Hacker News Reader

Comment by tancop | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Who pays for the logistics cost of moving and stocking these products in discount stores and giveaway centers? That is a large percentage of the total cost of production and the reason disposal is cheaper.

If those costs are paid for by taxpayers then the consumers are in effect involuntarily buying products they would not have otherwise bought, just with more steps. We already see this with agricultural subsidies.

If those costs are charged back to the producer then it becomes economically optimal to under-produce, which will cause prices to rise and risk shortages but eliminate waste. One can make the argument that higher prices for basic goods to reduce waste is a social good but it also impoverishes consumers.

All of these scenarios have happened empirically countless times. That almost every producer over-produces to some extent at no profit to themselves when allowed has strong "Chesterton's Fence" characteristics.

It's a somewhat blunt instrument used to internalize some externalities: Making a product and then destroying it is wasteful, and the market will fix all internalized costs of that waste, but some of those costs are externalized. Having society pay somewhat for producing clothes that are then worn, that's one thing. Having society pay for pointless waste is another.

What you've said is: Looking only at the internalized costs, pointless-wasting a percentage of clothes costs X but reduces clothes cost in the store by Y, with Y being larger than X.

Okay. Irrelevant - that math doesn't include externalized costs. It may well be that this is a stupid idea, but "market decided destroying some clothes was more efficient" doesn't prove anything unless you can show that the size of the externalized costs to this process are 0 or close enough to 0 to have no meaningful relevance.

Again, the waste is not pointless, it's part of an inventory management strategy to ensure adequate supply. If your local grocery store established a policy that they'll never buy more meat than they're sure they can sell before the expiration date, they'd routinely run out.

Do you have proof of that assertion?

Happens all the time at my local butcher shop. They make a point of using the whole animal -- no waste -- but that means they are frequently out of the more popular products. For the most popular parts you sometimes have to reserve it a week in advance from a future animal.

The result of laws like this is not that the store will never buy too much, it’s that when they do buy too much they will give it away to somewhere it can be used instead of destroying it. It will not cost them much if any more to simply give things to food banks or charity shops.

It in fact does cost them more to give things than to destroy them.

... and it costs society more to process the destroyed waste, and it costs society more to then deal with the fallout of shelters not having enough clothes.

Or not. Who knows. The point is, this 'economically it is more efficient' is not a proven case because the externalities need to be taken into account, and so far the person I've been responding to seems to not understand this part, or is ignoring it.

I'm not sure everyone in the conversation is understanding each other. Saying the waste is pointless implies to me that it has no value, that companies could eliminate it with small costs and no other tradeoffs and they just don't want to bother. That's not accurate; a system with no oversupply is necessarily a system with fewer choices and more shortages.

The tradeoff may be worth it in some contexts, but if you don't understand that there are tradeoffs, you're going end up proposing silly policies like the original commenter's idea that nobody should ever be allowed to destroy any object a consumer could use.

"it would be a small cost" and "there are tradeoffs" can both be true at the same time!

If the benefit they get from waste is like 10% of the value they're destroying, then in a broad sense it is pointless.

And nobody is arguing against oversupply. Oversupply itself is fine.

The waste is relatively inexpensive and already being paid for.

It's not so easy to give things away at scale. If someone deposited 500 kilograms of assorted meat products outside your front door right now, with a note attached saying they need to be consumed or frozen in the next 24 hours or they'll go bad, how much work would it take for you to deal with that?

Clothing is of course a bit easier to deal with (it'll still grow mildew if you don't protect it from moisture!), but the source link explicitly anticipates there will be some circumstances where it's impossible to give away clothing and authorizes destruction in that case.

Is that scenario supposed to be relevant?

This isn't some random guy. Their entire job is dealing with the logistics of big piles of clothes, and they have months in advance to plan.

There just aren't that many people in developed countries who can make use of a pallet of unsellable clothing. Even free clothing distributors - which most organizations accepting clothing donations are not, by the way - generally strive to provide a broad selection of desirable clothing rather than a bunch of copies of an unpopular shirt.

What makes you think these are unsellable? Would you be happy if the law mandated a certain amount of time offering deep discounts and only then could allow shredding? Because I bet the vast majority of these clothes would sell just fine at 75% off, brand new.

I'd be much happier with a law like that, yes. Clearance racks and outlet stores are already a well-known practice, so it seems like a minimal distortion to require that all clothing product lines have to cycle through them before being destroyed or recycled. My experience with clearance racks, though, is that people ~never buy something they're not excited about just because the discount is high. They browse to see if they get lucky on something they might have bought anyway, and if they don't they go buy something else at full price.

You could internalize the cost of waste more generically by charging appropriately for landfill use and letting producers decide how much it's worth avoiding waste. Instead of just banning a particular waste stream by a particular industry, with distortive consequences.

Yes, and that sounds like a better plan, but evidently that requires more political capital than is available.

There’s a missing component here: “Pray we do not regulate the deal further.”

Governments tend to be annoyed at having to regulate and will often ‘somewhat’ regulate the worst excesses and then do the equivalent of a staring contest with those regulated. If business push right up to the wire and fight every tiny loophole then they risk being hit with a second wave of much more severe regulations; if they generally comply and don’t embarrass regulators and politicians, then there isn’t need to spend more capital on better regulation. At some level it’s very costly to micromanage business regulation gestures at California but so there’s definitely some decisions to be made about How Far To Go Each Time that aren’t simply due to a lack of political willpower.

> Who pays for the logistics cost of moving and stocking these products in discount stores and giveaway centers?

All the examples I know of (Austria, Switzerland) are social clubs/associations (whatever that is called) and DO NOT depend on tax payer money.

It may be an incentive to produce less and restrict options available. It really depends on how much harm it does to the company to donate or mark down their product.

Food4Less I think is owned by a larger grocery store brand. They sell near due date or past due date foods at a reduced price. There are also third party past due grocers in secondary cities.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com