Comment by IneffablePigeon
17 hours ago
The result of laws like this is not that the store will never buy too much, it’s that when they do buy too much they will give it away to somewhere it can be used instead of destroying it. It will not cost them much if any more to simply give things to food banks or charity shops.
It in fact does cost them more to give things than to destroy them.
... and it costs society more to process the destroyed waste, and it costs society more to then deal with the fallout of shelters not having enough clothes.
Or not. Who knows. The point is, this 'economically it is more efficient' is not a proven case because the externalities need to be taken into account, and so far the person I've been responding to seems to not understand this part, or is ignoring it.
The waste is relatively inexpensive and already being paid for.
I'm not sure everyone in the conversation is understanding each other. Saying the waste is pointless implies to me that it has no value, that companies could eliminate it with small costs and no other tradeoffs and they just don't want to bother. That's not accurate; a system with no oversupply is necessarily a system with fewer choices and more shortages.
The tradeoff may be worth it in some contexts, but if you don't understand that there are tradeoffs, you're going end up proposing silly policies like the original commenter's idea that nobody should ever be allowed to destroy any object a consumer could use.
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It's not so easy to give things away at scale. If someone deposited 500 kilograms of assorted meat products outside your front door right now, with a note attached saying they need to be consumed or frozen in the next 24 hours or they'll go bad, how much work would it take for you to deal with that?
Clothing is of course a bit easier to deal with (it'll still grow mildew if you don't protect it from moisture!), but the source link explicitly anticipates there will be some circumstances where it's impossible to give away clothing and authorizes destruction in that case.
Is that scenario supposed to be relevant?
This isn't some random guy. Their entire job is dealing with the logistics of big piles of clothes, and they have months in advance to plan.
There just aren't that many people in developed countries who can make use of a pallet of unsellable clothing. Even free clothing distributors - which most organizations accepting clothing donations are not, by the way - generally strive to provide a broad selection of desirable clothing rather than a bunch of copies of an unpopular shirt.
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