Comment by radu_floricica
15 hours ago
> To prevent misuse, businesses relying on these exemptions must provide proof (e.g. documents or test results) and publish annual reports on what they have discarded.
I wonder if anybody is keeping track of everything a mid size business needs to take care of. Each particular report probably sounds like a reasonable request, but by now they're probably well into hundreds, and they're all outside the actual scope of the business (e.g. it may seem manageable for the bureaucrats designing them, because that's what they deal with all day, but not for a small organization doing... something else).
This whole story that Europe suffers from overregulation is just in parts true, and mainly lazy thinking.
In fact there was a study by an American law school that came to the conclusion that the US has more bureaucracy than many European countries…
Recommended read: https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/04/the-lazy-myth-that...
I don't really find this article persuasive. To pick out a good example of why:
> The debate around chlorinated chicken was never really just about chicken. It became a symbol of something larger: the fear that “market access” would become a polite way of saying, “please lower your food and safety standards so our companies can sell more easily into your market.” You can dismiss that as protectionism if you like. From a European perspective, it often looks like defending standards that citizens broadly trust.
Chemical washing of chicken is a safe and effective way to reduce pathogens. European food agencies agree that it's safe and effective, there's really no dispute about this, and in the US that's the end of the regulatory story. But in Europe the regulators see it as their job to consider esoteric second order effects: if we make it too easy to clean your chicken meat, might that cause you to underinvest in efforts to keep pathogens from getting there in the first place? It might, and the status quo achieves acceptably low rates of foodborne illness, so there's no need to permit innovations in chicken processing.
It's true, I would concede, that regulatory agencies requiring businesses to do stuff in a way that citizens consider normal will produce strong standards that citizens broadly trust.
> Chemical washing of chicken is a safe and effective way to reduce pathogens.
This is actually somewhat controversial. It definitely messes with standard in vitro bacteria counts. However, there's some evidence that this is more a measurement problem than anything else (for instance https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/26/chicken-health...).
Salmonella's particularly problematic here because for many strains the infectious dose is _tiny_, potentially as low as 1000 bacteria.
> But in Europe the regulators see it as their job to consider esoteric second order effects
That’s seems like a thing I want a regulator to do. A regulator making decisions only on first order effects seems doomed to fail.
I have lived both in the US and two European countries. Food quality is not even on the same scale. So much better in Europe, you can’t even compare, no wonder life expectancy is higher.
Europe may get some things wrong, but in comparison to United States on food, they don’t, particularly eggs, chickens and baked goods, America allows to many substitutions for expediency (profit).
You haven’t dealt with German bureaucracy then.
> You haven’t dealt with German bureaucracy then.
‘Europe’ is not substitutable by ‘Germany’: a one state counter-example does not substantiate a disproof of a union. Texas is not representative of how U.S. patent law works. Florida is not representative of how U.S. business regulation works. So, the recent HN post about German incorporation slowness fails, in isolation, to disprove the claim above that the US is more regulated than the EU; you’ll need to make your own case (or relevant citations!) about the EU (or Europe) rather than just Germany to be taken seriously here. Do you argue that “many” is the minority case out of all European countries? Are you evaluating difficulty weighted by GDP? Are you evaluating EU and non-EU together or separately? etc.
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Spoken as a German or as an American?
Mandatory testosterone testing!
At the end of the day people want to impose their morality on on others. Whether it is crazy Christians or leftist eco warriors- don't let them take away your freedom. Keep on buying shit from China.
I'm not sure your complaint works in this case.
You only write a report if you want the exemption.
The hypothetical business you're imaging shouldn't be looking for an exemption.
The law's effect on small business is conceptually not too different from eg laws against dumping toxic sludge.
You have to deal with this no matter what unless you can live with wasting storage space. You have to arrange extra sales or try and donate stuff (basically, go through all possible options that exclude it from being exempted) if you want to get rid of an item. Your estimates on sales count need to be pretty spot on to keep that low. Donations are still taxable where I live, by the way, so all that shenanigans is added too. It's not just about the report itself. You can't get rid of products not valuable enough to keep around without adapting your whole business model. Even if you are _not_ looking for an exemption, you will have to accommodate.
No one bothered to make any of the other options easier, only the previously simplest option was barred behind trying everything else. This is what over-bureaucratization looks like.
To use a different example: No one wants to switch to public transport (which is already crowded anyway)? No problem, just ban driving unless you can prove that it's orders of magnitude faster and it's not feasible to move your residence. No further preparation is done; no thought goes beyond the horizon. "Eat this rule and deal with it, you don't have to deal with the paperwork if you're willing to spend 2 hours more on commuting". That's the line of thought here. There are no plans to make it actually viable to use the train, the other options are just barred behind this veil of plausible optionality. You can do it, of course. The issue arises from doing this with literally anything you tackle.
You essentially only add rules and special cases without ever consolidating them or even considering possible impact on adjacent topics. Everything grinds to a halt by doing this and nothing ever gets simplified. It is a huge issue on a landscape that favored small businesses (that can't afford divisions dealing with this) when the way the law is written suddenly requires structures only big companies or consultancies can provide. It entombs the market structure and drowns any competition in regulatory capture. We haven't even seen what happens once the markets are dominated by oligopolies and monopolies. By that time the only way to deal with the fall out will be even more rules, as the competitive landscape will already be dead.
I'm not against the goal of this regulation, but the recent way the rules have been made favor a market structure I consider incompatible with the goals of the EU.
Per the OP article, this only affects large businesses (and medium businesses after a period of years).
At minimum, any medium business will be tracking disposal costs in its accounting books; the EU rule effectively taxes disposal by imposing regulatory processes upon it, so the net cost of disposal will increase to reflect the paper trail costs. The phased-in ‘large first, medium next’ started a while ago, giving mediums about twice as long (iirc?) to prepare for compliance as larges. One of the more predictable outcomes is that retailers will need to inspect and classify their completed-product waste streams, rather than simply dump every return bucket into the trash. Retailers are expected to do everything in their power to reduce the total volume of material inspected in order to increase profits, which in concert with stricter return regulations already in place, will force them to do various things.
Small retailers that process returns by taking the item out of the envelope, studying it, and then putting it back up for sale (either at full or reduced price, depending on new or cosmetic defect) will be entirely unaffected because their production costs vastly exceed their return inspection costs and they’ve been recording ‘sellable’ vs ‘worn’ vs ‘cosmetic defect’ somewhere this whole time anyways (or else they’d collapse even without these regulations!), and medium businesses will likely find their profits temporarily reduced — but since they were disposing of sellable products to begin with, they can either sell them to recover profits, donate them to reduce taxes, or accept the fractional inspection charge against profits and continue as-is.
Some possibilities: Reduce production defects (slower production/qa times), return rate), Reduce size variability (slower production/qa times), Improve fabric quality (higher production costs, lower future sales), Provide more detailed sizing charts (higher sales cost, lower return rates), Provide more consistent sizing (eg. band size 85 is not 80-90cm between different models and different brands), Reduce production batch sizes (less waste, more shipping costs), Reduce overseas manufacturing (higher cost production, lower cost/time shipping), Sell entire batches until sold out (increased inventory costs, maintains brand wealth-image), Donate wearable clothing to charity (tax deductions, goodwill), Switch from overseas large-batch production to domestic JIT (reduces inventory of never-sold products to zero), and so on.
As a mid sized business in touch with other mid-sized businesses - the burden you speak of doesn't exist. If you read the directive and others like it carefully, you will find they’re well integrated into reporting you already do. Each member state also adapts these to best fit their local legislation.
> but not for a small organization doing... something else
But for you to do your "small organization", shouldn't you be required to have to consider the environment around you?
A bar of course doesn't want to care about the noise the patrons do on the terrace for example, but because we live in the world with other people, they do have to care about this, even if it's "something else" than what they want to do.
Or data centers as another (maybe more contemporary) example, where sometimes they have things that needs to be disposed of in a certain way. Yes, the data center operators aren't in the business of "toxic waste management", but if you want to run a data center, you need to figure out how to deal with the byproducts.
I don't think clothing companies should somehow be magically excepted from having to care about others.
Socialist micromanaging you say? You should see what those maniacs do with there farmers. The job has literally turned into bureaucrat who ocassionally works a field as hobby.
Well yes, farming in European Union is pretty much eu-funded hobby. For good reasons of course (food security etc), but if European protectionism and donations were gone, farmers would be much worse off.
You still dont get the realities of climate change, do you? The world you want centralize micromanaged for the greater good, is going into locally different wild swings preventing local production of goods if not adapting and improvising locally on a add hoc basis. This is a starvation machine on which poorer parts of the world depend, disguised as a park management.
Most of the EU budget goes to agricultural subsidies, the least we can expect of them is to keep their books orderly
The "regulation kills businesses" saying is often (not always) exactly right.
Is it? What is the proof for that?
I think we've seen time and time again that self-regulation of the industry doesn't work and that businesses will gladly fuck over society if they can get away with it and make more money. Usually that behavior is even defended with saying "Well, it's not their responsibility to solve society's issues. They are there to make money."
Barring nationalization of an industry, heavy regulation and/or taxation/subsidizing are the only ways to reliably protect the interests of society. If some businesses get killed in the process, so be it.
»If some businesses get killed in the process, so be it.«
The problem with this attitude is that the rest of the world often doesn’t have these strict regulations and as result, businesses aren’t killed but just leaving the country.
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