Hacker News Reader

Comment by rzwitserloot | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com