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.
"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 world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.
That EU regulators actually saw need for such regulations makes me both sad and annoyed because they ought not be necessary. What's wrong with clothing manufacture, commerce and trade, and fashion that brand-new clothing can be just trashed and destroyed? Right, we know it's a rhetorical question but we must continue to ask it.
What's happening is sheer madness! If aliens were to witness this from a holistic perspective they'd arrive at conclusion the inhabitants of this planet are de-arranged. Why would any species take effort to gather resources/grow raw materials such as resource-hungry cotton then take time and more effort to manufacture it into useful products then move it holus-bolus to another part of the planet only to discard and destroy it unused—and harm the planet’s ecological systems in the process? That is unless they’re mad.
In a nutshell, why not do something more useful and productive and less wasteful?
What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste is that when I was a kid clothes were expensive, my parents struggled to send us to school neat, tidy and well-dressed. When I ripped holes in the knees of my grey school pants through rough play rather than buy new ones necessity meant my mother would spend hours at the sewing machine mending them.
What’s happening with these clothes is unnecessary waste and vandalism on a grand scale, and the fashion industry along with unethical marketing practices are largely responsible. People not only have too much disposable income but ‘fashion’ has convinced them their clothes are out of fashion almost from the moment they’ve bought them, these days, the notion of actually wearing one’s clothes until they’re worn out is almost inconceivable.
Little wonder megatons of discarded barely-used and new clothes are polluting the planet.
> What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste
To the degree ethics (which I am using here to mean, accounting for negative externalities) are not incorporated into economics, with very few exceptions, every company will optimize their profits with no thought to externalities.
Shareholders might care about waste as individuals, but are not coordinated in anyway that moves corporations. And any corporations that would like to be more ethical still have to compete with those that are not. Some with large margins can do that, but most cannot.
Asking/convincing companies or individuals to be voluntarily ethical, one at a time, is not a solution. It is asking the wiser people to de-power themselves, in a way that just increases the opportunity, profits and incentives for less-altruistic actors.
What the EU is doing is good. But I would like to see a consistent economic governance effort to avoid all significant negative externalities. Both the environment and the economy's value creation and net wealth, are better off without colossal destruction of value happening off the books.
Dealing with each externality as if it were an isolated problem fritters away resources and time, and throws away the clarity and commonality that would allow consistent reforms to happen. We don't have that time to waste.
"Asking/convincing companies or individuals to be voluntarily ethical, one at a time, is not a solution. ...just increases the opportunity, profits and incentives for less-altruistic actors."
Exactly, it's why we need to reintroduce regulations many of which were removed or weakened from the late 1970s onward. Moreover, we need intelligent regulation not just gut reaction to an immediate problem. That's proving much more difficult (reigning in the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism that were let out of the bag ~50 years ago with deregulation won't be easy).
Absolutely. Poorly thought out, too strict, performative, or obsolete regulations create opposition for any regulation.
I also think we need to co-opt the “enemy” to be regulated, in their terms. E.g. get all the major fossil fuel CFO’s in a room, and figure out the financials encouraging green energy, and away from polluting and geopolitically complicated energy, that would make cold business sense for them.
Include and involve the military, insurance giants, large food security/supply chain companies like Cargill, reactor companies, big enterprise customers that want rapid energy growth, and all the other major sectors that take climate change and energy expansion seriously and will get value out of a more stable world, with better energy technology in practical terms. The people that CEOs respect.
Once the biggest resisters can profit off not resisting, you will see a genuine change of heart. That can sound very cynical, but it’s just how people are. “First, I shall do no damage to my own turf.” But once they take a new position, their power doesn’t just cease it’s friction, but becomes another rocket for progress.
Whatever tax breaks and other incentives it took, to make green their best move, would be worth it. Bribe? Maybe. Better understood as the cost of faster consensus and coordination. Where the price of waiting for everyone to change due to the hardship that is being locked in, is so much higher.
On the other hand, after consensus, change itself needs to happen smoothly, not suddenly. Incentives and disincentive need to operate slower than we might want to make change practical. The most important thing is that those reinforcers are credible. Companies are forward looking. They will naturally move their investments today where the profits will credibly be tomorrow. They don’t need to feel pain, just know what to do to avoid it, and most importantly, prosper.
> include and involve the military, insurance giants, large food security/supply chain companies like Cargill, reactor companies, big enterprise customers that want rapid energy growth, and all the other major sectors that take climate change and energy expansion seriously and will get value out of a more stable world, with better energy technology in practical terms. The people that CEOs respect
Oh yeah let the corpos and MIC rule the world even more than they already do, great idea :)
We should really reform the "free market" IMO. It is way too free now. They get all the benefits and none of the responsibilities.
> Despite growing corruption, there are still competent people in these organizations to work with.
This is the part I strongly doubt. Well, not the competence exactly. But the motives. These people don't make their own decisions, they do what the board and shareholders want. And all they want is money. It's the only thing that counts for them. So the only solution is making these externalities have a cost. Business won't collaborate on that because it's only a negative for them.
I don't believe in public/private collaboration anymore. In Holland that was tried way too long.
> The military has labeled climate change a global destabilizer for years. Insurance companies and farmers are dealing with the fallout already.
Yet they continue to run full steam to meddle in oil-producing countries. I doubt they will keep this climate change classification up anyway as it is directly in contradiction to the dogmas of the current administration.
> Yet they continue to run full steam to meddle in oil-producing countries.
That isn't military strategy. That is the politicians choosing oil over alternatives and delegating action accordingly.
The military can warn about the threat of climate change or China's growing technical, manufacturing, scientific and potential AI dominance. But it can't (and shouldn't) set the elected leaders' agenda, or refuse to implement it.
A non-governing military is an anti-corruption firewall.
> This is the part I strongly doubt. Well, not the competence exactly. But the motives
There have been streams of people in power resigning as their particular role gets pinched between corruption or resisting. When that stops, maybe there won't be anyone competent with good motives left. But many people are quietly doing the best they can in the meantime, and hoping for a turnaround in the future.
> And all they want is money.
Yes, for those directly profiting from damage, we are going to have to address that directly if we want to acheive change.
But large segments of the economy are being financially hurt by that damage. So there are many natural allies.
For social media, I think we need some hard laws, to give regulators some teeth. For energy, where the damagers are also value producers (we can't just cut off fossil fuels instantly), whatever financials it takes to straighten that out will result in a net benefit.
People on the right often want companies to be able to do whatever they want, ignoring the damage. People on the left often want to eliminate damage, without any cost. Neither of those viewpoints leads us anywhere but off a cliff.
Boldness here is our friend. The sirens of making little changes, or imagining a big change won't take tremendous coordination or cost something, are mirages.
> I don't believe in public/private collaboration anymore. In Holland that was tried way too long.
That leaves a coupe, which isn't going to produce any improvement. "Tear it down" rarely morphs into building anything. "MAGA" as a soft coupe (democratically elected, undemocratic policies) is a mild example.
It's easy to shoot down the potential for change. But that isn't a plan, a step, or a mindset that has any chance of achieving anything.
Although I 1000% relate to the many reasons we have for cynicism and apathy.
Since the 1970s, some industries were deregulated, but overall legal and compliance complexity has still grown over time, according to all studies that I'm aware of on the subject of the regulatory burden.
The studies indicate that a few large early regulations aimed at clear externalities — like major air pollution — delivered substantial benefits on the balance, but many of the smaller restrictions added afterward, especially as they accumulated, mostly generated paperwork (huge compliance industries) and fixed costs (that made smaller firms less competitive) with diminishing returns.
The sensible goal should be to massively reduce the regulatory thicket, while keeping the small set of restrictions that have clear, major benefits and are straightforward to enforce, and replacing the rest with simpler standards or pricing mechanisms that prevent negative externalizations without dragging down productivity through top-down micromanagement of the economy that regiments the actions of private citizens.
"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 world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.
I don't see any cynicism here, only pure realism. The real question is why EU law tries to create a utopia on paper while ignoring real-world situations. That's what has always frustrated people in the EU about the institution: its lack of decisions that are close to the people and grounded in reality. Yes of course, everyone gets the idea and the good intentions behind it, but good intentions alone are not worth the paper that they are written on.
For quite many years I saw EU as something mostly good. Since ten years back I'm hesitating. Enforcements when it comes to cars (like the (EU) 2018/858) where the manufacturers are forced to implement "safety" features that customers don't want/need and "environmental" features (such as AD blue) that makes worse products. Regulations that perhaps were good on paper, but that will backlash on manufacturers and consumers (as the cars since then became way more expensive).
Regulations on sorting out textile (such as worn underwear, textile diapers) created huge issues in Sweden to take care of the textile waste to a big surprise for the politicians..
I see this response as the exact same one about tax cheating and how the rich will just move away or be better at cheating taxes.
Did we forget how to discover and punish bad actors? Do you think we should just do nothing and let casual bad behavior go because some people are gonna be abusive? No. I refuse to accept that. It is not your false dichotomy.
If people abuse the system, fine and punish them. More than they profit off of the bad actions.
> Do you think we should just do nothing and let casual bad behavior go because some people are gonna be abusive? No. I refuse to accept that.
I'm with you, and I also give a clear: No.
My criticism is about how it is handled. If you introduce a new law and already know there is an immediate workaround that makes the situation even worse than before, then you should close that loophole in the first place. If you can't close the loophole because of strong resistance from lobbyists, then it's obvious this is just about "good intentions on paper" so the EU can say they've done something.
That extra step mean selling what remains at low cost might be more financially interesting than if they could destroy it 'on site'.
Not a perfect solution, but it push the incentives in the right direction.
What's wrong with clothing manufacture, commerce and trade, and fashion that brand-new clothing can be just trashed and destroyed?
The industrial process (and, to add, global economy relying on slave-cheap labour in a far enough country) has become effective enough that it literally costs less to make surplus items than to scrap them. Not exactly the level of cost in duplicating copyrighted bits but low enough that the sales effort to find buyers for the clothes after the season is more expensive than the profits from it. Often the price of items doesn't even warrant paying for returns: many online shops just tell you to keep the product if you claim a defective product and want your money back.
But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets alone: when it comes to cheap items any reasonable business would source a bit extra in the hopes of selling more. If you source fewer items than what will sell you'll be losing money. Given the profit margins it makes sense to just source X percent extra and calculate that it's cheaper to pay for them but not sell, rather than pay for too few and limit your profits by running out of stock. It's like insuring yourself by taking a slice of your profits today to prevent a rainy day from happening.
Us consumers of the modern commercial wonders are not without guilt either. We support this by buying new, crap quality garments that last only so long we'll soon be buying more. The price is low but the value is even lower, and that's the profit of the clothing industry. Buying new again and again is what enables the industry to operate. You can still have your clothes handmade by a tailor with lasting quality and for prices astronomical enough that you'll surely won't be (nor afford to) throwing them out too soon. Few people choose to do that, of course.
The exact same thing is happening on varying scales in: consumer electronics, appliances, cars, houses...
"But you can't entirely blame the clothing markets..."
Nor stupid consumers, but watering down blame will weaken resolve to fix the problem. Perhaps it should become fashionable to criticize those who buy too many clothes by asking "do you really need that item?". Criticizing and ostracizing works, it greatly reduced cigarette smoking.
It's far easier to ostracize cigarette smokers (because you can see them smoke). You don't really know how many clothes somebody has unless you really pay attention to them, and nobody does.
There are multiple ways to tackle the problem, once we had competitions such as 'Miss World', 'Miss America', etc. that were popular but which now are very much seen as sexist.
The message would soon get across if being seen browsing in a clothing store wasn't the best look (like being seen in a porn shop is embarrassing). Or imagine the impact it were embarrassing to be seen at a fashion show or buying fashion magazines. Throughout history there have been bigger changes in social attitudes than that.
A rowdy mob picketing a few fashion shows would attract world attention to the problem.
It’s what already happens with recycling in Europe, it’s resold several times to companies claiming to recycle it and ends up shipped to the poor parts of South East Asia and burned or dumped.
> What upsets me so much about this unnecessary waste is that when I was a kid clothes were expensive
Clothes used to be more expensive and that makes you upset now?
But go back before the mechanized loom to see ACTUAL expensive clothing. When people were robbed, they literally took their clothes. People were murdered for the clothes they wore.
Now let's rethink this. Should you be angry that you didn't get beaten for destroying your clothing when you were a kid, because actually clothing was insanely cheap compared to pre-industrial ages? No, we should know our history and be glad that things are cheaper now.
Why not regulate thrift stores and force them to have 40% of their inventory at fixed prices? $3 for shirts and $7 for pants/shorts? Part of the problem, at least in the US, is that thrift stores are filled to capacity. But just like everywhere else, their prices are high as well. If we want to interfere with a free market, why not start there, to force higher turnover and keep them from rejecting donations?
They’d be filled to capacity even if they literally gave everything for free, because the unsold stuff is mostly the kind of things that people don’t want in the first place. The good stuff would be snatched, and the things nobody wants would linger there forever.
The only thing that can objectively reduce waste is well, simplifying access to people's data/surveillance capitalism. This way corps will have a better idea of what people want to wear and at which price they are willing to buy it, and products will be wasted less.
They are making the best decisions based on available information. No one trashes products for fun.
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.
Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.
Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.
There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.
They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.
The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.
I don't think you can sell at loss in Europe (not sure, happy to be corrected), so might be small but it'll still be positive. The bet is it will be high enough to be a deterrent. The other bet is that at some point the rest of the world will push back being a corporate dumpster.
This particular thread of the argument can go on for a while. I can't well articulate the doubts I have because I'm not in the industry, but many such well-meaning laws have a tendency to backfire once given enough time for bad/poor actors to game it.
There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.
The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.
The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.
Oil companies have been doing this for over a century in US. Sell abandoned well to a small llc, llc files bankruptcy, big OilCo off the hook! Everyone happy!
>The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner.
This is what these countries get for having weak laws that allow people to do illegal dumping and then hide behind a corporate veil to avoid accountability.
Trouble is if democracy worked properly then corporate entities wouldn't be able to lobby and influence governments to weaken laws out of self-interest.
Read their comment and yours? What great advice. I would suggest you do the same, but I think you'll continue to misread it.
> No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.
> 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.
They are saying that paying to dispose of the clothes/waste is how it's done. And then... you said the same thing. Perhaps you're assuming they're just taking a guess, rather than coming at it with understanding that this is how it has been done for a while.
There's already strong financial incentives to not over-produce. Nobody wants to dump cash into inventory that can't sell. Trying to force them to sell it all is going to reduce choice and availability for consumers, unless the businesses find a workaround. I'm pretty sure they will find a workaround, and it won't be to sell at a steep loss to the same market that refused the products to begin with. But these workarounds will cost money, and consumers will pay for the fantasy that waste is being reduced.
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.
1. Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.
2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.
3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.
1. You can buy a cotton tshirt from LIDL for 3 bucks and it'll hold for years. It won't be cut perfectly or have the softest material but it's definitely not bad.
Of course, if I get it from Temu for 6 cents it'll probably fall apart in a week, but modern clothing isn't really covered by "the cheapest thing I can find".
Same for ultralight fabrics, that, while lovely in summer, usually get trashed in a season or two simply because the thing weighs fuck all.
I'd even say we're in a golden age for clothing. I can get a motorcycle jacket that can slide at 80kmh for 40 bucks with shoulder and elbow protectors and a thermo layer insert.
Cheap cotton cannot hold for years, the fiber length and yarn quality makes it simply impossible. On top of that, cheap cotton is bleached and fast dyied which makes the clothing change after few washings.
I mean if you mean "hold" like, you can't still wear it albeit it looks nothing like it did two washings before, of course it does.
But then you look exactly like what you buy, someone with worn low quality clothing which looked nice in the shop and first wear.
The 3 buck LIDL tshirt isn't really intended for casual business attire tbh.
If you want good looking (symmetrically cut, better stitched, etc) tshirts long term I then raise you Uniqlo with 7 bucks per DRY synthtic tshirt and 12 for a supima cotton one. I pretty much daily them and in over at least 3 years they haven't shown significant aging. Only the supima ones have mostly lost the "supima" text on the inside at the back of the neck area.
Comically enough I also have 3 shirts from Primark for 1$ each that are now at least 5 years old, probably more like 7 that still look fine. I still wear them to work without worry. The shaping of them was all over the place though. No two in the pile were identical.
Dying could be an issue, I wear gray and black ones so your mileage may vary with colored washing. I also don't blast them at 90 degrees C but rather 60 for black/gray, 40 for everything else.
Or your standards are just ultra high compared to mine, for better or worse. From my perspective tshirt quality ends at Uniqlo and I then go to Olympus business/casual shirts. From there the only option I have to look more businessman-y is the wool suit.
> 2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.
The market for regular second-hand clothes is on the verge of collapsing in Germany though. Charities are flooded with low quality and unsalable stuff ever since it was made illegal to throw away clothes in the regular trash. You must bring them to recycling facilities instead now. It not profitable for charities to sort through them because of the volume. There is a market for quality vintage clothes but that's a totally different thing.
> 3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.
That's probably the only thing that motivates brands not to overproduce. But lets be real, they will rather find loopholes for destroying them instead of selling them for cheap.
> Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.
Hard disagree. Live in Central Asia, buy locally produced relatively cheap clothes and they have been lasting years so far.
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.
There seems to be 3-4 other issues colluding with that. If customers prefer or can't afford new domestic clothes, then it would make it hard for a business to succeed.
a firm isn't going to sell them to reseller in the third world as it will cause brand dilution, additionally current customer base will feel shortchanged and shop elsewhere.
Much more likely is as the op said: selling to a company that will dispose of the stock.
Retailers don't want their excess inventory to be sold at a discount. They'd rather it be destroyed. A small fee to have someone else destroy it is just a business expense. The OP should have put "sell" in scare quotes.
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.
That was because you could make money by turning old things into new things. Not so with garbage disposal, a service for which you almost always have to pay.
There is already a healthy trade for second-hand clothing to 3rd world countries (see pics of kids with "<Final's losing team> World Champions 2022"). The prices will be better for brand new clothes. The gray distribution channels already exist and will readily pay for new clothes - at steep discounts, but pay for them nonetheless.
Describing it as a market is not entirely correct. The clothes these people wear are garbage. As a species, we produce more clothes than we could ever wear. I am reminded of a story of a charity that accepted clothing donations for the victims of an American hurricane, and immediately had to stop because their warehouse filled up. Many clothes are not even worn once before they're thrown away, and one of the cheaper ways to dispose of them is dumping them on 3rd worlders. It's quite dystopic really the underclasses who dig through our trash.
… and put local African cloth producers out of business. The same happened with shoes sent to African countries by NGOs. Well intentioned, but local shoe manufacturers went out of business. The local population did not really benefit, because traders would get a hold of the free shoes and sell them on for just a bit less than locally produced shoes.
I’ve heard there’s a practice of selling bundles of clothes to Africa and then the purchases pick through the bundle for what’s good and what’s useless. The impression I was left with is that this used to be more lucrative but now you’re almost as likely to get complete garbage as something good. So it’s like a sad loot box.
It's a big issue in Africa, as it completely destroyed to local clothing industry. As a side effect, you see people wearing westerner style clothing even in the midst of Africa, which is quite unsettling.
Some places sell their cardboard scrap. I'm guessing that places with the right sorts of metal scrap get paid for their waste.
And folks have to pay for much of the rest. Some of the issue with dumping waste in a business's trash is that the business pays directly for waste removal in many places, unlike a lot of private folks, which pay through taxes.
This is the current state of things. What has changed is the sort of service that they need to pay for. Instead of destruction, they'd be paying for recycling or resale. Like now, they have the option of donation or reduced prices.
Forecasting demand is hard. If you will produce less than needed you will sell less than could have sold (lost revenue) while overproducing is relatively cheap.
> b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.
The main reason unsold items are destroyed is to avoid price depression - giving unsold items for next to nothing will reduce future demand for full priced items. It's wasteful and harmful for environment but as others noted it's hard to fight with this given that destruction could be outsourced to other countries.
"financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing."
That's not how it works in practice, with the economies of scale/production it makes more economic sense to produce goods surplus to requirements then destroy remaining stock so it will not detract from/devalue sales of next/forthcoming product.
It's an old trick and applies not only to clothes but many goods. There are variations such as destroying trade-ins, used equipment etc. rather than sell it to remove it from the market (thus only new equipment is available).
Some companies took this to extremes in that they'd only rent equipment which would be withdrawn from the market and deliberately destroyed at the end of its service life so it couldn't be sold or ratted for spare parts (photocopier manufacturers were notorious for this). IBM used a cleaver approach with its computers, they'd sell off old computers as 'valuable' scrap (some parts could be still useful to others) but anything deemed as spares for their existing machines would be partially disabled (still useful but couldn't be used as a spare part). For example, they'd break the edge connectors off circuit boards but leave the electronic components intact.
They won’t “sell”. Imagine LV selling originals in Africa , Africa would immediately resell them in Europe and us and Asia for much higher price and dilute the brand. It will be officially sold to a reseller, not officially they will pay a special African company to destroy it.
So same shit as before. Slightly more expensive. No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap.
> No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap
This is just inherently incorrect. In Europe we have a load of outlet villages which is where big brands do exactly that. It’s where I do most of my shopping. Last year I bought two pairs of Nike Dunks for £25 a pop. I bought Salomon hiking shoes for £60 instead of £140. A pair of Levis 501s for £20. Just an example or my most recent purchases.
You have to pay to burn them, at home or abroad, and the cost is likely a few % of a clothing piece, where the margin is already >70%.
Tl;dr the EU will say "Mission Accomplished" because no clothing has been burned in the EU since 2026(tm), while all of the emissions are produced abroad.
The same show has been going on with industry, where the dirtiest parts are done in India or China, so that we can say that we are "clean".
The big brands should be penalized for doing the burning or destroying themselves, enforcing such destruction through contract laws or any formal communication, or even through punishment by denying future contracts.
The receiver on the other end should defect and renege on their contract and sell the goods in the open market for pennies on the dollar. While they won't be able to bring it back to western countries, they should absolutely be able to sell them locally. It should be legal for them to renege on any illegal contracts.
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.
> 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?
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.
Given how absurdly efficient shipping stuff in container ships is, I don't believe its actually worse. Specially if the company can just save money by being slightly more conservative in terms of how much they manufacture in the first place.
Sure, let's conveniently not count the horrifically-polluting trucks in <3rd world country with zero environmental regulations> to distribute them across the interior.
You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?
The point is to change what companies believe is the optimal number of products. Right now companies produce what they expect to sell, with errors in both directions being valued equally. In the future they will have to produce only what they are certain they can sell.
The point is increasing the cost of over-production. Its not about the EU knowing better, but imposing a higher price for waste. Not sure how you are confused about that.
The additional shipments aren't going to drastically go up over a few more companies throwing second hand clothing on ships. Large crate ships are relatively efficient for what they tow.
As basic napkin math, if there's 1000 cargo ships moving in and out of the EU in a year, and this law adds 10 more. That's 1% increase. It's a bigger 1%, but I wouldn't be surprised if the emissions are less than the 9% of discarded clothes talked about in the article.
I'm going to speculate that it won't "add" ships at all
As you say, ships are moving in and out of the EU each year - the question is, how many have "back loads" - if some percentage of the ships leave Europe empty to return to Asia for more manufactured goods, then it seems very likely that they can have the containers of unwanted clothes as part of the trip.
Oh cool, so I can fly commercial all I want at zero marginal CO2 emissions just because they don't have to build an extra plane just for me? I can burn that jet fuel and not feel bad because they were going to burn that gallon of fuel anyway?
Some of these arguments are so silly that I'm starting to understand why the EU thinks regulations are a free lunch to improve the environment with no costs whatsoever.
Airlines adjust capacity to demand — empty seats represent foregone revenue and future flights get cancelled or downsized.
Cargo ships don't work that way. A container ship returns to Asia whether it's carrying 1000 containers or 5000. The marginal emissions of an additional backload container are genuinely close to zero, not as a rhetorical trick but as a structural feature of how bulk shipping economics work.
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.
I live in the US, but I would hope the EU doesn't have "burn pits".
But the 3rd world country they are about to be shipped to definitely does have burn pits that will incinerate both 1) any remaining unsold inventory, and 2) the older clothes that are replaced with the fancy european stuff.
Or better yet, they'll just be thrown into the river like most other things in Africa and SE Asia...
All you're doing is outsourcing your own pollution to make yourself feel better. It's idiotic.
A lot of the apparel being destroyed is unsold inventory of up-market brands to protect their pricing power. If they shipped that to less affluent countries for destruction, it's unlikely that they'd be destroyed, because those items would fetch a good price on the black market.
This is also how plastic "recycling" goes. Stuff gets collected, sorted, baled up, and a checkmark for "this is recycled" is placed. Then it gets loaded onto a ship and exported and ends up in landfill or incinerated anyway. And every step in the chain gets a ton of money, ultimately from taxpayers.
I'm sure some plastic gets recycled / reused. But as long as it's cheaper to just produce new plastics, the problem will remain. Recycling plastic is only viable for goodwill points and marketing (e.g. if people actively seek it out) and with government subsidies or rules.
Same as when the EU puts a ton of restrictions on farmers within the EU countries -- Co2, fertiliser requirements, etc. -- making food so expensive to produce many go out of business and the remainder become practically luxury food, and then countries just end up having to import food from countries outside the EU _without_ those restrictions, simply offloading the environmental burden on "some other countries somewhere".
Food is actually pretty cheap in the EU (in absolute prices compared to the US and relative to income compared to most other places), so I don't know what you mean.
EU is a net food exporter and the only agricultural products the EU isn't self-sufficient in are animal feed, sugar, and tropical fruits & vegetables.
So, no, EU farmers are struggling at the moment because they aren't as competitive on the global markets as they used to. Not because Europeans aren't buying their food anymore.
Australia currently bans the sale of "recycling" plastic and e-waste to certain countries in South East Asia because of this problem (dumping to companies that have no qualms about throwing the waste into waterways etc)
The waste is still making its way to those countries, and the way that we know is that NGOs are tracking it[0]
I suspect that clothing will get similar treatment - initial illegal dumping as you predict, followed by determined NGOs holding the supply chain to account.
It's about maintaining exclusivity - if you sell your $100 T-shirt for $50 instead of $100, then it's a $50 T-shirt now. Even if they always cost less than $10 to make.
It's degenerate bullshit so I'm all for the EU banning it, but there is a business rationale.
I understand why a the original manufacturer might want to destroy their remaining stock to keep up an inflated perceived value. What I don't understand is why the business buying the remaining stock would want to do the same.
If this was the US, yeah I'd agree with you, but it's not. EU values the spirit of the law, which changes things drastically. Before anyone comments otherwise, please search online what spirit of the law is and how it's different from the US (I want to avoid fast answers here, enable your "thinking" functionality before answering).
I'm no expert and don't know the full extent of what's already happening and what this ban would change, but I would say there is evidence that this is already happening.
In a recent episode of Clive Myrie's African Adventure where he goes to Ghana, he "heads to one of the world’s biggest second-hand markets to meet the designers giving discarded clothes a second chance".
They show a lady that bought a "crate" of random unsold clothes for around 500 USD, and she prays before opening it hoping it will contain clothes in good condition she can resell. The show claims that on a "good day" she can make something like 50 USD on such a crate.
They also (very) briefly show a huge landfill of what appear to be discarded clothes.
Keep in mind that this is only an entertainment show, so this is most likely only the tip of the iceberg.
> manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia
Look, I fully agree with what is going to happen in reality. But isn't it a bit misleading and ironic to accuse the recipient countries as disrespecting the "rule of law", when the companies selling them there are fully/partially aware and doing business with them to bypass the exact (proposed) law being discussed? As with historic examples of waste management, recycling, etc as well, where everybody in the chain knew and wanted what was /actually/ happening.
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
Without knowing any details and thinking about this for just a min, i dont think this actually makes sense.
Most of this stuff AFAIK is destroyed to keep brand value or as the cheapest solution to oversupply.
Oversupply is less likely because it costs more, and the cost of removal now at minimum is the cost of a shipment.
For actual good clothes, the company can now decide if they want to pay more to destroy it elsewhere in an attempt to hold brand value, or simply not put in a destruction clause in the sales contract before it is shipped off and maybe make a bit of profit.
Alternative story: they take these still-perfectly-functional finished products and find other markets for them. This isn't second-hand, damaged clothing, it's unsold new product.
Have you been to a poor country? Say you'll sell a pile of clothes for a dollar. You'll have 100 people rushing in offering to buy it off you because they know they can resell it. And if it's brand name stuff, demand will be higher. That's something they could even sell to tourists.
Warehouses aren't really necessary for clothes outside of rich countries where people can afford to just throw away literal tons of it.
This is already how it works today. If there demand curve shows an increase in desire for the same items in another jurisdiction, rather then make more and ship for <x> location, they are reshipped from your geography, even store to store.
Secondly, disposal is one of two things:
1. Donation to a company that collects clothes, who in reality sell these clothes by the tonnage. Most of the clothing recyclers are companies of this nature.
> Those companies will then destroy those clothes,
I disagree. Suppose that this is even allowed, What's the incentive for these off-shore resale shops to destroy the items? Do they get paid per ton of ash produced? There is a stronger incentive to re-sell it, it'll create more economic value. I could care less if it's sold off-shore or within EU; as long as it's not being destroyed.
Why would they destroy the clothes instead of selling them to consumers? Developing countries already have huge markets for selling, altering, and repairing second-hand clothing that gets sent by thrift shops in developed countries.
If anything this would be displacing lower quality used clothing (often graphic t-shirts) that currently makes up a large part of the textile markets in developing nations.
Because at some point it becomes cheaper to ship and destroy than to store and sell.
Inventory is "dead money" in accounting books!
Money has been converted to Obtainium and Obtainium just sits there until it is converted back to (hopefully more) money, taking valuable space that could be filled with more Obtainium as soon as it goes away.
At some point that Obtainium sitting there unsold just becomes un-space and destroying it becomes the cheapest move.
The kind of clothes we're talking about are not regular clothes. It's the unsellable kind. When H&M is doing a big sale, order the clothes by price, lowest price first. You will find stuff so hideous that they can't even sell it for four bucks. That's what I would expect most of the disposed clothing to look like.
Why wouldn’t these non-EU then just sell the goods in those countries? It would mean they turn a cost (destroying) into revenue (sales).
It’s not like there isn’t already a massive industry selling counterfeit goods. So in your hypothetical scenario, if those companies are already shady then I could easily see them selling those surplus stock in the same shady markets.
Because the cost of doing business in those markets is probably more than what they could get for the product. And if they lower the price in that market, it might devalue the product line as whole and potentially causes brand damage.
The brand isn’t the one doing the business. It’s the 3rd party who we’ve already established is unscrupulous. So why should they care about the brand value?
Spitballing here, why not shred these clothes as filler for insulation instead of literally burning them? PFAS and fiber inconsistencies as these clothes are probably a hodgepodge of all sorts of chemicals, so they probably need to be characterized. I think chemical recycling is also being looked into.
Wild how random, just getting by people can manage to recycle their motor oil and try to make better choices but businesses can only do the most shitty thing possible.
I feel like you accidentally flipped a minus sign in your equations and then doubled down on your conclusions. Who would pay you to take something away and destroy it for you?
It's fine to come up with creative solutions using an LLM, but you have to apply some critical thing before throwing your weight behind the conclusions!
What's stopping the price from being extremely low? Plenty might pay $1 to take a bundle of 1000 items of clothing, pick through it and find 20 items they like, then destroy the 980 other items.
Except being destroyed locally in a controlled or regulated process and shipped to be destroyed overseas with more relaxed regulations are not equal footprint wise
980 items being shipped then destroyed versus 1000 items being destroyed.
It's 980(x+y) instead of 1000(x)
I have no knowledge of the tradeoffs, but I might also imagine that the method of destruction could be worse: incineration vs landfill vs thrown in the ocean, etc
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.
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.