Comment by whateverboat
10 days ago
Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.
10 days ago
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.
So this law might significantly increase the fraction of good quality clothes that shelters get, which would be a good thing?
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.
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...)
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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.
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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
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
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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.
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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.
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donations are just an excuse to dump them on poor countries