> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.

In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring.

Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at.

Serious change is afoot, that much is undeniable.

You have already gotten two answers showing why this causes the manufacturer to lose money. A third: I hike, enough that pretty much all my gear out there is the good stuff. I do not care one bit about brands and would prefer not to be an ad for the outdoor companies--but I am anyway because it's not just a name.

Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. People like me don't want that big X on our stuff, if we learn Y is the same thing we are going to buy Y. And next year their sales of X drop because people like me waiting for the secondary stuff. Thus even if you do not consider brand dilution it's still in their interest to not sell the technical stuff in the secondary channels. When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.

Apparel firms exist not to clothe people as common sense would suggest but to make a profit, and this practice of erring on the side of overproduction is more profitable than under production. The perfect solution would be to produce exactly the number of goods they will sell, but forecasts aren't perfect so they overproduce. Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste, so this adds another incentive and removes the pollution externality they have been enjoying. So now either they err closer to under-production and risk missing out on sales or secondary market supply of their goods increases leading to possible brand dilution. So in the end the value of these companies ends up lower than before, less pollution, and apparel is cheaper. I'd like to know more about the equity and carbon effects of the process they will need to now follow. So they trade destruction with shipping a crate to Africa. What is the difference? Firms will be less profitable, manufacturing is reduced, who is impacted by that?

It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.

You should check out "Ascension" (it is on Paramount unfortunately). It gives a pretty close up look at China and factory culture and how their entire country is mobilized to push maximum consumption. The corporation's don't view Americans high per-capita consumption as a problem but instead wonder how to drive the rest of the world to consume the same absurd amount. It gives you a sort of fly on the wall view of the whole thing and it really makes you question what kind of psychotic road we are barreling down.

I agree with you about food though. I care about food and healthcare, very occasionally transportation. Can we focus on those instead of all the bullshit "amenities" corporations are churning out, are we really gonna decimate the planet for clothes, cosmetics and plastic conveniences?

> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.

I was in the bar in Revelstoke (where I lived, at the time) chatting with an old-timer the other year, and I asked him "is it just me, or did it used to snow more?"

He laughed, and told me that when he was a kid growing up, they weren't allowed to play on the tops of snowbanks because you'd get electrocuted by the high tension power lines. At the time, mid-winter, it was raining outside with a sad pile of slush maybe 1 foot deep.

Even when I was a kid in Revy, snowbanks were 10' deep mid-winter, every winter. It's been raining in town for the last 5 years, all winter. Winter's over. Time to start surfing, I guess.

>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.

It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.

> 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.

What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?

I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet.

The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.

Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.

I buy mostly from liquidators, where everything is sold as-is, but that doesn't stop end users from trying to make a claim, so many manufacturers often have methods for marking items that are not covered by the warranty. For example, Ryobi brands the items with a plastic welder, leaving a tell-tale wavy mark.

A robust liquidation market does a lot to prevent waste, and it reduces the cost of living for those who participate, so finding ways to allow products to be truly sold as-is is vital, otherwise the next most logical option is to put those items in a landfill.

It's also important that there's no legislative hurdles to seelling items as-is, or there may be no legal way to sell a salvage products without completely overhauling them, which is usually not cost effective.

> 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

Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.

(all assuming the product is not sold as "new")

Beautiful insight into processes that most of us never see, thanks!

My initial thought was "reusing an item is even better than recycling" but then realized that a warrantied item is quite likely to have flaws and get warrantied again very soon.

I have recently been trolling eBay for used computing equipment rather than buying new, after it was suggested I sell my old hardware that I don't think anyone would want. And man has that been a great experience, it's way more fun than browsing Newegg or doing pc part picking from new catalogs. I need neither the compute hardware nor the cost savings but it's a fun activity on its own, not unlike so many computer games where you do deck optimization or similar.

> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?

If you had bothered to read TFA, you'd have understood that the rules only apply to products that have fully passed QA, were being kept as stock but ended up not selling. They don't apply to experimental batches, to defective or damaged items, etc...

I heard that the clothes especially from high end brands are destroyed to keep the value of the brand high ie not to cannibalize sales. Which doesnt seem like good enough reason to burn 300.000+t of clothes (that created untold emissions)

They have exceptions for manufacturing defects

> aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.

I think some brands destroy the items to create an artificial scarcity that keeps their stuff 'exclusive'.

This is also very detrimental to buyer experience. When you search for a specific new product, prices from different sellers can vary widely. Most often there is no way to tell what is the reason for the difference. Is the cheapest offer simply the best deal, or is it a refurbished product, or even a fake?

> 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.

Isn't this TKMaxx's entire business model?

> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?

Isn't this why Ross exists? It's where I first heard the phrase "slightly irregular".

> had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.

Couldn't this be prevented by, say, sticking it on a drill press and drilling a large hole in it, and then recycling it?

> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?

Not covered by this regulation in spirit and (probably, haven't read it yet) in text. The spirit of the regulation is targeting fast-fashion on-prem retailers (think H&M, Primark, Zara and the likes) and online retailers like Shein, who have heaps of products that just aren't sold because they're not wanted - and also the occasional luxury brand trying to maintain scarcity [1].

> 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.

Yikes. That's something worth filing a lawsuit claim or at the very least terminating the business relationship.

[1] https://theweek.com/95179/luxury-brands-including-burberry-b...

What became of the relationship with the recycling company?

They quite clearly are. Burberry was caught a while ago https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983, but it's well known that every major upmarket brand was doing it to avoid the loss of prestige of sending the items to outlets.

Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.

It is not OK for anyone to litter, also not companies.

One can speculate that this is an easy way to force the companies to pay for their externalities - given that production in third countries are much harder to touch for the EU.

They're wontonly destroying and or dumping shitty goods that they got for cheap by externalizing costs.

Of course they're not. They're destroying goods that they can't sell at a profit because, for example, the cost of processing some unworn but returned goods outweighs the potential profit from those goods.

In TFA it's estimated that between 4% and 9% of clothing put on the EU market is destroyed before being worn. An admittedly high uncertainty, but even 4% of all clothing sold in the EU is still a heck of a lot of clothes.

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

They are...

Many brands prefer to burn their clothes than to send it to thrift shops or outlets for brand damage.

The EU is now putting your brand image a notch down compared to 'not wasting shit'.

I personally know that L’oreal will buy back and destroy products of theirs from outlets, just to keep the prices up. These items are often bought in bulk on grey markets by discount outlets. Not only does L’oreal destroy the products, they pay for them to do so. None of this is shocking IMO.

Luxury brands do in fact intentionally destroy old stock to make sure their value doesn't drop due to excess supply. I suppose the next step is making everything extremely limited like hypercars?

It's about preserving brand image. Destroying a product is favourable compared to selling it at a discount and making the brand you spent so much marketing appear "cheap".

Yeah, it is shocking. And that's why it needed to be legislated. Companies prove time and time again that they will take the easiest route to minimise losses and maximise profits, even if that means destroying the environment or wasting perfectly good merchandise to do so.

They're not destroying clothing because it's inherently unsellable, or hazardous, or damaged beyond repair. They destroy it because it's easier to dump excess stuff than it is to set up responsible channels to get rid of it.

Many "high fashion" shithouses intentionally destroy excess stock so that their precious branded status symbols can't get into the hands of the filthy proles, which would dilute their brand recognition.

These "regulatory burdens", as you call them, are the only thing holding back companies from further messing up the planet and I welcome them with open arms.

Not sure if sarcasm or cluelessness.

I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).

The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.

Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.

This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.

Donations would already be a great thing. This law makes it feasible in boardrooms to justify donations. Donations to shelters, developing countries and otherwise.

if you read the article...

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.

I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.

European politicians will wear the clothes nobody wants so they can be decommissioned lawfully.

>What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes

In theory companies would eventually be forced to produce less items nobody wants, although this is just an additional incentive in that natural process.

It seems like countries will do anything but tax carbon.

yep, they do https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...

> What happens if truly nobody wants those clothes?

from TFA

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

Worst case would be recycling the fibers, presumably.

Maybe donate it to poor countries?

When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.

Maybe they could bury the clothes and call it carbon sequestration. I assume that clothes are made of mostly hydrocarbons.

I wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean)

What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...

Outlets could be a key here.

I suspect this end up like US "recycling" of plastic: pay another country to "reuse/recycle" the waste, and that country then dumps it in a landfill, dumps it in the ocean, or burns it.

They should pay people to wear them.

So they’ll donate it to someone who will then destroy it.

Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.

And in pre-industrial societies, peasants (almost entirely women, ranging from children to the elderly) commonly spent around 100 hours of labor to produce a single square yard of fabric to clothe their families (fabric was too expensive for peasants to buy, so most spun it at home).

So yeah, considering how necessary fabric is to human life, that isn't a terribly surprising figure.

Citation for the 100-ish hours: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an...

Cheap clothing is a civilizational achievement and good for human welfare.

So carbon emissions are bad, but then we should price carbon and not micromanage clothing inventory.

Fashion? No, absolutely not. Textiles in general? Maybe, but almost certainly not.

This is the actual quote on the page you cite:

"Today, the combined textile and apparel sectors contribute as much as 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions."

Notice the unusual way they spell "fashion"...

For comparison, crypto and datacenters constituted 2% in 2022 (probably 3%+ now): https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/08/15/carbon-emis...

Local producers.

Businesses importing from non-EU countries have to shoulder the responsibility in stead of the manufacturer.

You have an odd perception of what constitutes "micro-targetting".

Why apparel specifically? Because apparel is specifically the consumer industry where enormous quantities of unsold product are intentionally destroyed to then be replaced in the market by newly made equivalent articles.

Why was USB-C mandated specifically on Apple devices? Well here's the thing: it wasn't. It was mandated on smartphones in general, and Apple was the only company that specifically tried to fight the regulation because apparently they're special.

> micro-targeted > mandated USB-C on Apple devices

There is no law that states specifically Apple must specifically use USB-C. IIUC, the law is that all brands/manufacturers should use the same type of charger, an industry standard. That was apparently USB-C. Apple was the odd one out and had to change. If something better comes along, the industry as a whole can upgrade.

I dont really care about waste too much as I think it's a non-issue blown out of proportion, but mandating standards and interoperability creates a lot of value for consumers and prevents anticompetive behavior.

I have clothes from all three brands. They most definitely don't fall apart after a year (or two, or three).

Is it? 4-9% of unsold portion seems reasonable. Unless they actually mean 4-9% of all manufactured.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr...

Oh, it's really percentage of all produced. Weird that they worded it in a way that makes their argument weaker.

>Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.

This number seems low, so >90% of unsold clothes are worn? Are they all donated? 4-9% of unsold clothes could be defective/damaged or something.

I would have guessed a much higher number, and the number possibly being as low as 4% seems like good news to me.

Brand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.

Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.

I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.

Yes, because shareholder value comes first. Ffs

I do hope they come up with something like that.

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

Nonsense. They can.

> 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.

Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.

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

False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.

To clarify, this is a consumer protection law which is set in all EEA countries. Discounts are regulated to prevent stores from tricking their customers into thinking they are getting a product at a lower then usual price. You can only claim a product is on discount if the price has been lowered from a previous price less then x-days ago (I think 2 weeks is not uncommon), after which this discount becomes the new price.

As a European immigrant to the USA, it infuriates me to no end that American stores are allowed to use the words “price” and “discount” interchangeably. When I get things “on a discount” I expect to be paying lower then usual price.

producers and sellers will have to optimize via better consumption prediction or via less previous season throw away.

good comment, but of course it's downvoted on hackernews

eu is inefficent to be stable, until it is not, by design

Give a man donated clothing and they will have clothes ... teach a man to become and indentured servant on minimum wage and they will be able to buy clothes every year for the rest of their lives.

They can just pull the labels off or relabel them. That’s the usual approach

That they may not be able to trust those Afriasian companies to actually burn them. Then they'll compete against normal offerings from the same producers + may also cause direct brand damage in case the products are defective or become faulty in any way during the long way from Afriasia back to Europe.

As a European, it seems absurd to me one would celebrate the short term benefits of being one of the by far most destructive (per capita) countries on earth regarding global climate (challenged only by a few oil states).

Is a temporary advantage worth destroying the planet forever?

Well put. Of course noone says that this will increase clothes price for everyone.

The assumption here is that clothes are being thrown away because they are worn out.

Except that’s not why the majority of clothes are thrown away. The real reason they are thrown away is because of size changes and fashionability.

HN probably has an over representation of the types of people who wear out clothes and even here it’s likely a minority that actually do wear out clothes.

Wow, you know what never happens? People changing size.

The government can do more than one thing at a time.

> 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.

Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.

[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/fashion-waste-problem-fabrics-...

It's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.

Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.

IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.

> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.

That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.

No, it's not just Zara and other fast fashion.

Premium brands really don't want to seel it UNLESS it's to the right people for the high price: https://fashionlawjournal.com/deadstock-destruction-why-fash...

> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking

I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?

It costs a company nothing to donate an unsold coat to a homeless shelter.

Oh no, poor fast fashion companies won't be able to continue maximizing their profits by using slave labor to manufacture ginormous amounts of garbage that goes out of fashion in a week. Guess they'll have to reduce their garbage output or switch to manufacturing quality stuff that can hang out on a store's shelf for a bit longer. The fucking horror. Fuck them.

textile waste, largely, is plastic waste.

Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic).

in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee.

fast fashion is by far the worst offender though.

Where? According to Wikipedia, suicide is no longer illegal anywhere in Europe.

You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.

> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.

While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?

Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.