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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

> manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.

Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes?

Surely these companies aren’t paying H&M for the privilege of destroying their surplus clothes, so by reselling them they’ll be getting paid to take the clothes and paid again when they resell them. Why would they ever destroy them?

Which is why this scenario won’t ever happen.

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They would destroy clothing because it is not sold. This already happens to second hand clothing that is shipped to Africa. Part of it is sold, part of it is dumped. This is well documented.

If part of it is sold, isn't it better than if it had all been destroyed? It's literally what that law is for.

Define what you mean by "better". Putting them on a giant CO2-burning ship to transport around the world to find every last person who wants a $1 shirt is much more harmful to the environment than just throwing it into a hole in the ground and making another one.

Given how absurdly efficient shipping stuff in container ships is, I don't believe its actually worse. Specially if the company can just save money by being slightly more conservative in terms of how much they manufacture in the first place.

Sure, let's conveniently not count the horrifically-polluting trucks in <3rd world country with zero environmental regulations> to distribute them across the interior.

You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?

The point is to change what companies believe is the optimal number of products. Right now companies produce what they expect to sell, with errors in both directions being valued equally. In the future they will have to produce only what they are certain they can sell.

And other cloths they could buy don't use trucks?

The point is increasing the cost of over-production. Its not about the EU knowing better, but imposing a higher price for waste. Not sure how you are confused about that.

The additional shipments aren't going to drastically go up over a few more companies throwing second hand clothing on ships. Large crate ships are relatively efficient for what they tow.

As basic napkin math, if there's 1000 cargo ships moving in and out of the EU in a year, and this law adds 10 more. That's 1% increase. It's a bigger 1%, but I wouldn't be surprised if the emissions are less than the 9% of discarded clothes talked about in the article.

I'm going to speculate that it won't "add" ships at all

As you say, ships are moving in and out of the EU each year - the question is, how many have "back loads" - if some percentage of the ships leave Europe empty to return to Asia for more manufactured goods, then it seems very likely that they can have the containers of unwanted clothes as part of the trip.

Oh cool, so I can fly commercial all I want at zero marginal CO2 emissions just because they don't have to build an extra plane just for me? I can burn that jet fuel and not feel bad because they were going to burn that gallon of fuel anyway?

Some of these arguments are so silly that I'm starting to understand why the EU thinks regulations are a free lunch to improve the environment with no costs whatsoever.

>Oh cool, so I can fly commercial all I want at zero marginal CO2 emissions just because they don't have to build an extra plane just for me?

If they would have flown the plane there anyway with an empty seat, your added CO2 is negligible yes.

The analogy doesn't hold.

Airlines adjust capacity to demand — empty seats represent foregone revenue and future flights get cancelled or downsized.

Cargo ships don't work that way. A container ship returns to Asia whether it's carrying 1000 containers or 5000. The marginal emissions of an additional backload container are genuinely close to zero, not as a rhetorical trick but as a structural feature of how bulk shipping economics work.

Yea they will, they'll resell what they can, and destroy the rest, probably by throwing them into a giant burn pit in a place with zero environmental regulations.

Ok, let's say that happens. Seems like a net win over throwing all of them in a burn pit.

Not quite when you are burning a ton of fuel to ship them overseas to arrive in the burn pit.

I live in the US, but I would hope the EU doesn't have "burn pits".

But the 3rd world country they are about to be shipped to definitely does have burn pits that will incinerate both 1) any remaining unsold inventory, and 2) the older clothes that are replaced with the fancy european stuff.

Or better yet, they'll just be thrown into the river like most other things in Africa and SE Asia...

All you're doing is outsourcing your own pollution to make yourself feel better. It's idiotic.

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