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Comment by eddythompson80 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law says we must do this. Please contact your representatives you dumb fucks"

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The original comment says "sell them to «resale» companies". Selling goods means being paid for it, while you and the parent comment are both saying money goes in the opposite direction.

When you negotiate the price to ”sell” at, it’s perfectly legitimate for that price to be negative.

Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.

Selling for a negative price is completely different from buying, because the flow of 'goods' is in the other direction.

Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.

There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.

They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.

The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.

You're buying a service, and the service is getting rid of goods.

I don't think you can sell at loss in Europe (not sure, happy to be corrected), so might be small but it'll still be positive. The bet is it will be high enough to be a deterrent. The other bet is that at some point the rest of the world will push back being a corporate dumpster.

This particular thread of the argument can go on for a while. I can't well articulate the doubts I have because I'm not in the industry, but many such well-meaning laws have a tendency to backfire once given enough time for bad/poor actors to game it.

Brings to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.

The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.

The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.

Oil companies have been doing this for over a century in US. Sell abandoned well to a small llc, llc files bankruptcy, big OilCo off the hook! Everyone happy!

>The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner.

This is what these countries get for having weak laws that allow people to do illegal dumping and then hide behind a corporate veil to avoid accountability.

Trouble is if democracy worked properly then corporate entities wouldn't be able to lobby and influence governments to weaken laws out of self-interest.

Are you referring to this case? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/17/swedish-queen-... Thanks

Read their comment and yours? What great advice. I would suggest you do the same, but I think you'll continue to misread it.

> No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.

> lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now.

They are saying that paying to dispose of the clothes/waste is how it's done. And then... you said the same thing. Perhaps you're assuming they're just taking a guess, rather than coming at it with understanding that this is how it has been done for a while.

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