Comment by motbus3

> 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.

"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.

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 I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.

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 would any species take effort to [...]

Because Market Forces said so :(

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's not really true.

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.

> a) not over produce

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.

>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.

I think now the incentive is to produce less.

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.

You are right. What will happen is somebody will pay “x” for the clothing, but the same company will charge “2x” for transport.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yea, I'm not sure I understand how destroying the items would benefit these "resellers" ? What's in it for them?

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.

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.

Modern insulation is likely several times more efficient (R-value) than shredded polyester and cotton.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

We all have in Europe and the US - but it too is a sign of harsh climate change, because the reason it is cold "down here" on our latitudes is that the arctic is super hot, pushing the cold down to us.

It has been brutal, and very cold, and we have not seen the sun. Send help!

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.

Unless you're in a dense urban area, the effect of your air conditioners on neighboring houses is negligible. There's so much other thermal reservoirs around (like the ground and plants) as well as circulation from the wind that the extra heat from the air conditioner has only a small effect on the environment.

Compare the volume of your house to the volume of area around your house (including several hundred feet vertically, since that is easily part of the circulation). If you're cooling your house 20 degrees then that would correspond to heating an area 20x the size by 1 degree. How many times bigger is the circulating area around your house (100x? 1000x?)?

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.

>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.

This is a certainty.

Scientists have been ringing the bell since at least the late 60's and our only reaction was to laugh at them and floor the accelerator pedal and continuously increase our emissions over 5 decades. It is unlikely to change with the AI boom.

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Climate change will probably solve itself within 10 years due to exponential growth of solar panels, batteries and electric cars.

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.

This isn't exactly a supply and demand situation that might cause prices to increase by restricting supply, like what you sometimes see with global commodity cartels such as oil.

What's happening in this case is that they are overproducing because profit margins are high enough that they can overproduce and still be happy with the profit after discarding the extra, in the hope of capturing the stochastic upside of extra sales from never being out of stock.

This might cause various random fast fashion junk items to occasionally go out of stock when they wouldn't have in the past, but it's not like you're going to see long waiting lists or high aftermarket prices. People just won't buy that stuff because there will be lots of alternatives, are they just won't buy anything at all and realize they don't need it.

So yes, in an abstract textbook sense, the price might go up in the sense that you might experience some probability of your desired items selling out when that probability was lowered before. But I don't think anybody in their right mind would argue that's a serious economic detriment.

Maybe there's a case to be made that this is a crude way to address what is essentially an allocation failure. But that alone doesn't mean that we shouldn't try it or that it's bad policy.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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Where are the 8% annual returns going to come from to pay for all the defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare plans?

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.

> 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.

By sustainable I mean its impact on the environment, animals and humans. I don't mean how profitable or easy it is.

Rabbit is one of the most sustainable livestock. It requires less food to produce more rabbits and they don't need much land. A single female produces ~50 kits per season, taking 8-12 weeks to come to market. Ironically, they aren't considered livestock by USDA, so you can skip most of the red tape. As far as feed goes, there are many options that will depend on the farmer; pelleted feed is the best but most costly, so you can mix in either foraging or supplement with various other feeds like different hays, oats, etc. Whether it's economical depends on a number of factors, but there's over 3,000 rabbit farms in USA right now.

Same with goats, very sustainable. In many places like islands, goat is the preferred livestock as it requires less land and feed. And obviously you can forage goats in places most animals won't since they'll eat nearly any plants.

Pigs (and other livestock) historically were raised through the year and only slaughtered in winter. It's the last 100 years that has completely changed how and when people in the West eat meat, people's assumptions about how we must farm, how we must eat, etc. Our diets don't have to remain the way we are. For example, since Chinese people prefer to eat pork, they actually have half the world's pig livestock. We like beef so we have a lot of cows. It could've been reversed if our cultural tastes were different. Similarly, we could just eat less meat, and our tastes would develop towards the whole universe of non-meat foods.

Pigs are huge blobs of meat.

Families would raise one pig they would slaughter once a year and it would be a regular source of preserved meat and fat over the following year.

All of this was pre "green" revolution so it has to be carbon neutral at that level of consumption(which is admittedly lower than that of most people these days).

Eating meat once a year is an exaggeration when it comes to pork.

They’re not and the idea cows are environmentally unsound or a bad use of resources doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.

50% discounts on technical stuff are basically only the very last ones that are unlikely to be your size. Real world, you're not likely to do better than 20% off. It's in the manufacturer's interest that I know it's unlikely I can find a better sale.

Note that I'm talking technical stuff, not designer stuff.

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...

Deflationary currency is like a highway that you're allowed to park on. People will park their car on the highways and then charge you a fee to let you through.

>Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary.

Uhm, if money is deflationary, your house will be worth less than X denominated in the deflationary currency. This means if the money grows in value faster you'd sell all your assets as quickly as possible and replace it with a useless scrap of paper.

>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.

Again, if money is deflationary, you'd hold onto money and wait for house prices to drop with the aforementioned mechanic.

You might say this is appealing, but the problem is that your income depends on other people's spending and they have the same incentive as you do, which is to earn more than you spend. That's something that is not possible in aggregate, where total aggregate spending and total aggregate income must always be equal. This is a zero sum game purely mathematically and this is not a moral judgement but an explanation how the rules work.

When people follow the rules of the game, something weird happens. The promised outcome of a wealthy society from everyone being prudent savers doesn't emerge. The reason is as follows: If you have 1 million paper notes that represent the wealth of the entire nation and the value of the paper notes goes up, the represented wealth of the entire nation goes up, but the nation still has the same 1 million paper notes. No matter how much value people try to save in the form of money, they will still only have paper notes.

Those paper notes do not have intrinsic value and that is for a good reason. Giving the paper notes intrinsic value doesn't change the fundamentals, it just makes the tokens more expensive to produce. It's like having a golden toilet.

If money is worthless, then trying to give it non-transient value is a fools errand. Trying to say that a house is equally as valuable as a small bundle of cotton fabric is only acceptable for the purposes of accounting, but saying that the same bundle of cotton fabric (whose value is decreed) ought to buy more house next year is batshit insane. You couldn't come up with a better system to reward laziness and idleness.

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.

Where’s that, out of curiosity?

There's no way to perfectly forecast demand; all things equal I'd prefer that companies overproduce and we live in an age of plenty with a bit of waste (which companies are already incentivized to avoid), rather than face shortages in goods.

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.

I don't think this forum has significant costs of running, especially considering it is not in development.

It didn’t use to be this way but through evaporative cooling, most of the founder types stopped posting here.

Socialism never took off in America because Americans know that disincentivizing work shrinks the economy and makes everyone poorer.

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.

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.

What landfill doesn't charge fees?