work. Out of a desire to have a dehumidifier sooner than later I was about to open it up when I saw it already had been, so I opened a return instead and sent it back.
I can only assume it is worth it for the seller to sell untested goods as new, a good number must work long enough for the buyer to be happy.
I still remember Fry's Electronics and trying to find anything that hadn't been opened-returned-reshinkwrapped. Often it was impossible. Not sure why they had so many but eh whatever, it mostly worked fine.
> all assuming the product is not sold as "new"
And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.
The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.
If I donate something on the premise that it's going to be used for some charitable cause and then it just ends up on some skuzzy listing on ebay, that would, at best, be deceitful. It's "good" insofar as the item is not being dumped in some landfill but it's not "good" insofar as it was obtained through deception.
Beautiful insight into processes that most of us never see, thanks!
My initial thought was "reusing an item is even better than recycling" but then realized that a warrantied item is quite likely to have flaws and get warrantied again very soon.
I have recently been trolling eBay for used computing equipment rather than buying new, after it was suggested I sell my old hardware that I don't think anyone would want. And man has that been a great experience, it's way more fun than browsing Newegg or doing pc part picking from new catalogs. I need neither the compute hardware nor the cost savings but it's a fun activity on its own, not unlike so many computer games where you do deck optimization or similar.
I heard that the clothes especially from high end brands are destroyed to keep the value of the brand high ie not to cannibalize sales. Which doesnt seem like good enough reason to burn 300.000+t of clothes (that created untold emissions)
Do high-end brands even produce 300 kilotons of clothing? Assuming, very generously, that a piece of clothing, with packaging and all, weights 1 kg, it would be 300M pieces of clothing; that could be an entire production run of something very ubiquitous (say, Levi's 501), but definitely not high-end.
I think that tonnage is for all textiles, not just high-end clothing.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
They have exceptions for manufacturing defects
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
If you had bothered to read TFA, you'd have understood that the rules only apply to products that have fully passed QA, were being kept as stock but ended up not selling. They don't apply to experimental batches, to defective or damaged items, etc...
From the site guidelines:
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
This is also very detrimental to buyer experience. When you search for a specific new product, prices from different sellers can vary widely. Most often there is no way to tell what is the reason for the difference. Is the cheapest offer simply the best deal, or is it a refurbished product, or even a fake?
> aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
I think some brands destroy the items to create an artificial scarcity that keeps their stuff 'exclusive'.
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere.
Isn't this TKMaxx's entire business model?
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
Isn't this why Ross exists? It's where I first heard the phrase "slightly irregular".
> had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Couldn't this be prevented by, say, sticking it on a drill press and drilling a large hole in it, and then recycling it?
This does happen: for example in Macbook repair, it is common to buy defective motherboards, in order to salvage the chips off them (which are apple-specific, hence not purchasable elsewhere). Those boards often come from China, and often have holes drilled in them, I guess exactly to prevent them from being repaired.
It's a shame, because some of those boards could (and would, they are valuable enough) be fully repaired by a skilled repair person. Instead, the chips are picked off and the rest goes to waste.
I did buy a batch once that didn't have holes drilled, and they all turned out to have all sorts of strange, often random issues, so I suspect those were RMAs that somehow "fell off the back of a truck" and escaped the drilling.
There is this insane video where someone actually does repair one of the prototype boards that have been drilled
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q
Why do you think the ones with holes didn‘t have the same defect?
Probably, but part of the point of outsourcing the recycling was that you wouldn't have to set up infrastructure, process and people for that. If they weren't crooked, you could even have customers ship the products directly to the recycler. To drill it first, then you are paying for shipping twice, on an item that is already worthless to you.
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
Not covered by this regulation in spirit and (probably, haven't read it yet) in text. The spirit of the regulation is targeting fast-fashion on-prem retailers (think H&M, Primark, Zara and the likes) and online retailers like Shein, who have heaps of products that just aren't sold because they're not wanted - and also the occasional luxury brand trying to maintain scarcity [1].
> but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.
[1] https://theweek.com/95179/luxury-brands-including-burberry-b...
What became of the relationship with the recycling company?
I think it's a reasonable idea. It's mostly going to affect the "luxury" brands who attempt to limit price reductions.
Perhaps it might encourage producers to do smaller runs to confirm interest before massively increasing volumes. The real issue is to get the lowest price you need to hit minimum volumes. It's cheaper currently to burn unused stock than store it for next year. This may change that model. If it doesn't work it can always be changed.
I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?
I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in.
It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.
You have an odd perception of what constitutes "micro-targetting".
Why apparel specifically? Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles.
Why was USB-C mandated specifically on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: it wasn't. It was mandated on smartphones in general, and Apple was the only company that specifically tried to fight the regulation because apparently they're special.
> Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry
Because it is very visible to low information voters who are also red/green voters.
Are you a high-information voter? If so, could you please provide information about any consumer industry that comes even close to the apparel industry in terms of a) ubiquity and market scale and b) destruction of unsold but undamaged items while still producing equally functional equivalents for market?
Is there such a thing as fast-cutlery? Or fast-furniture? Maybe fast-book or fast-vehicle? Fast-whitegood perhaps? I'm at a loss here, I've only heard of fast-fashion.
> micro-targeted > mandated USB-C on Apple devices
There is no law that states specifically Apple must specifically use USB-C. IIUC, the law is that all brands/manufacturers should use the same type of charger, an industry standard. That was apparently USB-C. Apple was the odd one out and had to change. If something better comes along, the industry as a whole can upgrade.
I agree wholeheartedly, seems to be a symptom of bureaucracy. Rules upon rules that end up as the status quo without consolidation and a good refactor.
I dont really care about waste too much as I think it's a non-issue blown out of proportion, but mandating standards and interoperability creates a lot of value for consumers and prevents anticompetive behavior.
It’s shocking to see this legislated.
As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.
They quite clearly are. Burberry was caught a while ago https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983, but it's well known that every major upmarket brand was doing it to avoid the loss of prestige of sending the items to outlets.
Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.
It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies.
One can speculate that this is an easy way to force the companies to pay for their externalities - given that production in third countries are much harder to touch for the EU.
Clothing items are so cheap to make it's hard to believe. I used to work in a distribution warehouse for a national baby and children's clothing chain. Containers would arrive from China and we'd enter items into the warehouse stock system. Cost basis for most items was under 10 cents.
>As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
They are...
Many brands prefer to burn their clothes than to send it to thrift shops or outlets for brand damage.
The EU is now putting your brand image a notch down compared to 'not wasting shit'.
> As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I remember watching a documentary in which they tracked a package of coffee returned to amazon (unopened). It traveled through half of Europe to end up in an incinerator in Slovakia, which is funny because amazon doesn't even operate there.
Big companies are doing a lot of weird shit because at their scale if it's even 1ct cheaper to burn 10 coffee pods vs reprocessing them back in their store it's going to make a huge difference in the long run.
They're wontonly destroying and or dumping shitty goods that they got for cheap by externalizing costs.
Of course they're not. They're destroying goods that they can't sell at a profit because, for example, the cost of processing some unworn but returned goods outweighs the potential profit from those goods.
In TFA it's estimated that between 4% and 9% of clothing put on the EU market is destroyed before being worn. An admittedly high uncertainty, but even 4% of all clothing sold in the EU is still a heck of a lot of clothes.
Luxury brands do in fact intentionally destroy old stock to make sure their value doesn't drop due to excess supply. I suppose the next step is making everything extremely limited like hypercars?
Singer used to do this, they'd give favorable trade-in deals for old sewing machines so they could be destroyed and kept off the second hand market.
However hypercars are not purposely limited. It takes an enormous amount of time and labor to build them unlike a handbag where the limit is artificial to sell more.
> However hypercars are not purposely limited
Are you serious? Pricing theory includes both supply and demand, and limiting supply makes the remaining items more valuable by dint of rarity. Companies absolutely limit supply on items to maximize profits. How is this even a question?
Are they harder than ordinary cars?
I personally know that L’oreal will buy back and destroy products of theirs from outlets, just to keep the prices up. These items are often bought in bulk on grey markets by discount outlets. Not only does L’oreal destroy the products, they pay for them to do so. None of this is shocking IMO.
> I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand
if a manufacturer finds it too complex to not overproduce and not add all kinds of negative externalities then their business model is flawed or they’re not up to the task.
either way, it isn’t “the bureaucrats” fault they’re overproducing, and they absolutely are overproducing.
It couldn't have been easily sold because brands establish a floor below they don't want to go with value to maintain their perceived premium.
It's been known for ages that they operate like this. Some more ethical ones cut off the labels from the garment before they sell it in bulk. Most will destroy the items altogether.
This legislation targets this vanity and I applaud it.
Major fashion houses have been caught destroying clothes to prop up the value of the brand.
Companies can and should participate in law drafting. If they have some not yet mentioned insight they should raise it or just take it to their grave.
It's about preserving brand image. Destroying a product is favourable compared to selling it at a discount and making the brand you spent so much marketing appear "cheap".
Yeah, it is shocking. And that's why it needed to be legislated. Companies prove time and time again that they will take the easiest route to minimise losses and maximise profits, even if that means destroying the environment or wasting perfectly good merchandise to do so.
They're not destroying clothing because it's inherently unsellable, or hazardous, or damaged beyond repair. They destroy it because it's easier to dump excess stuff than it is to set up responsible channels to get rid of it.
Many "high fashion" shithouses intentionally destroy excess stock so that their precious branded status symbols can't get into the hands of the filthy proles, which would dilute their brand recognition.
These "regulatory burdens", as you call them, are the only thing holding back companies from further messing up the planet and I welcome them with open arms.
Shocking? Why such drama? Is this AI text?
I don't see anything shocking here. Corporations doing corporatey things, which is maximizing profits and that can easily literally mean destroying unconsumed stuff since it would cost them 2 cents more per tonne to ship it and sell someplace cheaper. Ever heard the term economies of scale for example? Those distort many things in money flows.
Those corporations don't give a fuck about mankind, environment, future, long term stuff etc. Any approach to similar topics which gives them benefit of the doubt is dangerously naive and misguided from the start. It's up to society to enforce rules if its healthy and strong enough. Some are better off, some worse.
Not sure if sarcasm or cluelessness.
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."
So they’ll donate it to someone who will then destroy it.
As the recipient of that donation, why would I actually destroy it when I can sell it?
Because that's what you agreed to, that's why they donated it to you.
Then that's not a donation, just some shenanigans to bypass the law, which regulators presumably understands could happen.
Welcome to Planet Earth in 2026 :)
Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
Don't be surprised if products are sent abroad for destr^Wrecycling.
No I am not joking, some german company hid an airtag in a old computer that went to recycling. It ended up somewhere in Thailand, being not very environmentally friendly taken care of.
Remember when UK council recycling bags were found in rubbish dumps in the Myanmar jungle?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7070709/Plastic-pac...
Not just that. I have seen Morrisons supermarket bags in some weird places around the world!
That would be a carbon tax. This is plain overregulation.
Just businesses being intrinsically incentivised to not produce waste by the loss of profit is already a good motivation.
If that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model.
Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying things like "you must stop a machine before putting a person inside it".
Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
We have something like 200 years of labor laws around this point. You should probably read some history and ask yourself why every government on the planet has been compelled to force legislation on business to protect the interests of the people.
Can they ship it outside the EU and then destroy it? What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? Why not just put a carbon tax per weight?
I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).
The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.
Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.
This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.
How recycling by shredding is not destroying?
If the regulation specifically prohibits burning, it makes sense, as a measure to limit unproductive CO₂ emissions.
i would think chanel quilts would sell very well
But what do you do with unsold Chanel quilts?
Turn them into insulation! This is what happens with old denim jeans: https://www.henry.com/residential/products/insulation/denim-...
Chanel; the ultimate luxury insulation.
Cut the price, this is basic microeconomics.
That is not what they should do according to microeconomics because luxury goods are Veblen goods. Decreasing price would lower demand, at least until they lowered it enough that it was no longer a Veblen good.
Basic microeconomics is just that: basic and thus an oversimplification.
Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.
My wife worked for a cloth upcycling association (finding sustainable future for discarded clothes).
Reality is, there is just 10x more thrown out clothes in the west that any third world country on earth could need, same for shelters.
Associations distributing clothes to developing countries / shelters are filtering tightly what they accept.
In short, the vast majority of thrown out clothes in the west are just crapwear that not even the third world want. There are entire pipelines of filtering and sorting to only keep and distribute the good quality clothes.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
You can steer where donations go with regulations. I don't see any downsides of warm coats to homeless shelters for example.
Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
I think this was predicted in that "documentary"... hmmm, Zoolander... with the fashion-line "Derelicte"...
Why do you want those brands to die?
Why do you want those brands to exist?
Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".
Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.
(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)
The opposite of “Why do you want those brands to die?” is not “Why do you want those brands to exist?”.
Perhaps not but in the context of this discussion and legislation it is pertinent question to ask, perhaps not of you specifically but of the wider audience.
Brand value particularly for commodity products is usually just a form of information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers, and creates economic inefficiency since it diverts expenditure from other products that can materially improve lives. It also allows enshittification to happen since it creates inertia (brand loyalty) to switching, and the positive brand image sticks around for longer than the actual good quality products.
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 to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
I would hope that that will also be a policy area the EU addresses as part of this regulatory push.
Aren’t there already advantages to donating? I.e. Tax advantages, and a lack of disposal cost?
I think the reason that brands don’t want to donate is because they don’t want their brands to be associated with poor people.
Ive read some years ago that companies do not donate and destroy instead because of whatever wierd tax-regulation
donations are just an excuse to dump them on poor countries
What developing country do you think has a clothing shortage?
What about the poor in their own countries that might not be able to afford clothes?
But then the prices might drop and the shareholders might lose value.
Rather have all people spend all of their money to the cent to buy clothes, to pay rent and to buy water tbh
The shareholders losing value means that either all clothes drop to shein quality or they just stop making clothes.
OK. We were told creative destruction is good, if some companies exit the market and are replaced by others that offer better value then resources are being allocated more efficiently, no?
Just like other companies came along and offered a better Sears catalog when the internet killed their revenue?
People don't voluntarily lose money. Understand that and the world will way more understandable.
If the shareholders are rich because the poor are not clothed then fuck the shareholders and the system that made them rich.
It's very very easy to spend much less on clothes. Buying a new handbag every 6 months vs maintaining a bag for 20 years isn't that much different in terms of effort, but one is unbelievably more expensive.
Any name brand would rather send their unsold clothes to a landfill in India rather than allow their wealthy customers to see poor people wearing the clothes.
Which is why you write regulations to ban that. Hence, this thread.
A perhaps inadvertent but nicely succinct indictment of capitalism.
if you read the article...
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.
I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.
Well one link deeper says "Restrict the export of textile waste" but I'm still unclear why they preferred these measure over a carbon tax.
Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive 2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
European politicians will wear the clothes nobody wants so they can be decommissioned lawfully.
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.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
If I had that kind of hustle, I'd be finding out who exports the losing teams T-shirts and reimport them. I'm sure some Pats fans would pay $50 a shirt to live in an alternative reality.
Then fewer clothes will get manufactured, which is exactly the goal.
You sound American, so why do you even care? Have fun in the land of the free.
Why would you over produce something no one wants?
Also if really no one wanted it, why are companies destroying the items instead of giving them away?
>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.
Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem. Why does that problem exist if that incentive is actually really strong in practice?
I assume it's not actually a really strong incentive in context.
> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
> Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
You mean something like, to signal to voters they're trying to solve a problem voters want changed? Or a problem voters say they have?
I didn't mean to imply it would fix the problem, or that the problem would be fixed. Just that there's desire for [thing targeted], is something enough people would want to change.
I also said "assume that" for the sake of the argument/discussion given you started by saying you didn't understand. I say it's trivial to understand if assume there are other incentives where destroying the product is desirable. Thus making the incentive you mentioned, not very strong, (in context).
EU regulations aren’t set by people who are directly elected though, so the incentives are really weird. It seems like largely a non-problem, the likes of which gets obsessed over by the types of also ran politicians who end up as members of the European Parliament or filtering into the Brussels bureaucracy.
Call me when they stop buying Russian gas.
A factory might have a minimum order quantity of 10000 units for a product. The products cost $1 landed.
You know you can sell 4000 of those products for a total of $15k.
This might become a bad deal if dealing with the 6000 extra units costs you money.
maybe this will force factories to change their process. with manufacturing getting cheaper, smaller batches become affordable. at the extreme we can now print books on demand, and improved 3D printing allows one-off items in many more areas. that's the trend we need to push. to get away from wasteful mass production.
Push how? Through regulation? Unclear how else you’d achieve this if it is still worse economically. Buyers don’t want to pay more either.
through demand at first. clothes designers are hopefully going to demand smaller batches to avoid getting punished for overproducing. but if that doesn't work, then yes, maybe regulation is necessary. tricky though because manufacturing is often outside of the EU.
overproduction needs to be made more uneconomical than smaller batches. if that is really the issue. i really doubt that large batches of production are actually the problem here.
How much longer do you wait to see if demand solves it? It hasn't. The problem has gotten worse
You can produce so little people take anything you give them - like it was in the Soviet union.
Clothing has a huge profit margin (when manufactured overseas) especially at the higher end (for brands which do not invest in local production, which is most, because it is also hard to beat Chinese quality). It's better for these brands to over-produce on some items and lose the low-cost inventory, than to under-produce and not meet market demand, to not offer a range of sizes and varieties to meet individual taste, and not achieve wide distribution that's necessary to grow market demand. That's why regulation is needed here.
I get he economics, but I don’t think it follows that it’s a problem governments need to involve themselves in.
What’s your big idea
You might not think that, but EU citizens think otherwise.
I would think the incentives to produce things no one wants would already be pretty low.
Supplier MOQs can create significant incentives to overproduce. For example, you get 9000 things someone wants and 1000 that no-one wants.
This can be profitable for the customer, if they can't just easily get rid of those 1000 they can't sell, it's presumably less profitable.
Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.
Not really, the EU is just introducing additional weighing in favor of smaller order quantities.
They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
You can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
Overproducing is often cheaper than losing sales because of the fixed costs of producing a batch and the externalities of destroying your inventory not being priced in. Some brands also find it more interesting to destroy stocks than reduce prices because it protects their brand values. Well, now, that's illegal.
It seems like countries will do anything but tax carbon.
Carbon is not the only concern here, it is also excessive water use, excessive land use, higher logistics pressure on ports and such which can be reduced if these are made to a higher quality and a reduced quantity.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/carbon-taxes-europe-20...
For the same reason tax codes are complex. If you have a simple law, there's no way for a politician to say to a group of people: "If you vote for me, I will get you a special favour".
> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes?
from TFA
> companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
Which in many cases is less environmentally efficient than the alternative
This already happens a lot for used clothes with the thrift store->poor country->landfill pipeline. That third step will likely be a lot less rare with new clothes.
yep, they do https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...
Maybe they could bury the clothes and call it carbon sequestration. I assume that clothes are made of mostly hydrocarbons.
Won't fungi and bacteria eat (cellulose-based) the clothes, releasing the same amount of CO₂, only a bit slower? Synthetic fabrics can likely be buried as a form of carbon sequestration though.
Maybe donate it to poor countries?
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
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 the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
Or people do other things.
Around 1800, 95% of people worked on the farm. Today it is 2%. People do different things now.
this is not destroying things to create jobs. this is about globalization negatively affecting local culture. clothing especially represents culture. if people can not afford to create their own clothes then that has a negative effect on their culture as a whole.
I don't see how localized culture clothing styles would be destroyed by importing different styles from other countries.
nobody buys the local style because it is more expensive than the imported stuff. as a result the local style dies out, or it doesn't get a chance to be developed in the first place.
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.
You can start if you wish.
I don't think these companies want the poor people to wear their brand.
They'll find another way to destroy them.
2018 article reports that Burberry destroyed £28 millions worth of clothes to keep their brand "exclusive": https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983
The intended effect of the law is that they get better at planning. It requires supply chain innovation similar to what happened in the automotive industry decades ago with JIT manufacturing. They can borrow from fast-fashion but now there’s a penalty for over producing.
Most clothes are manufactured in countries with cheaper labor costs to cut costs - the reality is clothes are cheap to make in terms of raw materials- and dumping unwanted clothes will just destory the local economy
Poor countries don't need clothes. They have clothes. It's just more (mostly plastic pollution) that fills their landfills and rivers.
https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/the-messy-truth/
Just because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
What country has a clothing shortage? Be specific.
The most desperate povert I've ever seen was in India. You know what people were using to make tents to live in? Clothes.
Poor people have been making clothes for thousands of years without any help from heavy industry, and it's incredibly cheap to produce long-lasting cotton clothing.
Clothing isn't really a perpetual need the way you frame it. A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
I’m not suggesting that any countries have clothing shortages.
However, countries don’t wear clothes. People do. People sometimes have shortages of clothing in many places.
For example, here in the United States people sometimes experience poverty and may sometimes experience a lack of suitable clothing. This happens at the same time that there are also people in the US throwing away clothing that they do not use. This is because those people are different people in different immediate locations.
The reasons that people lack clothing is not because there is not enough clothing in existence. It is because the clothing is not distributed universally to every person who needs it.
If I have seen this with my own two eyes in the US, then I am sure it happens in other places.
> A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
So? A person with the ass ripped out of their jeans or a hole in their shoe doesn’t give a fuck whether other clothes last 10 years.
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?
Ah yes, the classic HN hair splitting meta-argument. No.
I'm not sure you know what hairsplitting means, but I am sure "No." is an answer to some question, just not the completely reasonable one I asked.
What they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently.
Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society.
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
It's just boring for consumers. Business provides value to customers. Customers dictate what gets produced. And there are customers (e.g. me) who do keep things for a longer amount of time - there's a reason why generally men's clothing makes up around 20% of the total clothing shopping floor space in any given city.
> Customers dictate what gets produced.
Sure? It seems to me that the companies dictate what I consume. Many many times I wanted to buy exactly the same clothes item or shoes to replace an old one (because I know exactly how it'd fit and wear) only to discover it has been discontinued with no obvious "heir". Sometimes only 6 months later...
Whats the percentage of people chasing "fashion", especially after mid 30s?
More accurate to say that it's the other customers that dictate what you consume, by out voting you with their wallet.
Outlets could be a key here.
I suspect this end up like US "recycling" of plastic: pay another country to "reuse/recycle" the waste, and that country then dumps it in a landfill, dumps it in the ocean, or burns it.
They should pay people to wear them.
Fashion production is responsible for 8-10% of all carbon emissions
https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-s...
And in pre-industrial societies, peasants (almost entirely women, ranging from children to the elderly) commonly spent around 100 hours of labor to produce a single square yard of fabric to clothe their families (fabric was too expensive for peasants to buy, so most spun it at home).
So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.
Citation for the 100-ish hours: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an...
There has to be a sweet spot between someone hand spinning wool for 100s of hours and an automated factory spitting 80% polymer based clothing directly into a trash can.
Man, I really can't see your point. And so...?
Cheap clothing is a civilizational achievement and good for human welfare.
So carbon emissions are bad, but then we should price carbon and not micromanage clothing inventory.
Clothing everyone is an achievement, but fast fashion is overshooting that target.
A bit like feeding everyone vs. having an obesity crisis.
Polyester has been a disaster for clothing. I'd love to see countries come up with a plan to cut down on the amounts of plastic crap being pumped out.
Perfectly summed up
Getting common goods less expensive is good, making them too cheap is not. Imagine you are optimizing a math model, but nothing actually has prices. You just get a garbage point as optimum. You need to have scarcity, so that a system that optimizes the allocation of scarce goods actually works.
Fashion? No, absolutely not. Textiles in general? Maybe, but almost certainly not.
This is the actual quote on the page you cite:
"Today, the combined textile and apparel sectors contribute as much as 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions."
Notice the unusual way they spell "fashion"...
Right, textiles are much bigger than fashion - bedding, furniture upholstery, curtains, some types of shelter, practical items like footwear, protective equipment, medical equipment and dressings, vehicle interiors... pretty much all aspects of human life depend on textiles. It ain't just cheap t shirts and dresses.
For comparison, crypto and datacenters constituted 2% in 2022 (probably 3%+ now): https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/08/15/carbon-emis...
Every single country should follow suit, apply to food also.
The reason these companies get so greedy is because they can control the demand. Companies have been found destroying their goods to keep the price high.
The whole Europe is pretty broken right now government wise, but they sure know how to have some decent laws in place when the politics aren't being an arse.
A good way to understand this is to think about Apple and how they refuse to run Black Friday or any other type of sales. They just don't. If they do, they're very modest.
This helps to maintain the value of the product and for consumers to not defer purchase until sale event.
Clothing companies are similar. The actual product is worth pennies, but they'll refuse to sell for 10% of RSP because who would be buying them at the full price? They'll do 50%, maybe 70 discount and that's it. They destroy whatever they don't sell. Rinse, repeat, four times a year in this crazy, fast fashion reality
It's a known practice and they've been going on like this for ages.
Fashion is vain by definition and this whole industry is very wasteful of our resources. This legislation is meant to help mitigate this.
What's gonna change long term is manufacturers will be keeping more items on sale for longer and the fast fashion cycles will slow down. Hopefully they'll start competing with quality and workmanship thus, in turn, giving EU textile industry a new chance to survive Asian competition.
THIS IS GOOD FOR EU ECONOMY!
> The ban on destruction of unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear and the derogations will apply to large companies from 19 July 2026. Medium-sized companies are expected to follow in 2030. The rules on disclosure under the ESPR already apply to large companies and will also apply to medium-sized companies in 2030
5 months is a pretty short timeline for a large company to change literally its entire business to handle one class of products differently. This affects returns, sales, shipping, contracts with disposal companies, etc.
The weirder part is that they're granting medium and small size companies 4 more years to figure it out. It will take any company a long time to deal with this. So why shaft the large companies? Spite? The difficulty this imposes on them, and any fines from their inability to comply, will be passed down to the consumer.
The additional costs will make the people who already are compliant competitive.
First, seems like a good thing. I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.
Second, in the short term this is going to lower profits for some companies.
Third, hopefully in the long run it will lead to less waste.
Is it perfect? Of course not, no real legislation ever is. If there's a better way to get started on reducing waste I'd like to hear it, though.
> I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.
They didn't. You can look at the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) yourself. It's fairly long but it should be easy to scroll until you find some of the lists.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng
Does this apply to Chinese companies too or it is just another measure that disadvantages local producers?
Local producers.
Businesses importing from non-EU countries have to shoulder the responsibility in stead of the manufacturer.
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 never are tradeoffs, after all.
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 price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.
Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.
I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
Unsold apparel is a headache, but banning it probably won't work. Something still has to be done with the stuff.
In the first dot-com era, I knew some startup people who were trying to create an online secondary market in used apparel, called Tradeweave. It flopped. You can see their web site on the Internet Archive up to 2004.[1] Then, suddenly, it's gone. There's a Stanford Business School case for this company.[2] Amusingly, the Stanford case study is dated 2000, before the collapse, and makes it sound like a success.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040323045929/http://tradeweave...
[2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/t...
I wonder why this doesn't also cover handbags and scarves?
https://www.darveys.com/blog/luxury-brands-burn-their-own-go...
considering H&M (Sweden), Zara (Spain), C&A (Netherlands) etc.. have lead the way into the clothes-that-self-destructs-in-a-year fashion, it was about time europeans did something about clothing waste, well done.
I have clothes from all three brands. They most definitely don't fall apart after a year (or two, or three).
Companies' response: we'll just sew these unsold clothes into a large curtain, which is not apparel so we can then just burn it.
I do hope they come up with something like that.
Cheap shop rags!
I get the impression this will turn out similar to how some "for cause" businesses have. Past examples include:
I worry that, one way or another, this is going to create a pile of unwanted products somewhere, and it probably won't be in a nice neighborhood.The European Union is messing up ignoring the law of unintended consequences, as typical...
If you look at the backyards (so called garden) of homes of the advanced countries, from satellite maps, they mostly became junkyards of things. Inside homes are full of things that are rarely used. I have seen Amazon boxes going into bins unopened. Basically, homes are overflowing with goods, and throwing things away is going to become expensive. Advances in manufacturing, supply chains and online shopping have accelerated the saturation of markets.
Destruction of goods can't be stooped due the pace of inflow of inventory. This is like a conveyor belt jamming, where the downstream belts are draining slower than upstream ones.
Took me a while to find the actual rules: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/commission-del...
Overall, seems reasonably sensible.
It's still ok to destroy products if (among many other reasons) "the product can reasonably be considered unacceptable for consumer use due to damage, including physical damage, deterioration or contamination, including hygiene issues, whether it is caused by consumers or occurs during the handling of the product [...] and repair and refurbishment are not technically feasible or cost-effective;" but cost-effective means "the cost of repairing or refurbishing a product not outweighing the total cost of destruction of that product and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product."
So essentially, they have to offer all the clothing for donation first, if nobody wants it, it can still be destroyed (that's one of the other exceptions).
Unfortunately another exception is if "it is technically unfeasible ... to remove ... labels, logos or recognisable product design or other characteristics that are ... protected by intellectual property rights". So a luxury brand can probably still go "well our design is protected and we don't want the poors wearing our fancy clothes".
I anticipate a lot of unintended consequences lurking.
But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.
Might be to hinder large companies of moving fast-fashion storages into EU, so they cannot circumvent the 150EUR free import limit when it is dissolved, as that would move them into the supposed jaws of this "ban of destruction of fast-fashion" act.
It's a great idea, but this seems incredibly hard to enforce. Shipments sometimes go missing, products can be damaged "unintentionally", etc. I hope they can achieve what they intend.
> an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn.
That is a crazy amount.
Is it? 4-9% of unsold portion seems reasonable. Unless they actually mean 4-9% of all manufactured.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...
Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.
>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.
This number seems low, so >90% of unsold clothes are worn? Are they all donated? 4-9% of unsold clothes could be defective/damaged or something.
I would have guessed, with no real basis whatsoever, that 4-9% of all manufactured clothes would be destroyed without ever being used.
I would have guessed a much higher number, and the number possibly being as low as 4% seems like good news to me.
Why massive discounts seem to be much more of a thing in the US compared to Europe?
A strange decision considering that high fashion is one of the few lucrative sectors of eu. LV cannot afford to give away their branded items , and i doubt they are willing to remanufacture or reuse. They may be a tiny fraction of the industry, but equally affected.
Yes, because shareholder value comes first. Ffs
For some of these things I wonder if there are missing recyclable options. Like could you economically run a pile of defective clothing through a blender and and use it as fiber reinforcement in some kind of construction material or insulation?
What about the environmental impact of all the extra warehouses they have to build to store the unsellable stock?
This must be the first thread I've seen in a while on HN where nobody calls the EU a "nanny state".
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 general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product.
The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.
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.
Give a man donated clothing and they will have clothes ... teach a man to become and indentured servant on minimum wage and they will be able to buy clothes every year for the rest of their lives.
I will never understand fashion. Why does a store need ten new collections per year?
the only reason they need them is cause people are buying them. the supply side is never an issue…
What stops them from selling it to an affiliated entity for 1 eurocent and thus evade the ban?
The EU has to get its hand into every aspect of everyone's life.
From the material the straw I drink from is made, to what port companies can use for charging, to what companies can do with their own products.
I don't get why European nations always have to turn into totalitarian fascist dictatorships.
EU law making is full of hope and dreams but empty on common sense.
“I hope everyone in the system will play nice and not try to abuse or circumvent it”
We really really really need to replace our poloticians with younger ppl with functioning brains.
Being 60+ should automatically disclasify you from running into office.
Great! Can we also ban the export of waste, please?
This is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules.
The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.
Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.
---
The linked page has this text:
"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."
Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.
The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.
I don't think that is very believable.
(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
A good chunk of unsold clothing destruction happens because the brand considers fire sales to be brand damage. I have to wonder if they'll comply with this regulation willingly, or if they'll do some stupid workaround to make sure they can continue to pointlessly destroy clothing for the sake of a brand image.
They can just pull the labels off or relabel them. That’s the usual approach
Makes sense. You’d rather burn a birkin than let a poor person get their grubby little mitts on it. So the only way to stop them burning them, is to force them to do something with them.
I think incorporating the cost of recycling and trash into the original purchase price should also become a global norm.
This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.
Very tongue in cheek: In the latest fully analyzed year (2024) Sweden was CO2 net negative. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.
(https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldi...)
The "Less Growth for Europe" party strikes again.
It's regulation from the previous European Parliament and the first von der Leyen Commission. The new parliament from 2024 has a lot fewer red/green members (still enough to cause trouble, though) and the second von der Leyen Commission has a different agreement with the current parliament. The current Council is also a lot different than the council of just a year ago -- not in terms of members but in terms of opinions. A lot of the craziness is being rolled back, maybe this will also be rolled back.
The link is not about the 2024 framework regulation (from just before the elections) but about some new supplementary regulation that the 2024 regulation allowed for and required -- in order to provide clarifications and fix some of the mistakes of the initial regulation.
Yes, to the frustration of supporters of the "Paperclip Maximising Means Growth" party.
EU makes sense once!! two thumbs up
Looking forward to Hermes moving to NY
Finally, this never made any sense.
What keeps them from selling 1000 pieces for a cent to offshore companies in Africa/Asia that then burn what they bought?
That they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.
That this is an actual rule that other versions of have been a thing for years makes further convinced we are on the falling edge of capitalist society.
Hopefully, what this should motivate is the emphasis on products which can be _disassembled_, taken apart, other than through destruction.
It may also become less costly to take products with flaws and fix them up: Right now, it's not profitable; but if one can't just chuck them away, then the cost-benefit analysis changes.
Less throw-away fashion hopefully.
This is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell.
So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.
Great news!
I live in America and I would like it to continue to be the leading economic zone.
The more Europe (and others) lag behind, the better my life will be :).
As a European, it seems absurd to me one would celebrate the short term benefits of being one of the by far most destructive (per capita) countries on earth regarding global climate (challenged only by a few oil states).
Is a temporary advantage worth destroying the planet forever?
I just think we have vastly different understandings about what actually helps the environment and what’s even happening to the environment.
This particular law is probably going to cause more resource waste not less. Holding inventory or distributing it costs money.
Btw have you taken up this topic with china, India, or Africa?
> Great news! I live in America...
Great news, indeed.
Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes.
If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this.
I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got.
The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.
The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out.
Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.
HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.
GLP-1's solve this, now you're basically only losing weight and eventually (i.e. the 2030s) most people won't fluctuate much in weight. So, try again on "changing sizes". Yes I'm aware that children grow up rapidly and need new clothes. Don't buy goodyear welted boots for your 7 year old.
The best fashion is timeless, and that's why heritage fashion is far superior to trends. Coincidentally, it's why the brands I listed above are exclusively heritage brands, who have basically no regards for trends.
There's a reason HN is poorly dressed. I'd rather take the "only dresses with startup T-shirt" guy over the "I've gotta have the Sydney Sweeney Jeans" person, and especially over the sneakerhead crowd which now thinks Hoka and NB is superior to Nike.
Wow, you know what never happens? People changing size.
> People changing size.
I was curious why I no longer was able to wear pants I wore in my 20s. I could not get them over my hips. It wasn't because I was getting fatter, my weight is about the same.
I was also intrigued by young men looking slim in the hips, and older men not.
So I looked it up.
Turns out that your hips grow wider with age. I'd never heard of this before! Though I did know one's ears got bigger.
Too bad my shoulders never get wider, and my height shrinks :-/
My feet have gotten considerably wider with age, too.
And that's why companies destroy unsold stock? How?
Typical Eurocrat meddling in people's affairs. The owners of those items should be free to do whatever they want. If the government is concerend about environmental damage, they should raise landfill fees or tax carbon, not limit what firms are allowed to do with their own things.
Well put. Of course noone says that this will increase clothes price for everyone.
Raising the landfill tax or carbon tax will also increase the price of clothes.
This might only increase the price of already expensive items, a t-shirt from H&M won't go up in price because of this.
Just another case of the EU being focused on unimportant things while looking away from real issues like cost of living crisis or energy costs. Though on the other hand, it may be for the best since they only make things actively worse.
The government can do more than one thing at a time.
Far too much state interference in private matters. The EU is quickly becoming the new Soviet Union.
Those 'On Sale' racks are going to take up half the shop now. Maybe they could have a deep discounted section where clothes are set at cost value. Should find an equilibrium and someone will buy them
EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
textile waste, largely, is plastic waste.
Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic).
in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee.
fast fashion is by far the worst offender though.
So is rayon... kinda. It's cellulose from trees and other plants, without the original cells.
Where is the dividing line between cellulose, lignin and "plastics"?
rayon is a regenerated cellulose fibre: it biodegrades.
polyester is a thermoplastic polymer synthesised from petrochemicals: it doesn’t.
that’s the dividing line. one breaks down in the environment, the other persists for centuries and sheds microplastics into waterways every time you wash it.
rayon has its own environmental problems (deforestation, chemical processing), but “is it plastic?” is not one of them. the chemistry here isn’t ambiguous.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/12/stor...
They are working on that, too.
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.
> 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.
Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.
[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/fashion-waste-problem-fabrics-...
The majority of clothing produced is not for exclusive brands.
This is a very niche feature of low volume brands.
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.
Related note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company.
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 $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.
Clothing items tend to have quality roof that past that, it doesn't matter and it's not 2000$ for handbag.
Clothing has been used as wealth/class indicator for thousands of years, trying to change that will be extremely difficult lift.
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.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.
Counter point: all of human existence.
We wouldn’t have 99% of the technological advancements we’ve made without a fuckton of failure and waste.
Counter point to the counter point: also all of human existence.
The "fuckton of failure and waste" which has brought technological advancements to humanity didn't come from destroying unsold clothing, and the risks involved in actual technological advancements are orders of magnitude larger than the risk of not being able to destroy unsold consumer products without penalty.
But now that we do, we know how to be smarter about it going forward
No, it's not just Zara and other fast fashion.
Premium brands really don't want to seel it UNLESS it's to the right people for the high price: https://fashionlawjournal.com/deadstock-destruction-why-fash...
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking
I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
It costs a company nothing to donate an unsold coat to a homeless shelter.
Oh no, poor fast fashion companies won't be able to continue maximizing their profits by using slave labor to manufacture ginormous amounts of garbage that goes out of fashion in a week. Guess they'll have to reduce their garbage output or switch to manufacturing quality stuff that can hang out on a store's shelf for a bit longer. The fucking horror. Fuck them.
Incredibly, unbelievably stupid law. Waste is made when something unwanted is created, not when it is thrown out. Destruction or landfill is often the best option for all involved and modern landfills are very safe and sustainable. I worked in recycled clothing for a few years and it is not always or even often efficient.
This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
producers and sellers will have to optimize via better consumption prediction or via less previous season throw away.
eu is inefficent to be stable, until it is not, by design
good comment, but of course it's downvoted on hackernews
Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.
Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
Where? According to Wikipedia, suicide is no longer illegal anywhere in Europe.
You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.
> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?
Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
Edit to clarify: things can't be put on sale, except for a few times during the year? I guess this is not every country, although I'm not sure which and when.
> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
Nonsense. They can.
> In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.
> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
> Nonsense. They can.
Specifically I meant that there's a few times during the year when things can be put on discount?
That's correct: typically Christmas, Easter and Summer. That's more than enough to get rid of excess if they were serious about it.
To clarify, this is a consumer protection law which is set in all EEA countries. Discounts are regulated to prevent stores from tricking their customers into thinking they are getting a product at a lower then usual price. You can only claim a product is on discount if the price has been lowered from a previous price less then x-days ago (I think 2 weeks is not uncommon), after which this discount becomes the new price.
As a European immigrant to the USA, it infuriates me to no end that American stores are allowed to use the words “price” and “discount” interchangeably. When I get things “on a discount” I expect to be paying lower then usual price.