EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only. This might make production more complicated for a while, but nowadays it is much easier to predict demand and produce quicker in smaller batches. In the 90s you might need change a whole factory setting for every single piece of fabric but nowadays it is that most of it are produced in small sets anyway.

Can anyone clear why would it not be a good idea? My country can measured an increase of micro plastic from cloth fibers. We all know how pollution is getting worse. Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.

Food production decreased by 20% this year. I kid you not. Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.

I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?

I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in.

It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.

In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.

For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.

What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.

It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.

So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]

It’s shocking to see this legislated.

As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.

I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.

Can they ship it outside the EU and then destroy it? What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes? Why not just put a carbon tax per weight?

Great! Can we also ban the export of waste, please?

If you look at the backyards (so called garden) of homes of the advanced countries, from satellite maps, they mostly became junkyards of things. Inside homes are full of things that are rarely used. I have seen Amazon boxes going into bins unopened. Basically, homes are overflowing with goods, and throwing things away is going to become expensive. Advances in manufacturing, supply chains and online shopping have accelerated the saturation of markets.

Destruction of goods can't be stooped due the pace of inflow of inventory. This is like a conveyor belt jamming, where the downstream belts are draining slower than upstream ones.

Their plan for what to do instead is an indifferent shrug:

"Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse."

Does this apply to Chinese companies too or it is just another measure that disadvantages local producers?

Fashion production is responsible for 8-10% of all carbon emissions

https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2023/strengthening-s...

Far too much state interference in private matters. The EU is quickly becoming the new Soviet Union.

Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?

In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.

A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.

I anticipate a lot of unintended consequences lurking.

But manufacturing goods, shipping them halfway across the planet, then throwing them away is tremendously wasteful and is a gross misuse of limited resources.

A strange decision considering that high fashion is one of the few lucrative sectors of eu. LV cannot afford to give away their branded items , and i doubt they are willing to remanufacture or reuse. They may be a tiny fraction of the industry, but equally affected.

Might be to hinder large companies of moving fast-fashion storages into EU, so they cannot circumvent the 150EUR free import limit when it is dissolved, as that would move them into the supposed jaws of this "ban of destruction of fast-fashion" act.

considering H&M (Sweden), Zara (Spain), C&A (Netherlands) etc.. have lead the way into the clothes-that-self-destructs-in-a-year fashion, it was about time europeans did something about clothing waste, well done.

It's a great idea, but this seems incredibly hard to enforce. Shipments sometimes go missing, products can be damaged "unintentionally", etc. I hope they can achieve what they intend.

For some of these things I wonder if there are missing recyclable options. Like could you economically run a pile of defective clothing through a blender and and use it as fiber reinforcement in some kind of construction material or insulation?

EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.

Seems like policy ripe with unintended side effects. At the very least, it'll likely raise prices for consumers because the companies aren't allowed to manage their inventory as efficiently as they wish.

Now of course this might be a totally acceptable price to pay, I'm not necessarily arguing against it. It will just be conveniently omitted from public communications on the topic by the EU. For regulators, there never are tradeoffs, after all.

Companies' response: we'll just sew these unsold clothes into a large curtain, which is not apparel so we can then just burn it.

> an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn.

That is a crazy amount.

Fashion is a deeply irrational market that preys on the worst of human nature. There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. You might say ok, if people are dumb enough to buy that then that's not my problem. So now there are companies creating the environmental cost of destroying viable products just to sustain this kind of grifting.

On top of that I think that society, as a general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product.

The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.

What stops them from selling it to an affiliated entity for 1 eurocent and thus evade the ban?

This is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules.

The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.

Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.

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The linked page has this text:

"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."

Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.

The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.

I don't think that is very believable.

(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)

I think incorporating the cost of recycling and trash into the original purchase price should also become a global norm.

Hopefully, what this should motivate is the emphasis on products which can be _disassembled_, taken apart, other than through destruction.

It may also become less costly to take products with flaws and fix them up: Right now, it's not profitable; but if one can't just chuck them away, then the cost-benefit analysis changes.

Less throw-away fashion hopefully.

Incredibly, unbelievably stupid law. Waste is made when something unwanted is created, not when it is thrown out. Destruction or landfill is often the best option for all involved and modern landfills are very safe and sustainable. I worked in recycled clothing for a few years and it is not always or even often efficient.

This is forcing society to be inefficient to make some people feel a little better emotionally about something irrational.

That’s excellent news. I always find it strange that companies would go as far as to destroy unsold items instead of just donating or recycling them.

Finally, this never made any sense.

A good chunk of unsold clothing destruction happens because the brand considers fire sales to be brand damage. I have to wonder if they'll comply with this regulation willingly, or if they'll do some stupid workaround to make sure they can continue to pointlessly destroy clothing for the sake of a brand image.

Makes sense. You’d rather burn a birkin than let a poor person get their grubby little mitts on it. So the only way to stop them burning them, is to force them to do something with them.

This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.

Very tongue in cheek: In the latest fully analyzed year (2024) Sweden was CO2 net negative. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.

(https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldi...)

Looking forward to Hermes moving to NY

That this is an actual rule that other versions of have been a thing for years makes further convinced we are on the falling edge of capitalist society.

What keeps them from selling 1000 pieces for a cent to offshore companies in Africa/Asia that then burn what they bought?

Great news!

I live in America and I would like it to continue to be the leading economic zone.

The more Europe (and others) lag behind, the better my life will be :).

Typical Eurocrat meddling in people's affairs. The owners of those items should be free to do whatever they want. If the government is concerend about environmental damage, they should raise landfill fees or tax carbon, not limit what firms are allowed to do with their own things.

This is yet another conflict within the system we live in. On the one hand the EU is, as is most of the world, a capitalist society, but on the other it tries to be a leader in being environmentally friendly. One could assume these are possibly orthogonal, but they are not. Example: there was a baker in my co-working space who had a desk there to do his accounting. He would occasionally bring in unsold goods instead of essentially throwing them away. Which was nice, but it was obvious that people who got something for free would not go to his shop to buy some. Economically it makes more sense to destroy what you don't sell.

So a noble idea for sure, but it will fail because it goes against the core of the society we live in today. And the EU is primarily an economic union.

Problems that don't happen with actually good clothes.

If you buy from (It's mostly menswear brands here, sorry ladies) companies who specialize in actually quality vs "fake exclusivity", trends, or hype, than you'll never have to worry about this.

I'm specifically talking about selvedge denim brands (i.e. brave star, naked and famous, the osaka 5 brands, etc) high end leather makers (i.e. Horween, Shinki, and the people who make stuff with them like Schott), goodyear welted boots/shoes (i.e. Whites, Nicks, Grant Stone, Meermin, etc), high end made in the USA brands (i.e. Gustin) - this will literally never happen. It's far too damaging for them to destroy any kinds of their stock given it's natural exclusivity and the fact that they always sell basically everything they've got.

The fact that they had to pass this ban at all is a signal that normies are bad at buying clothes, and they should feel really bad about it too.

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Just another case of the EU being focused on unimportant things while looking away from real issues like cost of living crisis or energy costs. Though on the other hand, it may be for the best since they only make things actively worse.

Those 'On Sale' racks are going to take up half the shop now. Maybe they could have a deep discounted section where clothes are set at cost value. Should find an equilibrium and someone will buy them

Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.

Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.

Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.