In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.
What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.
It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
I buy mostly from liquidators, where everything is sold as-is, but that doesn't stop end users from trying to make a claim, so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty. For example, Ryobi brands the items with a plastic welder, leaving a tell-tale wavy mark.
A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who participate, so finding ways to allow products to be truly sold as-is is vital, otherwise the next most logical option is to put those items in a landfill.
It's also important that there's no legislative hurdles to seelling items as-is, or there may be no legal way to sell a salvage products without completely overhauling them, which is usually not cost effective.
> so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty
With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.
But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as not eligible for warranty. They just want that coverage
We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products they bought through gray market channels.
> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.
Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling.
If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:
1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.
2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation
3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
Especially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.
No, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.
I think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.
And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.
The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.
I heard that the clothes especially from high end brands are destroyed to keep the value of the brand high ie not to cannibalize sales. Which doesnt seem like good enough reason to burn 300.000+t of clothes (that created untold emissions)
Do high-end brands even produce 300 kilotons of clothing? Assuming, very generously, that a piece of clothing, with packaging and all, weights 1 kg, it would be 300M pieces of clothing; that could be an entire production run of something very ubiquitous (say, Levi's 501), but definitely not high-end.
I think that tonnage is for all textiles, not just high-end clothing.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
Beautiful insight into processes that most of us never see, thanks!
My initial thought was "reusing an item is even better than recycling" but then realized that a warrantied item is quite likely to have flaws and get warrantied again very soon.
I have recently been trolling eBay for used computing equipment rather than buying new, after it was suggested I sell my old hardware that I don't think anyone would want. And man has that been a great experience, it's way more fun than browsing Newegg or doing pc part picking from new catalogs. I need neither the compute hardware nor the cost savings but it's a fun activity on its own, not unlike so many computer games where you do deck optimization or similar.
This is also very detrimental to buyer experience. When you search for a specific new product, prices from different sellers can vary widely. Most often there is no way to tell what is the reason for the difference. Is the cheapest offer simply the best deal, or is it a refurbished product, or even a fake?
This does happen: for example in Macbook repair, it is common to buy defective motherboards, in order to salvage the chips off them (which are apple-specific, hence not purchasable elsewhere). Those boards often come from China, and often have holes drilled in them, I guess exactly to prevent them from being repaired.
It's a shame, because some of those boards could (and would, they are valuable enough) be fully repaired by a skilled repair person. Instead, the chips are picked off and the rest goes to waste.
I did buy a batch once that didn't have holes drilled, and they all turned out to have all sorts of strange, often random issues, so I suspect those were RMAs that somehow "fell off the back of a truck" and escaped the drilling.
Probably, but part of the point of outsourcing the recycling was that you wouldn't have to set up infrastructure, process and people for that. If they weren't crooked, you could even have customers ship the products directly to the recycler. To drill it first, then you are paying for shipping twice, on an item that is already worthless to you.
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
Not covered by this regulation in spirit and (probably, haven't read it yet) in text. The spirit of the regulation is targeting fast-fashion on-prem retailers (think H&M, Primark, Zara and the likes) and online retailers like Shein, who have heaps of products that just aren't sold because they're not wanted - and also the occasional luxury brand trying to maintain scarcity [1].
> but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.
EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).
The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.
Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.
This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.
Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
That is a slightly different scenario than taking cheap "fast fashion waste", compressing it into bales, shoving it into shipping containers, transporting/dumping it and flooding local countries/markets.
(And many of these large shipments do not end-up as donations by the time they get to their destination, but are actually sold by weight and then resold again)
But yes - distribution/logistics of donated goods needed to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".
Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.
(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)
It's very very easy to spend much less on clothes. Buying a new handbag every 6 months vs maintaining a bag for 20 years isn't that much different in terms of effort, but one is unbelievably more expensive.
This kind of reply is so cliché it's tiresome. "Someone makes small step to avoid waste and environmental damage" -> "if it's not perfect it's no good at all, let the free market sort it out at t=infinity".
Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.
Where even are all the people wandering around naked for lack of clothes? There's so much donated clothing already out there. And the homeless here mainly 'need clothes' because they have no way to wash their clothes. It'd be less wasteful to get them access to laundry facilities. And the developing world always gets the "PATRIOTS - Super Bowl LX Champions" gear and a ton of other cast-offs - I doubt they need more.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
For the same reason tax codes are complex. If you have a simple law, there's no way for a politician to say to a group of people: "If you vote for me, I will get you a special favour".
Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.
Well one link deeper says "Restrict the export of textile waste" but I'm still unclear why they preferred these measure over a carbon tax.
Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that
involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to
destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following
operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive
2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that
Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the
recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to
destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
Won't fungi and bacteria eat (cellulose-based) the clothes, releasing the same amount of CO₂, only a bit slower?
Synthetic fabrics can likely be buried as a form of carbon sequestration though.
> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes?
from TFA
> companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
> Assume the legislation is trying to reduce a real problem
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
maybe this will force factories to change their process. with manufacturing getting cheaper, smaller batches become affordable. at the extreme we can now print books on demand, and improved 3D printing allows one-off items in many more areas. that's the trend we need to push. to get away from wasteful mass production.
Clothing has a huge profit margin (when manufactured overseas) especially at the higher end (for brands which do not invest in local production, which is most, because it is also hard to beat Chinese quality). It's better for these brands to over-produce on some items and lose the low-cost inventory, than to under-produce and not meet market demand, to not offer a range of sizes and varieties to meet individual taste, and not achieve wide distribution that's necessary to grow market demand. That's why regulation is needed here.
Presumably the split between things people want and do not want is not known a priori. It seems the EU is trying to legislate into an existence a solution to an unsolvable equation.
They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
You can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
Overproducing is often cheaper than losing sales because of the fixed costs of producing a batch and the externalities of destroying your inventory not being priced in. Some brands also find it more interesting to destroy stocks than reduce prices because it protects their brand values. Well, now, that's illegal.
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
this is not destroying things to create jobs. this is about globalization negatively affecting local culture. clothing especially represents culture. if people can not afford to create their own clothes then that has a negative effect on their culture as a whole.
Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise:
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
Most clothes are manufactured in countries with cheaper labor costs to cut costs - the reality is clothes are cheap to make in terms of raw materials- and dumping unwanted clothes will just destory the local economy
Just because a country has clothing in it doesn’t mean all of the people in that country have clothing. There are people in rich countries that need clothes. Clothing wears out, it’s a perpetual need and perpetually disposed.
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
I wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean)
What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...
It's just boring for consumers. Business provides value to customers. Customers dictate what gets produced. And there are customers (e.g. me) who do keep things for a longer amount of time - there's a reason why generally men's clothing makes up around 20% of the total clothing shopping floor space in any given city.
I'm not particularly big into fashion (I think my newest clothes are 4-5 years old), but why is the thing you want "common [expletive] sense" and someone choosing to spend their money a different way, by extension, nonsensical?
What they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently.
Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society.
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
I suspect this end up like US "recycling" of plastic: pay another country to "reuse/recycle" the waste, and that country then dumps it in a landfill, dumps it in the ocean, or burns it.
For some of these things I wonder if there are missing recyclable options. Like could you economically run a pile of defective clothing through a blender and and use it as fiber reinforcement in some kind of construction material or insulation?
Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug:
"Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."
And in pre-industrial societies, peasants (almost entirely women, ranging from children to the elderly) commonly spent around 100 hours of labor to produce a single square yard of fabric to clothe their families (fabric was too expensive for peasants to buy, so most spun it at home).
So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.
Right, textiles are much bigger than fashion - bedding, furniture upholstery, curtains, some types of shelter, practical items like footwear, protective equipment, medical equipment and dressings, vehicle interiors... pretty much all aspects of human life depend on textiles. It ain't just cheap t shirts and dresses.
This is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules.
The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.
Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.
---
The linked page has this text:
"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."
Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.
The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.
I don't think that is very believable.
(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
A strange decision considering that high fashion is one of the few lucrative sectors of eu. LV cannot afford to give away their branded items , and i doubt they are willing to remanufacture or reuse. They may be a tiny fraction of the industry, but equally affected.
Might be to hinder large companies of moving fast-fashion storages into EU, so they cannot circumvent the 150EUR free import limit when it is dissolved, as that would move them into the supposed jaws of this "ban of destruction of fast-fashion" act.
considering H&M (Sweden), Zara (Spain), C&A (Netherlands) etc.. have lead the way into the clothes-that-self-destructs-in-a-year fashion, it was about time europeans did something about clothing waste, well done.
Seems like policy ripe with unintended side effects. At the very least, it'll likely raise prices for consumers because the companies aren't allowed to manage their inventory as efficiently as they wish.
Now of course this might be a totally acceptable price to pay, I'm not necessarily arguing against it. It will just be conveniently omitted from public communications on the topic by the EU. For regulators, there never are tradeoffs, after all.
Brand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.
Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.
I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
Incredibly, unbelievably stupid law. Waste is made when something unwanted is created, not when it is thrown out. Destruction or landfill is often the best option for all involved and modern landfills are very safe and sustainable. I worked in recycled clothing for a few years and it is not always or even often efficient.
This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.
>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.
Why is it crazy? Demand for clothes depends on size, style, weather, etc. It’s a hard forecasting problem. I also regularly want to buy something and find my size isn’t available which is basically the flip side of making too much.
How accurate are comparable industries at forecasting demand?
This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.
(Very) tongue in cheek: In 2024 Sweden was CO2 net neutral. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.
A good chunk of unsold clothing destruction happens because the brand considers fire sales to be brand damage. I have to wonder if they'll comply with this regulation willingly, or if they'll do some stupid workaround to make sure they can continue to pointlessly destroy clothing for the sake of a brand image.
Typical Eurocrat meddling in people's affairs. The owners of those items should be free to do whatever they want. If the government is concerend about environmental damage, they should raise landfill fees or tax carbon, not limit what firms are allowed to do with their own things.
Just another case of the EU being focused on unimportant things while looking away from real issues like cost of living crisis or energy costs. Though on the other hand, it may be for the best since they only make things actively worse.
That this is an actual rule that other versions of have been a thing for years makes further convinced we are on the falling edge of capitalist society.
That they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.
This is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell.
So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.
Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes.
If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this.
I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got.
The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.
The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out.
Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.
HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.
GLP-1's solve this, now you're basically only losing weight and eventually (i.e. the 2030s) most people won't fluctuate much in weight. So, try again on "changing sizes". Yes I'm aware that children grow up rapidly and need new clothes. Don't buy goodyear welted boots for your 7 year old.
The best fashion is timeless, and that's why heritage fashion is far superior to trends. Coincidentally, it's why the brands I listed above are exclusively heritage brands, who have basically no regards for trends.
There's a reason HN is poorly dressed. I'd rather take the "only dresses with startup T-shirt" guy over the "I've gotta have the Sydney Sweeney Jeans" person, and especially over the sneakerhead crowd which now thinks Hoka and NB is superior to Nike.
Give a man donated clothing and they will have clothes ... teach a man to become and indentured servant on minimum wage and they will be able to buy clothes every year for the rest of their lives.
Makes sense. You’d rather burn a birkin than let a poor person get their grubby little mitts on it. So the only way to stop them burning them, is to force them to do something with them.
Those 'On Sale' racks are going to take up half the shop now. Maybe they could have a deep discounted section where clothes are set at cost value. Should find an equilibrium and someone will buy them
Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
> Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.
It's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
Related note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company.
My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited supply they control - is inherently predatory and should be restricted. Not because I'm the morality police and want to stop people from buying a bag that says "I spent $2000 on a bag", but because there is nothing that stops the company from cost-reducing that to oblivion. If you are going to sell a $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.
Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.
IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.
Counter point to the counter point: also all of human existence.
The "fuckton of failure and waste" which has brought technological advancements to humanity didn't come from destroying unsold clothing, and the risks involved in actual technological advancements are orders of magnitude larger than the risk of not being able to destroy unsold consumer products without penalty.
I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
Oh no, poor fast fashion companies won't be able to continue maximizing their profits by using slave labor to manufacture ginormous amounts of garbage that goes out of fashion in a week. Guess they'll have to reduce their garbage output or switch to manufacturing quality stuff that can hang out on a store's shelf for a bit longer. The fucking horror.
Fuck them.
Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.
Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.
> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?
Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.
For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.
What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.
It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who participate, so finding ways to allow products to be truly sold as-is is vital, otherwise the next most logical option is to put those items in a landfill.
It's also important that there's no legislative hurdles to seelling items as-is, or there may be no legal way to sell a salvage products without completely overhauling them, which is usually not cost effective.
With textiles this is usually a hole punch or something with the tag. With hardware we had the serial number recorded.
But consumers don’t care. If they buy something from a vendor they think is selling them something as new and the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer, the customer doesn’t care that you marked it as not eligible for warranty. They just want that coverage
We even had customers write ragebait Reddit posts claiming we were unfairly denying warranties, people sending stories to popular newsletters and journalists, and other attempts to make us look bad for not honoring warranties on products they bought through gray market channels.
Maybe this is the problem. Retailers should cover the statutory warranty on any product they sell.
Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.
(all assuming the product is not sold as "new")
It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.
Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling.
If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:
1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.
2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation
3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
People buying it may or may not be ok with the defect.
Think bad welds, usually they're fine for a while and then they're very much not.
And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.
The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.
I think some brands destroy the items to create an artificial scarcity that keeps their stuff 'exclusive'.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
My initial thought was "reusing an item is even better than recycling" but then realized that a warrantied item is quite likely to have flaws and get warrantied again very soon.
I have recently been trolling eBay for used computing equipment rather than buying new, after it was suggested I sell my old hardware that I don't think anyone would want. And man has that been a great experience, it's way more fun than browsing Newegg or doing pc part picking from new catalogs. I need neither the compute hardware nor the cost savings but it's a fun activity on its own, not unlike so many computer games where you do deck optimization or similar.
Isn't this why Ross exists? It's where I first heard the phrase "slightly irregular".
Couldn't this be prevented by, say, sticking it on a drill press and drilling a large hole in it, and then recycling it?
It's a shame, because some of those boards could (and would, they are valuable enough) be fully repaired by a skilled repair person. Instead, the chips are picked off and the rest goes to waste.
I did buy a batch once that didn't have holes drilled, and they all turned out to have all sorts of strange, often random issues, so I suspect those were RMAs that somehow "fell off the back of a truck" and escaped the drilling.
Not covered by this regulation in spirit and (probably, haven't read it yet) in text. The spirit of the regulation is targeting fast-fashion on-prem retailers (think H&M, Primark, Zara and the likes) and online retailers like Shein, who have heaps of products that just aren't sold because they're not wanted - and also the occasional luxury brand trying to maintain scarcity [1].
> but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.
[1] https://theweek.com/95179/luxury-brands-including-burberry-b...
The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.
Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.
This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.
If the regulation specifically prohibits burning, it makes sense, as a measure to limit unproductive CO₂ emissions.
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
(And many of these large shipments do not end-up as donations by the time they get to their destination, but are actually sold by weight and then resold again)
But yes - distribution/logistics of donated goods needed to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".
Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.
(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)
I think the reason that brands don’t want to donate is because they don’t want their brands to be associated with poor people.
Rather have all people spend all of their money to the cent to buy clothes, to pay rent and to buy water tbh
Guess what, the free market doesn't give a shit as long as the executives make their millions.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.
Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive 2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
from TFA
> companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.
Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.
In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.
I assume it's not actually a really strong incentive in context.
Why assume that? Could you not imagine that legislation is often meant to signal values to voters as much or more than it is intended to solve real problems.
You know you can sell 4000 of those products for a total of $15k.
This might become a bad deal if dealing with the 6000 extra units costs you money.
This can be profitable for the customer, if they can't just easily get rid of those 1000 they can't sell, it's presumably less profitable.
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
They'll find another way to destroy them.
2018 article reports that Burberry destroyed £28 millions worth of clothes to keep their brand "exclusive": https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983
https://atmos.earth/art-and-culture/the-messy-truth/
What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...
Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society.
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
"Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."
https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-s...
So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.
Citation for the 100-ish hours: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an...
So carbon emissions are bad, but then we should price carbon and not micromanage clothing inventory.
A bit like feeding everyone vs. having an obesity crisis.
This is the actual quote on the page you cite:
"Today, the combined textile and apparel sectors contribute as much as 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions."
Notice the unusual way they spell "fashion"...
The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.
Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.
---
The linked page has this text:
"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."
Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.
The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.
I don't think that is very believable.
(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
I live in America and I would like it to continue to be the leading economic zone.
The more Europe (and others) lag behind, the better my life will be :).
Now of course this might be a totally acceptable price to pay, I'm not necessarily arguing against it. It will just be conveniently omitted from public communications on the topic by the EU. For regulators, there never are tradeoffs, after all.
Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.
I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.
That is a crazy amount.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...
Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.
>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.
How accurate are comparable industries at forecasting demand?
(Very) tongue in cheek: In 2024 Sweden was CO2 net neutral. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.
(https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldi...)
So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.
If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this.
I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got.
The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.
Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.
HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.
The best fashion is timeless, and that's why heritage fashion is far superior to trends. Coincidentally, it's why the brands I listed above are exclusively heritage brands, who have basically no regards for trends.
There's a reason HN is poorly dressed. I'd rather take the "only dresses with startup T-shirt" guy over the "I've gotta have the Sydney Sweeney Jeans" person, and especially over the sneakerhead crowd which now thinks Hoka and NB is superior to Nike.
Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.
[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/fashion-waste-problem-fabrics-...
This is a very niche feature of low volume brands.
This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited supply they control - is inherently predatory and should be restricted. Not because I'm the morality police and want to stop people from buying a bag that says "I spent $2000 on a bag", but because there is nothing that stops the company from cost-reducing that to oblivion. If you are going to sell a $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.
Clothing has been used as wealth/class indicator for thousands of years, trying to change that will be extremely difficult lift.
IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.
We wouldn’t have 99% of the technological advancements we’ve made without a fuckton of failure and waste.
The "fuckton of failure and waste" which has brought technological advancements to humanity didn't come from destroying unsold clothing, and the risks involved in actual technological advancements are orders of magnitude larger than the risk of not being able to destroy unsold consumer products without penalty.
Premium brands really don't want to seel it UNLESS it's to the right people for the high price: https://fashionlawjournal.com/deadstock-destruction-why-fash...
I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?
Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.