Comment by miki123211
11 days ago
Here's how this law is actually going to work.
Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2.
The disclosure paperwork and the s/contracts/bribes/ needed to do this will also serve as a nice deterrent for anybody trying to compete with H&M.
"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).
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"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 believe we (the citizens of EU) deserve better
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.
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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.
In fact, there is precedent for this kind of thing too.
Plastic used to be shipped to china and burned there, until china decided to stop accepting everyone else's trash
bad guys do bad things and will try to get around these laws.... so we shouldn't have laws and should just let bad guys be bad.
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...
"...it literally costs less to make surplus items than to scrap them."
Right, my rhetorical point somewhat expanded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031527
"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.
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> 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.
Is Europe punishing these companies when they get discovered?
> 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 :(
Its the invisible hand of harvard MBAs at work.
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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.
This is a fantasy.
No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.
So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.
lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now. It took China putting on regulations on their side to disrupt that industry. Now you have to find other smaller economies to do that.
You appear to be agreeing with the person you’re replying to.
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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.
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.
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Both of those situations sound like a net win.
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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.
How is achieving the exact goal 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.
> A small fee to have someone else destroy
They just write it off, Jerry.
All these big companies, they write off everything.
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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.
clothes is plastics waste
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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.
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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.
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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.
> 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.
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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".
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.
At least that's how I see it.
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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?
Which is why this scenario won’t ever happen.
They would destroy clothing because it is not sold. This already happens to second hand clothing that is shipped to Africa. Part of it is sold, part of it is dumped. This is well documented.
If part of it is sold, isn't it better than if it had all been destroyed? It's literally what that law is for.
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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.
Ok, let's say that happens. Seems like a net win over throwing all of them in a burn pit.
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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".
It's a farse.
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.
You're not contradicting me. Read it again.
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.
Now why do you think they’re not competitive? Think about this more than one layer.
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.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-30/gps-in-e-waste-from-a...
Regardless of whether they respect the law, why would a business pay for goods just to destroy them? How does that make money?
And if they're NOT destroying the goods but are instead using them, then the law is doing exactly what it is intended to.
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.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002q72g
>Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
Until one of them gets the bright idea to resell the clothes, which should take all of 30 seconds.
Your theory presumes the existence of a sketchy african company which will nonetheless remain scrupulously honest.
> 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.
> Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
This isn’t going to happen. But if it did, they would 100% sell them in local markets, not destroy them.
Yea, I'm not sure I understand how destroying the items would benefit these "resellers" ? What's in it for them?
They don't have to pay to warehouse them or maintain a storefront. Space and people aren't free.
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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.
2. Sale at a low value to the company above.
> 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.
But what about ship and sell? That's what I'm talking about. Storage is very cheap in developing countries.
My hope for more reasonable pricing so they sell all units is then perhaps naive?
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.
Then maybe this will make it more expensive for them to do that (which would be good because it's a bad thing to have been doing)
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.
Modern insulation is likely several times more efficient (R-value) than shredded polyester and cotton.
It seems like your view boils down to “why bother trying to regulate businesses when they’ll just be evil anyway?”
Well, they’re guaranteed to be evil without regulations.
Any flaws with the regulation can be worked out and adjusted in the future. These things are not set in stone forever.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/chile...
>Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
I think those companies might just actually sell them, and report to the company is being destroyed.
> Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe,
they are already being sent to Chile or Ghana to be destroyed there.
Even if this is how it goes, it's a good first step that just needs a follow up with sanctions and fines if they cheat on the spirit of the rule
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.
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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.
Isn't that still better than it all getting destroyed?
Also if someone is buying new goods for pennies on the dollar, I'd expect them to find some value in more than 2% of the stock.
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sounds like an improvement on the current system, no?
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Or they could sell them in Africa, driving local producers out of business
We should not have rules because bad people will break them absurd.
H&M is great though, why the shade?
What is going to happen is that what is left of European manufacturers in the sector are going to move production and warehouses abroad, and from there they will move to EU only about what they need. They will continue to operate as they used to, the only difference being less business (and less jobs) being done in EU.
cheap clothing is for the vast, vast majority not done in the EU, so this does not matter.
But also, this regulation applies to the company _selling them to customers_, so it's completely irrelevant.