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Discussion (128 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I wonder if anybody is keeping track of everything a mid size business needs to take care of. Each particular report probably sounds like a reasonable request, but by now they're probably well into hundreds, and they're all outside the actual scope of the business (e.g. it may seem manageable for the bureaucrats designing them, because that's what they deal with all day, but not for a small organization doing... something else).
Though that will obviously incur a larger cost than today.
So some slightly damaged shirt, or a shirt returned and such, ends up sold by these secondary sellers as new. This is part of why people destroy clothes upon return, so that secondary sellers can't buy their own returned product at $1, and sell it making more than the original seller would have.
Not to mention, all returns I've been noticing, resold from Amazon, are heavily treated now with some sort of spray. I can only presume bedbugs were getting returned with used clothing...
No say you estimate that you will sell 10 items of "less common size", you stock 10 items, and hope that you sell all of them. You end up selling 9, you have a remaining 10%.
How does that make a difference?
A key insight is that what constitutes an "unpopular size" is a very local phenomenon. Every point of retail sells a different, semi-predictable distribution of sizes. It is much cheaper to ship sizes no one will buy than to manage the logistics of exactly matching local demand for a specific distribution of sizes.
I asked the same question to someone who works in this business and got an eye-opening detailed explanation that made it obvious in hindsight why things the work the way the do. The difference in product cost and logistics infrastructure was not small.
That really only applies to luxury designer brands where selling at a discount can dilute the brand prestige, is Gucci, Versace, etc. really destroying unsold inventory at large volumes vs. standard retailers?
For a high-end designer dress, may be better to not manufacture large or small sizes that don't sell frequently.
Or they could also just levy higher taxes/fees on synthetic fibers and clothing that cannot be repaired (there are several reasons), and at the same time support the industry for natural, truly biodegradable fibers and their research?
This seems like more ivory tower navel gazing.
And that doesn’t even touch on all the jurisdictional and financial shenanigans that immediately come to my mind how you can circumvent that.
Government legislatures really should have red team groups that have to be included in legislative processes with the objective of punching holes into legislation.
Nike's unsold, defective, or returned shoes are ground up to make carpet padding. They're processed by the truckload in a large grinding machine.
It seems that under these rules, this would be illegal - ?
The law reduces wasted production inputs — materials, energy, and labor — as well as production outputs — wearable shoes, here. This directly regulates a practice by brands where they destroy wearable clothing rather than see their latest branded fashion worn by people who bought it at a discount or received it for free. This also directly regulates corporations from using grinders, melters, incinerators, landfills, and overseas ‘recycling’ (=landfills) to replace warehouses with retailers, accelerate product cycle times and derive FOMO sales benefits without the cost of reducing their batch sizes. The apparel industry is destroying something like one third of what it produces, so it’s certainly earned regulation of its ‘this shall not be sold’ decisions to its disfavor.
I would expect Nike in the EU market to either increase product prices and/or decrease release intervals until their inventory supply is lowered to meet demand while claiming that it’s the EU’s fault that their hottest shoes aren’t yet available, rather than maintaining their existing cycle times and quantities by donating their wearable, branded, wealth-signaling shoes to be worn by poor people. (Perhaps that’s already begun?)
As far as I can tell (although I'm no lawyer, sorry Nike), the point is to reduce waste and to increase recycled content in use. With these two main objectives, what Nike is doing seem to be fitting within that. It's not the "destruction" itself that is bad, but what you do with that after the destruction, recycling it doesn't create waste (or maybe, as much waste) as outright destroying+throwing all of it.
Down-cycling is a thing. Even aluminum and steel get down-cycled.
I have no sympathy for recycling fetishism.
> The concept of destruction as outlined in this Regulation should cover the last three activities on the waste hierarchy, namely recycling, other recovery and disposal. Preparation for reuse, including refurbishment and remanufacturing, should not be considered destruction. Preventing destruction will reduce the environmental impact of those products by reducing the generation of waste and by disincentivising overproduction.
Basically, does it end up as waste or does it end up being repurposed? If the former, we should find a way of getting rid of it, if it's the latter, it's A-OK!
Downcycling is when you reuse something for a less refined purpose. For instance you can use contaminated plastics (im the sense of somewhat mixed types, bits and bobs of labels etc) to make humble park benches, but you won't be then reusing that low grade park bench plastic to make the Hubble space telescope with.
Still, downcycling into carpet is better than dumping the shoes on a coral atoll of course. Yet it's a step below recycling.
At a nearby whole foods a large portion of produce goes to waste. It's heartbreaking to see.
There's was uptick around this story 4 months ago, so I'm not sure if those were bots resurfacing it or whether something changed in the law.
The cafe at the bottom of my street has roughly that amount of waste collected every 2 weeks - they fill their commercial trash bin every 2 days. I don’t know how much of that is waste vs old food but they generate orders of magnitude more waste than I do even when I’m making a huge mess.
Very interesting point of view, as someone who never done a home remodel, it surely brought a new perspective for me.
> That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing.
I'm not sure, if you have two kids who are into trendy clothing and you're able to let them make choices around clothing, then I can imagine that there is quite high turnover on those things.
Besides, the proposed rules seems to try to address waste generated by businesses rather than individuals or families. I guess currently they throw outdated clothing in order to make space for the new clothing lines?
High margin industries get more complicated to model, of course.
But I also feel like it’s a bit besides the point. Seeing pallet after pallet of perfumes getting destroyed every month should be an indication that something is not right.
In fast fashion you're shipping a knock-off of the $8000 designer swimsuit seen in a Paris catwalk show at the start of July, a preview of your $150 version was shown in a TikTok video that blew up on Friday and your customers will be wearing them on the beach next weekend. By August that product is old news, you do not want that $150 product available for $5 in a discount store or your consumers might rebel - so you want to burn it instead and the EU says no, that's a perfectly good swimsuit, sell it to somebody who needs a swimsuit. Or give it away.
If "fast fashion" no longer makes economic sense now, too bad, I guess you won't do it any more. The EU's citizens do not want you to destroy the planet they live on just to get more money. We made money up. Stop being crazy.
While living there the system changed from paying for a disposal service to pre-buying special bags that cost around 2.50chf per 35L bag. The French family moved back to France within a couple of months.
basically
- company cheap mass produces clothes/shoes
- new session (1/4 year) comes in (at beast)// it's fast fashion and there is a new trend (at worst)
- the "old" clothes are sold with rabatt but either before the session end or limited to clothes already shipped to stores
- this leaves a ton of clothes not shipped to physical shops and not sold in time
- selling them very strongly discounted means they compete with the new batch of different clothes, not discounting them means they might block up store space (physical store) or storage space (online shop, storage cost at scale shouldn't be underestimated, especially if some clothes just don't sell)
- so companies just destroy the unsold clothes _and write the production cost off as loss_. Turns out destroying + write off is more profitable then gifting or discounting... :(
- this is especially true for brand-clothes. They are often produced for a fraction of sales price and don't want to see their stuff being sold for more then a small discount. For some of this brand clothes their values outright lies more in "you needed to pay a bunch for it" then it "being high quality" (beyond a certain baseline of quality).
now the relevant question: Will this prevent companies from finding loopholes to still trash their clothes, especially brand clothes?
Yes it won't prevent it. But it increases the cost/complexity of it so it will likely reduce it by quite a bit. But some big next "<brand still dumps clothes through loophole>" scandal is basically just a question of time.
Still overall it looks like it will be beneficial from a wast, environment and climate POV while harming (way too) fast fashion which is good as fast fashion is harmful for all the previous points, laborer treatment, cloth quality and some others.
i think it should be expanded to cover more categories than food and clothes when reuse and recycling infra grows to take the demand. its not just good for the environment it also prevents producers from restricting supply to keep their profits high.
the ultimate goal is make it illegal to destroy or intentionally damage anything usable before it reaches consumers. that would create a new ecosystem of discount stores and giveaway centers, and save everyone a ton of money.
If those costs are paid for by taxpayers then the consumers are in effect involuntarily buying products they would not have otherwise bought, just with more steps. We already see this with agricultural subsidies.
If those costs are charged back to the producer then it becomes economically optimal to under-produce, which will cause prices to rise and risk shortages but eliminate waste. One can make the argument that higher prices for basic goods to reduce waste is a social good but it also impoverishes consumers.
All of these scenarios have happened empirically countless times. That almost every producer over-produces to some extent at no profit to themselves when allowed has strong "Chesterton's Fence" characteristics.
What you've said is: Looking only at the internalized costs, pointless-wasting a percentage of clothes costs X but reduces clothes cost in the store by Y, with Y being larger than X.
Okay. Irrelevant - that math doesn't include externalized costs. It may well be that this is a stupid idea, but "market decided destroying some clothes was more efficient" doesn't prove anything unless you can show that the size of the externalized costs to this process are 0 or close enough to 0 to have no meaningful relevance.
All the examples I know of (Austria, Switzerland) are social clubs/associations (whatever that is called) and DO NOT depend on tax payer money.
https://changingmarkets.org/report/trashion-the-stealth-expo...
And it's not just old clothes being discarded, another related study showed that around 30% of clothes returned from online stores are not even looked over to see if they're worth selling again and are discarded straight away.
https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/...
We really have to get away from the idea that curtailing intentional industrial waste production is futile. Perhaps in American style capitalism it is because the system is rigged and the biggest money bag always wins. But we don't want this here at all.
We have to get forward as humanity and treat our planet with respect. Otherwise we won't have one worth living on. Making money isn't the only thing that counts.
2. do a bunch of studies to validate it
3. go through a pretty complicated, comprehensive, pretty long review process to debate and make it work within the existing regulatory system
4. eventually implement it
5. measure its impact
6. adapt or revoke according to the results
We are at the 4th step. Why would you assume your concerns haven’t been already taken in account in all the previous steps? It’s all public, you can look for the reasoning and justification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
1. This only applies to companies above a certain size.
2. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of textiles are destroyed each year in the EU before use.
3. In Germany alone, companies destroy tens of millions of garments per year under just one of the existing justifications for destroying garments before use.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
[0] Better link: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/jul/24/made-in-ital...
Yes.
It hurts brand perception.
Let's say you have some bruised bananas. You either have to keep them on the shelf till they rot (less space for sellable product) or donate them and then people won't buy as many bananas, so you need to raise the price.
The state of perishable goods is much worse. A lot is dumped in food and short shelf-life items. Nothing can be done here. This is not even a brand issue.
Do not give license to industrial production or imports that far exceeds the needs of people in that region.
That’s already regulated in multiple countries
And the more recent non-food waste ban follow-up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Waste_and_Circular_Econom...