EU approves ban on destruction of unsold clothing
dw.com
dw.com
I have 25 year old clothes that hold up to this very day and I have recently bought farmers and trousers from the same brand which only lasted for half a year compared to early models that I still have and they are intact. And these are not cheapo parts...
Edit: I just realized I am wearing said t-shirt right now!
so often i’m disappointed, over and over again when i order online vs buying from a store. whether it’s the quality is terrible, the color is just wrong, or the fit is weird, buying online is an awful experience and seems to be getting worse.
i can’t tell you how exhausted i got over time waiting for stuff to arrive, wasting time going through the exchange process, having to ship it back, waiting yet again for the new one to arrive, and then let down again. rinse and repeat over and over, so frustrating.
i know how ridiculous this next thing sounds, but it’s just so much more satisfying doing a full on trip to the mall.
To answer your question: Japan. Uniqlo for example is a solid choice and if you want really long lasting things, buy in Japan directly. It’s the only society on the planet that has resisted the insanity of continuously sacrificing quality.
Does that mean you can just "sell" a lot of clothes to a recycler for $1? Or do they have to keep that ugly jacket on the shelf for decades if they have to? How is this enforceable?
Also, I'm all for durable/repairable clothes, but I'm not sure how much the average consumer is really into darning their own socks. If we want more durable clothes we are talking about less spandex and polyester and more thick and uncomfortable garments.
But the key issue is how discards allow bad practices. As we prohibit waste, businesses will adjust what they produce and ship accordingly.
And then the consumer throws it away later? So basically the same disposal, but with extra steps?
This article really needs more details on how they plan for this to actually work.
If throwing them away wasn't free, a lot of other interesting options would be more viable... like not shipping excess in the first place, discounting extras to an extreme level (shelf space is worth selling you a book for a quarter at some point), or giving them to charities.
With clothing returns, or Amazon returns in general, the issue is similar: It costs them more to actually check over the product for resale then to just chuck it in the trash. Waste is cheap because waste doesn't require any labor costs.
Forcing a company not to throw away unsold merchandise simply raises the cost of getting rid of it above zero, so they have to seek better options.
So basically it costs less resources to throw them away, and instead we are legislating that people spend extra resources under the guise of reducing resources by not throwing things away.
Sounds backwards to me.
It reminds me of those recycling ideas where you are meant to mail the item somewhere, using more energy to do that, than it would cost to make the item from scratch in the first place. Great plan that.
Or people who drive 20 minutes to recycle glass.
Instead please have a care for the environment and just throw stuff away!
> Forcing a company not to throw away unsold merchandise simply raises the cost of getting rid of it above zero, so they have to seek better options.
In other words things will cost more? So basically these new laws have as a consequence higher prices, and extra resource consumption?
Someone didn't think things though........
They behave this way because it consumes less resources, by definition: if you spend less money, then you spend less resources (that's what money is for: to acquire resources).
> The solution is for them to make less.
Think about it - wouldn't they do this on their own? I mean it costs them money to make so much. If things are cheap, it's because they don't take much resources to make in the first place.
The regulation has a good goal, and a failed implementation - it actually going to result in more resource consumption, only those resources will be in shipping, handling, storage, etc.
Too cheap. And this raises the cost, not in materials but in overall lifecycle cost of producing an item. That's the point. The cost of overproduction is too low, by raising it, bad practices like "buy three and return two which we'll throw away" will no longer make financial sense. The excess shipping, storage, etc. won't happen because it won't be a viable business strategy.
If it's cheap to make it's because there's little environmental impact.
It's not a perfect one-to-one, but it's really close.
> practices like "buy three and return two which we'll throw away" will no longer make financial sense
But you are not changing consumer behavior! People will still buy things and return them, and those returned items are worthless, i.e. not sellable. The manufacturer can try to donate them, but no one will want them, or they will just store them forever in cheap warehouses that will burn down every once in a while, or suffer water damage.
Or perhaps you want there to be artificial shortages in stores, so there's just barely enough to buy because the store will be fearful of overbuying something they will have to keep on their shelf permanently?
Please, try to think of the results of your suggestions. You keep thinking only of your goals and not what will actually happen.
What a weirdly specific whataboutism argument.
Should we stop food or monetary aid along the same argument?
Aid should certainly be given in exceptional circumstances - drought, illness, war, etc. But not routinely every year.
But I agree: repairability for clothes seems a little silly. We have industrial processes (like automated cutting) that make clothes-making extremely efficient, and materials that make them far more comfortable than ever; we just need to improve what we do with them at the end-of-life (i.e., reusing/recycling).
As for the ugly jackets, they should be able to sell these to secondhand stores or the like for next-to-nothing, where they could be sold for very little. Or given to homeless shelters.
> The agreement outlined that the European Commission can issue legally binding requirements to make goods such as furniture, tyres, detergents, paints and chemicals more environmentally friendly.
It's interesting to watch how people constantly invent new ways to re-introduce legal concepts that we threw out when we invented liberalism. For example, we got rid of sumptuary laws, which restrict the consumption habits of the lower classes, but now we're bringing them back under the principle of being environmentally friendly.
There is a difference that you're not seeing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38538799
When society discusses sex work, there is more support for penalizing the traffickers than the workers. This is because morals are an important dimension besides just economics. Similarly, when talking about waste, there is more depth than just thinking about the economic impact.
Fast fashion put waste into overdrive, easily by a factor of two thirds as it specifically encouraged online ordering with free returns so that consumers ordered their size, a size above, a size below and returned two out of three purchases .. rather than sell "worn goods" returns went to land fill.
The mountain of excess production (consuming energy, resources, producing excess CO2, etc) that comes with the past decade of fast fashion brought little of real value and is a practice worth discouraging.
Let the consumer spend by all means, but at least reduce the litter that comes with every purchase.
The bulk of your comment is just an explanation of why you think sumptuary laws can be good (which may be correct! Not arguing that), not a refutation of the idea that this is a sumptuary law
Look at the nature of production to meet demand before and after fast fashion .. there's been a sea change to not simply meet demand or provide a little additional choice but to over produce as a means of changing consumer behaviour to milk out every cent with a by product of magnitudes more landfill than has previously existed.
Not sure how people can't see this difference. Preventing companies dumping or disposing of their (harmful) waste (in an unregulated manner) is pretty common practise and generally agreed upon good thing.
Maybe they are just discarded "first hand" clothing?
Or do they actually plan to require stores to keep clothing that no one wants on the shelf forever?
A Bonobos is fast-fashion, but a Gitman Bros less so; you'll see the same cloth/pattern/colors year in, year out. Maybe the collars change over time and maybe they'll add darts one year...
Uhmmm, so your answer is to have to some group of people asses every item of clothing or every new brand that pops up to see if it qualifies as fast-fashion based on whether it was influenced by recent catwalk trends or whether the factory it was produced in made it too fast or efficiently. ? yikes. Not sure if you realize that just how subjective and unscalable that is.
Breaking before those 2 years during normal usage is usually considered a flaw. In case of a dispute, it's on the seller to prove that the customer did something that's not considered normal use.
Once an item is fixed, the fix gets another fresh 2 years.
In principle I don't see why most clothing couldn't be covered by a similar scheme. It would force the producers to make clothing that actually lasts. Sure the price would go up, but you'd need less of it.
There's a shop here in Oslo which has moved in this direction[1]. Their stuff is made from durable fabrics and they allow one free repair.