Comment by dash2
11 hours ago
I don’t understand why they would ban this rather than charge for it. It seems very likely that destroying unsold clothes is sometimes the socially efficient thing to do, even after taking into account the environmental externalities.
Destroying unsold clothes is financially the most efficient thing to do. It remains unclear to me how taking actions to maintain higher markups on products would be socially efficient in any way. Companies of course can keep doing it, they just will face financial and legislative repercussions for it.
If you can't sell clothes to anyone, then it may be more socially efficient to destroy them than (a) keep them in a warehouse or (b) ship them overseas. Both (a) and (b) can have substantial environmental costs. I don't think it should be hard to come up with other plausible cases. You're assuming there's only one reason companies do this. I don't deny that that's a possible reason. I also don't see why taxing that behaviour would not reduce it.
Or (c) lower the price to the market clearing price point and your clothes will be gone.
4 replies →
How do you know the "social value" is real value if you ignore the market?
That was my initial thought too; just make it a non-deductible charge, ideally, payable from executive compensation.
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.
Because it promotes recycling instead of being another tax.
Recycling an object almost always means destroying it.
A tax would also promote recycling, since that would avoid the tax?
How's that different to current asking for recycling and fining on incompliance?