Comment by sajithdilshan
16 hours ago
I’m pretty sure all those brands would now export those clothes to non-EU Balkan countries or even Turkey to be destroyed.
16 hours ago
I’m pretty sure all those brands would now export those clothes to non-EU Balkan countries or even Turkey to be destroyed.
Why do you assume that the entire EU has brain damage and did not think of this _most obvious_ loophole? Sure the companies could commit crimes but if that is enough of a reason not to pass laws then we better start striking murder of the books as well.
The EU cannot control every avenue you might be sneaking products out for destruction. The goal is not to prevent all sort of destruction, just make it risky enough not to be worth it: Since it's illegal to do, you now have something to fear when you try to get away with your (now) crime.
ESPR regulates the entire placement of products, not only the destruction, e.g. the Digital Product Passport (DPP) which every product has to have (it's slowly being phased in over the coming decade) gives information about repairability, resource used, recyclability,... To do the exporting for destruction you would need to fake the entire paper trail of the product, committing countless numbers of document forgery.
In general the "you are not allowed to destroy unsold goods" part is arguably the small element of ESPR. ESPR also contains the right-to-repair legislation, where ESPR introduces requirements (or at the very least disclosure requirements) for - Design for durability - Availability of spare parts - Access to repair information - Software support obligations - Design for repairability / Restricting design practices intended to hinder repair
The "don't destroy working items" is just a one component of this. The more important component is the DPP which makes the product lifetime traceable.
Because it happens with other things like recycling rules for most trash? How many years of EU exporting trash to places without regulation now?
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Indeed. Rather than deal with it, there will just be some shell company in non EU they can export to and have it destroyed there...
Though that will obviously incur a larger cost than today.
Transportation would be costly, but it could be that in whole it would be much cheaper than discarding them in let’s say in Germany. I can imagine the price to destroy 1kg of clothes in Serbia way less than in Germany
What typically happens is that people buy up these clothes in massive auction/lots, then just sell them on Amazon. As Amazon joins all listings together, 100 sellers of the same item all have the same reviews/etc.
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...
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Or perpetually store it in an "open warehouse" where it rots over time.
Sounds like a lot of extra work which will make this kind of behaviour less financially viable vs. just selling or overproducing it.
The EU is doing everything it can to fail. The only thing that seems to be coming out of the EU in the last 20 years is regulation. It seems to be its only invention and contribution to itself. They have no upper bounds on creativity when it comes to creating rules that disrupt business.
I can't tell if this is coming from jealousy or incompetence—or perhaps a combination of both. They see the rest of the world, especially the United States and China, getting richer and more advanced, and their response seems to be to shield themselves from it instead of competing.
Volkswagen in Germany is going to lay off 100,000 jobs and shutter plants. Half of the EU is recklessly in debt. And Germany is supposed to be the good country with the good economy.
You're arguing in favor of destroying unworn clothes instead of donating to charity or discounting them as somehow being good for business? The point of this is to control against wasteful business practices, not a ban on producing or selling clothes.
The EU is a $23 trillion economy, hardly a slouch even though it is underperforming.
The VW example is actually something you probably don't understand - they're failing because they're an inefficient business, not because of EU regulations or Germany not having a "good economy". Toyota produces almost twice as many vehicles per employee.
I wouldn't even say that VW is a failing company: They sold the largest number of EVs in the EU in 2025 (https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-brand-domi...) and that is before you consider that e.g. Audi, Cupra and Skoda are _also_ VW brands (and some of the ford cars are built on top of VW's EV platform).
The main problem they have is that you just need a fraction of the number of people to build an electric car than what you need for a combustion car. You no longer need complex transmission, exhaust filtering, turbos, highly complex combustion engines,... all of which are marvels of engineering but no longer necessary for EVs. VW "main" (i.e. excluding sub-brands like audi) was already rather highly staffed (though part of this is due to them taking over some duties for their sub-brands), so the employee impact is higher than what you would expect, but even for a reasonably staffed car company this would imply huge layoffs and changes in the structure of the company.
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the quote: "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" is something that the regulators have never heard.
What they see is people burning clothes and they say "we can't do that". The result won't be that these clothes will somehow be put back on people, clearly that's not economical or this wouldn't be a problem.
Instead, they'll be put on ships and burned elsewhere, or buried, or something even worse.
I agree that VW is mostly responsible for its own demise, they got too comfortable with their success and soon would be the blackberry of car manufacturers.
In the last 20 years, the EU has grown about %1.5. In 2005, the EU accounted for 25% of the global GDP. Now it's about 17%.
GDP per capita in the United States is about twice of Europeans. 85k per capital in the US, vs 43k in the EU.
The only tech companies I can think of in Europe are Spotify and Umm.. sure there are others..
One brightside is Sweden who has decided to embrace capitalism and has turned themselves around.
Neat info. I would guess that Toyota produces twice as many vehicles per employee at least in part because the regulatory and social environment where Toyota operates is better.
There is often an underlying sensible economic reason for doing things like destroying perfectly wearable shoes or burning edible crops. Understanding involves admitting things people don't want to admit to themselves.
Nike destroying shoes: the shoes they make are just cheap synthetics and foam, and the per-pair materials and manufacturing cost is a small part of the cost of the shoes. Nike is a marketing company that sorta does shoes. The shoes themselves aren't a very important part of the value they provide to people who buy their shoes. People who buy their shoes are buying a social signal about who they are and how much money they have that doesn't work if the shoes are too cheap.
This is some top-tier bait