Is this a problem in the EU? I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once. Those can easily fill a dumpster with tons of garbage. That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing.
some places already do this for food where anything thats after sell by date but still safe to eat has to be donated to a food bank.
i think it should be expanded to cover more categories than food and clothes when reuse and recycling infra grows to take the demand. its not just good for the environment it also prevents producers from restricting supply to keep their profits high.
the ultimate goal is make it illegal to destroy or intentionally damage anything usable before it reaches consumers. that would create a new ecosystem of discount stores and giveaway centers, and save everyone a ton of money.
> that would create a new ecosystem of discount stores and giveaway centers, and save everyone a ton of money.
No. The real cost storage and selling, not the finished product. You don't magically get competent organizations to sell that popping out of the ground.
I have worked at a donation center like goodwill before. They get tons of stuff and throw away most of it. People won't buy it and they don't have time or space.
Great! “Fashion” is capitalism’s toxic way of having people discard perfectly good clothes and buy new ones every 12 months. It’s stupid, wasteful, and disgusting
Yes, this will likely exacerbate that further in the short-term: if retailers simply stop producing outlier sizes to reduce disposal of those sizes, then various niches will open up. In US women’s flats, very few go up to size 12+ (it’s already higher-cost to make products in outlier sizes and most don’t!) and so the one retailer (agaik) that offers that size has 100% market share, and keeps an inventory warehouse of unsold product that is listed until it sells at up to 80% discounts after a year-plus on the shelf. Another handful of retailers specialize exclusively in women’s clothing for people XL and above, which allows them to profit equally as well from less-common sizes.
My hope, however, is that this reduces overseas manufacturing in favor of domestic, which would allow retailers to dramatically reduce the shipping costs for small production batches, so that they’re able to simply produce more small batches of less-common sizes in response to demand. Sure, they might see a few percent lower profits per item, but they’ll be able to sell considerably more of their product simply by raising their supply to meet demand with finer granularity than the cheaper ‘produce an entire season one-time only and store it in a cargo container’ model offers today.
It can be made available online with a longer lead time if the manufacturers care enough about it. I guess it depends on whether the complexity is worth it, because if you're just selling cheap fast fashion then discounting/donating might still be worth it even if you produce excess, but more high-end brands probably won't stock uncommon sizes.
If they do not need to get rid of last months colors as fast, because the economic sweet spot has slightly moved towards longer production runs per design, they might as well also have longer intervals during which all sizes in production are in stock simultaneously.
What I admire the most about this is that already months before passing this law, all the members of the European Commission signed a document that they as individuals will not purchase any new or expensive clothes during their time in office, as an act of solidarity and to show they also take their individual responsibility to reduce waste.
Industrial production would far exceed the needs of people in the target markets. Supply chains are also highly streamlined. Some amazon boxes would go to dump unopened, after delivering to customer.
The state of perishable goods is much worse. A lot is dumped in food and short shelf-life items. Nothing can be done here. This is not even a brand issue.
Do not give license to industrial production or imports that far exceeds the needs of people in that region.
There are actually laws in EU countries to prevent this. Supermarkets have to discount food that is soon to expire instead of throwing it away, perishables from restaurants and fast food joints can be taken home by employees at the end of the day, and even donations to charities of said goods, or farms for produce unfit for human consumption is encouraged/regulated.
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.
So the corporation can just sell or donate them to their own shell entity in some tax preferred jurisdiction and then destroys them and take a loss that can be shuffled back to the corporation?
So i buy from my own money fabrics, machines and also i pay handy people to make clothes out of it. I can not sell them all. My Risk. And as an additional punishment i lose the right to do whatever i want with my own property? Mad world.
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.
"Companies may only destroy unsold clothes and shoes in limited cases, such as when items are unsafe or damaged, counterfeit or infringing intellectual property rights, or are rejected by charities or donation schemes."
Nike's unsold, defective, or returned shoes are ground up to make carpet padding. They're processed by the truckload in a large grinding machine.
It seems that under these rules, this would be illegal - ?
Create a holding company and register some trademarked design. Apply said design to the product. License the design to the manufacturer.
When the manufacturer wants to destroy unsold stock - revoke the license to the design. You can now fully legally destroy unsold stock for "violating ip rights"
This seems kinda backwards, as far as I know charities and donation schemes are overwhelmed by clothing donations. Our problem isn't that we are destroying clothes that could be used somewhere else, the problems are manufacturing low quality clothing that lasts 2-3 wears, and fast fashion where people buy clothing for a specific event.
If they want to achieve their goals they should be aiming for demand destruction on _new_ clothes, once the clothes are unwanted it's too late.
But seems better to somehow incentivize fabric recycling and higher quality clothes. Even expensive clothes fall apart these days.
> 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).
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.
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.
No, this will give EU textile manufacturing an advantage, because they mostly produce low volume high value products. This will hurt fast fashion importers the most.
The problem with the EU is that it only approaches problem solving with regulation. It’s incapable of doing anything else. Meanwhile none of the Chinese platforms dumping cheap clothes and crap into the market are held to any of these standards for safety or destruction.
(I can't find a source, but I thought a similar thing happened in Shakespeare's time, except I remember it being children going around collecting old scraps of clothing. And in my head it's related to act 1 scene 1 of Hamlet, the famous quote: "But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad". A mantle was a kind of cloak, and russet was the cloth it was made from which was originally reddish (though eventually "russet" was just this rough cloth of various colors). So I think maybe "shoddy" is a kind of evolution of "russet".)
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 13.4 ms ] threadA likely outcome is stores carry fewer options and you need to order what you want.
i think it should be expanded to cover more categories than food and clothes when reuse and recycling infra grows to take the demand. its not just good for the environment it also prevents producers from restricting supply to keep their profits high.
the ultimate goal is make it illegal to destroy or intentionally damage anything usable before it reaches consumers. that would create a new ecosystem of discount stores and giveaway centers, and save everyone a ton of money.
No. The real cost storage and selling, not the finished product. You don't magically get competent organizations to sell that popping out of the ground.
I have worked at a donation center like goodwill before. They get tons of stuff and throw away most of it. People won't buy it and they don't have time or space.
My hope, however, is that this reduces overseas manufacturing in favor of domestic, which would allow retailers to dramatically reduce the shipping costs for small production batches, so that they’re able to simply produce more small batches of less-common sizes in response to demand. Sure, they might see a few percent lower profits per item, but they’ll be able to sell considerably more of their product simply by raising their supply to meet demand with finer granularity than the cheaper ‘produce an entire season one-time only and store it in a cargo container’ model offers today.
The state of perishable goods is much worse. A lot is dumped in food and short shelf-life items. Nothing can be done here. This is not even a brand issue.
Do not give license to industrial production or imports that far exceeds the needs of people in that region.
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.
At a nearby whole foods a large portion of produce goes to waste. It's heartbreaking to see.
Nike's unsold, defective, or returned shoes are ground up to make carpet padding. They're processed by the truckload in a large grinding machine.
It seems that under these rules, this would be illegal - ?
When the manufacturer wants to destroy unsold stock - revoke the license to the design. You can now fully legally destroy unsold stock for "violating ip rights"
If they want to achieve their goals they should be aiming for demand destruction on _new_ clothes, once the clothes are unwanted it's too late.
But seems better to somehow incentivize fabric recycling and higher quality clothes. Even expensive clothes fall apart these days.
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).
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...
It seems rather similar to what Ross Clothing does.
(I can't find a source, but I thought a similar thing happened in Shakespeare's time, except I remember it being children going around collecting old scraps of clothing. And in my head it's related to act 1 scene 1 of Hamlet, the famous quote: "But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad". A mantle was a kind of cloak, and russet was the cloth it was made from which was originally reddish (though eventually "russet" was just this rough cloth of various colors). So I think maybe "shoddy" is a kind of evolution of "russet".)