The invisible hand of the market will rectify this of course. Nothing to see here.

Sounds like a lot of extra work which will make this kind of behaviour less financially viable vs. just selling or overproducing it.

That was my initial thought too; just make it a non-deductible charge, ideally, payable from executive compensation.

Or they could also just levy higher taxes/fees on synthetic fibers and clothing that cannot be repaired (there are several reasons), and at the same time support the industry for natural, truly biodegradable fibers and their research?

This seems like more ivory tower navel gazing.

And that doesn’t even touch on all the jurisdictional and financial shenanigans that immediately come to my mind how you can circumvent that.

Government legislatures really should have red team groups that have to be included in legislative processes with the objective of punching holes into legislation.

Destroying unsold clothes is financially the most efficient thing to do. It remains unclear to me how taking actions to maintain higher markups on products would be socially efficient in any way. Companies of course can keep doing it, they just will face financial and legislative repercussions for it.

Yes, with the exception of ‘unsafe’ where a shoe is used and/or non-cosmetically defective.

The law reduces wasted production inputs — materials, energy, and labor — as well as production outputs — wearable shoes, here. This directly regulates a practice by brands where they destroy wearable clothing rather than see their latest branded fashion worn by people who bought it at a discount or received it for free. This also directly regulates corporations from using grinders, melters, incinerators, landfills, and overseas ‘recycling’ (=landfills) to replace warehouses with retailers, accelerate product cycle times and derive FOMO sales benefits without the cost of reducing their batch sizes. The apparel industry is destroying something like one third of what it produces, so it’s certainly earned regulation of its ‘this shall not be sold’ decisions to its disfavor.

I would expect Nike in the EU market to either increase product prices and/or decrease release intervals until their inventory supply is lowered to meet demand while claiming that it’s the EU’s fault that their hottest shoes aren’t yet available, rather than maintaining their existing cycle times and quantities by donating their wearable, branded, wealth-signaling shoes to be worn by poor people. (Perhaps that’s already begun?)

Because it promotes recycling instead of being another tax.

Indeed. Rather than deal with it, there will just be some shell company in non EU they can export to and have it destroyed there...

Though that will obviously incur a larger cost than today.

How do you figure?

There is a lot more information about it here: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/strategy/circular-economy/e..., and the full (current) text being here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

As far as I can tell (although I'm no lawyer, sorry Nike), the point is to reduce waste and to increase recycled content in use. With these two main objectives, what Nike is doing seem to be fitting within that. It's not the "destruction" itself that is bad, but what you do with that after the destruction, recycling it doesn't create waste (or maybe, as much waste) as outright destroying+throwing all of it.

You're half joking but this actually happens already. As you can imagine there's a lot of backlash on dumping good clothes on Europe itself so they export them in bad conditions just to have it burned out of sight.

https://changingmarkets.org/report/trashion-the-stealth-expo...

And it's not just old clothes being discarded, another related study showed that around 30% of clothes returned from online stores are not even looked over to see if they're worth selling again and are discarded straight away.

At least they're trying.

it is not the year 1800 any more, some things have changed

Some stuff you basically have to give away for people to buy, some stuff just isn't so attractive to most people. With limited store space, you could miss out on profits if you don't update what you have available. Every item you carry is another item you cannot fit to carry.

I guess it comes down to if that is considered recycling. I'd personally consider it such, but not sure what the legal definitions will be.

Now I'm imagining someone dumped in the river chained to a pallet of t-shirts rather than a cinder block.

I mean at this point they may as well have a deal to let the mafia steal cars in the parking lot and share the benefits...

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.

This is already the case in France since I believe 2016.

There's was uptick around this story 4 months ago, so I'm not sure if those were bots resurfacing it or whether something changed in the law.

1. There are no Whole Food in europe 2. Clothes don't go bad and poison people in general

I did a remodel last year. I filled 2 largeskips by the end of it. This is the first large job this house has had in 10 years, and it’s a 130 year old house.

The cafe at the bottom of my street has roughly that amount of waste collected every 2 weeks - they fill their commercial trash bin every 2 days. I don’t know how much of that is waste vs old food but they generate orders of magnitude more waste than I do even when I’m making a huge mess.

> I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once

Very interesting point of view, as someone who never done a home remodel, it surely brought a new perspective for me.

> That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing.

I'm not sure, if you have two kids who are into trendy clothing and you're able to let them make choices around clothing, then I can imagine that there is quite high turnover on those things.

Besides, the proposed rules seems to try to address waste generated by businesses rather than individuals or families. I guess currently they throw outdated clothing in order to make space for the new clothing lines?

One of my clients (a clothing brand) burns something in the range of 60-100 tonnes of clothes at the end of each season (4/year) here in the EU. They do it because it is easier and cheaper than to optimise the logistics chain. It is also cheaper than to recycle it. And they refuse to discount it or sell to secondary outlets to ”avoid brand dilution”.

The keyword is _unsold_. If you bought clothes, they aren’t unsold

This is about businesses, not families.

I reuse everything from remodels. Seems a shame to throw out always. And other skips are getting bought by others to use in their building projects.

That can be penalised too.

We really have to get away from the idea that curtailing intentional industrial waste production is futile. Perhaps in American style capitalism it is because the system is rigged and the biggest money bag always wins. But we don't want this here at all.

We have to get forward as humanity and treat our planet with respect. Otherwise we won't have one worth living on. Making money isn't the only thing that counts.

That loophole has become very difficult:

https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/...

On a planet with infinite resources it may be a mad world. On one where oil will be depleted at some point and fast fashion brands are collectively creating thousands of disposable plastic clothes models in dozen of millions of nuits per month, it's common sense to limit the madness of this industry

So I buy my own factory and produce my own pollutants and I dont have the right to do whatever I want with them, mad world.

Yes, clothing companies and stores will very commonly destroy clothes if they determine that selling at a discount would undermine the brand value. They do things like cutting holes in the soles of shoes before discarding them.

Isn't that recycling instead of destroying?

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.

My dad worked at a logistics facility, the amount of perfume he took home was ridiculous - and you’d think that something like perfume would never go stale. It does from a brand perspective and they do everything they can to have it destroyed so it doesn’t end up being sold to prices that would hurt the perceptive value. Obviously he wasn’t allowed to take it either.

It's companies dumping unsold ranges of clothes as new ranges come in. Not people.

I lived in a small building along with a French family with 5 children. The amount of trash they had every week was incredible. We had our small trash bag and theirs would be a heap of bags chest high. I sometimes wondered if he was throwing out trash from his business too.

While living there the system changed from paying for a disposal service to pre-buying special bags that cost around 2.50chf per 35L bag. The French family moved back to France within a couple of months.

Is fast fashion not a thing in the US? I was under the impression it was, but perhaps I was wrong...

I think this largely is about brand protection. They worry that discounting the clothes means they will just cannibalize sales of that brand's full-price clothes.

If the full price is €6, there isn’t much room for a discount. Destroying and freeing up store space for something that does sell can easily be profitable.

Thats also the case for a lot of electronics, it’s not just a problem with clothes

Artificial scarcity + the urge to impose fashion cycles, sadly

Selling cheaper cannibalizes next season's fashion.

Particularly for “luxury” brands as selling at a discount devalues the brand. I use quotes because most of those brands sell cheap stuff (double digit manufacturing cost using forced labor [0]) but with a fancy logo making them worth 4 figures.

[0] Better link: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/jul/24/made-in-ital...

> Is it cheaper to destroy than sell at discount?

Yes.

This has nothing to do with consumers throwing away their old clothes. It's specifically about companies throwing away clothes that were never bought by consumers.

It's really different depending on if the manufacturer has Brand reputation or is just a replaceable good. For no name jeans, they probably just keep making them and donate the leftovers.

For a high-end designer dress, may be better to not manufacture large or small sizes that don't sell frequently.

Currently, unpopular sizes are over-produced because they are subsidized by popular sizes. If the unpopular sizes have to be paid for, the logistics and production processes would push producers to under-produce popular sizes.

A key insight is that what constitutes an "unpopular size" is a very local phenomenon. Every point of retail sells a different, semi-predictable distribution of sizes. It is much cheaper to ship sizes no one will buy than to manage the logistics of exactly matching local demand for a specific distribution of sizes.

I asked the same question to someone who works in this business and got an eye-opening detailed explanation that made it obvious in hindsight why things the work the way the do. The difference in product cost and logistics infrastructure was not small.

Normally you can overproduce clothing and make three of every size or something, knowing that it only costs a couple bucks to make another shirt, for instance. And you can throw out if you make too many. If it's illegal to throw it out, maybe that raises the price from $2 to $4 because now you have to pay for storage for a long time. So you'll buy less inventory at the start, which usually means cutting less common sizes first

How do you reuse plaster or drywall walls/ceilings? I’m fairly reuse-friendly, but that stuff goes straight in the dumpster for practical reasons.

Our planet has effectively infinite resources. We're probably past peak oil extraction and have plenty left, nevermind that the vast majority of clothes aren't made of plastic. This policy is dumb as hell.

But when does a product become waste? When the owner says it is.

> The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

And per OP article:

1. This only applies to companies above a certain size.

2. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of textiles are destroyed each year in the EU before use.

3. In Germany alone, companies destroy tens of millions of garments per year under just one of the existing justifications for destroying garments before use.

Makes it more expensive for everyone and also decentivize donating food to homeless or anyone in need.

> The state of perishable goods is much worse. A lot is dumped in food and short shelf-life items. Nothing can be done here.

That’s already regulated in multiple countries

Transportation would be costly, but it could be that in whole it would be much cheaper than discarding them in let’s say in Germany. I can imagine the price to destroy 1kg of clothes in Serbia way less than in Germany

If your minimum run is 1000 of a size, and you can only really sell 500 because it's an uncommon size, and you would prefer to sell at full price or not at all, seems like making that size no longer fits your plans.

What is considered recycling? Is convert the clothing into fuel pellets considered recycling? What about thermal decomposition for feedstocks for chemical manufacture (and what if 75% of the mass isn't useful for that and is instead burned in turbines for cogeneration)?

Down-cycling is a thing. Even aluminum and steel get down-cycled.

I have no sympathy for recycling fetishism.

It seems plausible. Less common sizes have a lower chance of being sold out, so if they can no longer be destroyed at the end and need to be further managed at lower quantities, it can become more cost effective to simply not make them. Whether it is true or not, I don't know.

Luxury brands don't want the poors to be seen wearing their merchandise.

It hurts brand perception.

I agree we should, but that does not mean that a particular regulation is the right way to do it. Its very hard to close loopholes and exploitation of exemptions.

Wasn’t it the US that caught European companies in the emissions scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

Turning shoes into carpet padding is probably "downcycling". I think recycling would mean most of the shoe would be used for new shoes or something of similar complexity, retaining the grade and value of the input materials.

Downcycling is when you reuse something for a less refined purpose. For instance you can use contaminated plastics (im the sense of somewhat mixed types, bits and bobs of labels etc) to make humble park benches, but you won't be then reusing that low grade park bench plastic to make the Hubble space telescope with.

Still, downcycling into carpet is better than dumping the shoes on a coral atoll of course. Yet it's a step below recycling.

> 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.

Ya, and this is hugely driven by "Fast Fashion". If you're a company which made raincoats since the 1880s and the style with more buttons and few zips starts to be less popular maybe you make fewer of those and more of the zip ones next season, and in five years you've gone from 90% button 10% zip to the reverse. Companies like that don't destroy a lot of stock. They do a few discount sales, end-of-line price slashes, that sort of thing, but this "destroy clothes to make money" wasn't a thing.

In fast fashion you're shipping a knock-off of the $8000 designer swimsuit seen in a Paris catwalk show at the start of July, a preview of your $150 version was shown in a TikTok video that blew up on Friday and your customers will be wearing them on the beach next weekend. By August that product is old news, you do not want that $150 product available for $5 in a discount store or your consumers might rebel - so you want to burn it instead and the EU says no, that's a perfectly good swimsuit, sell it to somebody who needs a swimsuit. Or give it away.

If "fast fashion" no longer makes economic sense now, too bad, I guess you won't do it any more. The EU's citizens do not want you to destroy the planet they live on just to get more money. We made money up. Stop being crazy.

Did they still have children wearing diapers? If so, that's your answer.

You didn't say where you live, and what kind of waste.

Is your separated into general/food/plastic/cardboard? As often it's the plastic bin that overflow if families are not cooking from ingredients but buying ready made food.

I think the children alone are enough of an explanation…

It definitely is, according to my experience traveling to NYC

Fiction, there are places that already do this without any of these fabled effects

From previously linked text:

> The concept of destruction as outlined in this Regulation should cover the last three activities on the waste hierarchy, namely recycling, other recovery and disposal. Preparation for reuse, including refurbishment and remanufacturing, should not be considered destruction. Preventing destruction will reduce the environmental impact of those products by reducing the generation of waste and by disincentivising overproduction.

Basically, does it end up as waste or does it end up being repurposed in some good way? If the former, we should find a way of getting rid of it, if it's the latter, it's A-OK!

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.

This isn't really surprising in a low margin industry. If you are making a 2% margin on the average perfume bottle, and then you liquidate it at -3% because it's cheaper than destroying it, you can accidentally end up anchoring customer perceptions on a price with like a -1% margin which actually will destroy the business over time.

High margin industries get more complicated to model, of course.

That's interesting. Mind telling how regulation would stop dumping of expired or unconsumed food and other stuff?

how does NOT destroying edible food make food more expensive?

What typically happens is that people buy up these clothes in massive auction/lots, then just sell them on Amazon. As Amazon joins all listings together, 100 sellers of the same item all have the same reviews/etc.

So some slightly damaged shirt, or a shirt returned and such, ends up sold by these secondary sellers as new. This is part of why people destroy clothes upon return, so that secondary sellers can't buy their own returned product at $1, and sell it making more than the original seller would have.

Not to mention, all returns I've been noticing, resold from Amazon, are heavily treated now with some sort of spray. I can only presume bedbugs were getting returned with used clothing...

> prefer to sell at full price or not at all

That really only applies to luxury designer brands where selling at a discount can dilute the brand prestige, is Gucci, Versace, etc. really destroying unsold inventory at large volumes vs. standard retailers?

Wouldn't it be cheaper to only produce 500 items, instead of producing 1k, and throwing half of it away?

But clothes aren't perishable, so why would you only be able to sell 500, rather than it just taking twice as long to sell all 1000?

Hmm... say you estimate that you will sell 1000 items of "normal size", you stock 1000 items, and hope that you sell all of them. You end up selling 900, you have a remaining 10%.

No say you estimate that you will sell 10 items of "less common size", you stock 10 items, and hope that you sell all of them. You end up selling 9, you have a remaining 10%.

How does that make a difference?

That’s pretty outdated, luxury brands have been selling cheaper clothes since decades at this point. It’s not uncommon to see people without wealth wearing luxury branded clothes (though of course they are mass produced and aren’t the actual luxurious clothes, just a way to wear the brand name)

Naming and shaming is a reasonable first step.

We need judges that don't just look at the letter of the law. We can already use computers for that.

Ok, what's your point?

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.

For sure high end perfumes are high margin products. Can’t be a lot of cost in producing a $100 perfume.

But I also feel like it’s a bit besides the point. Seeing pallet after pallet of perfumes getting destroyed every month should be an indication that something is not right.

Check France 2016 food waste ban: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/04/french-law-for...

And the more recent non-food waste ban follow-up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Waste_and_Circular_Econom...

Yes. The law was motivated by reports of luxury retailers destroying their entire stock every year. Usual stores just discount stuff until it sells.

I don’t think m that’s happening in EU. Most of the clothes I see on Amazon are the same as I find on Temu. Only the prices are higher on Amazon

Fashionable clothes are perishable. "Nobody" wants to buy clothes from last season or last year.

Storing the clothes until they come back in fashion is expensive... and some materials really won't be useful after sitting for 10 years anyway. (Elastic bands really are perishable)

1k in this example would be the minimum needed to make it worth the static cost of setting up and tearing down the production run.

Because it won't take twice as long, but 10x as long. There's typically a large rush on a new design, followed by a slow tick in sales. Meanwhile you have to pay to warehouse it, pay tax on the inventory, etc.

1. Come up with a regulation idea

2. do a bunch of studies to validate it

3. go through a pretty complicated, comprehensive, pretty long review process to debate and make it work within the existing regulatory system

4. eventually implement it

5. measure its impact

6. adapt or revoke according to the results

We are at the 4th step. Why would you assume your concerns haven’t been already taken in account in all the previous steps? It’s all public, you can look for the reasoning and justification

You have to start somewhere, no? We have laws against stealing and murder and folks don’t usually go around saying they should be removed from the books because some people still steal and commit murder.

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.

Perfume? Low-margin? Getting hits ranging between 50% and 85% depending on how luxury the brand is considered to be...

They have to deal with less sales and or storing excess inventory.

Let's say you have some bruised bananas. You either have to keep them on the shelf till they rot (less space for sellable product) or donate them and then people won't buy as many bananas, so you need to raise the price.

Many years ago I worked in the printing industry. F.ex. a client wants 100 products of something (e.g. posters or flyers), usually it was more cost effective to produce a 1000 (or more) and then throw away 900 the client didn't need. Obviously a huge waste of material.

Because we say “science!” every time. And yet, our leaders have been unable to explain why we all know someone who was raped, bombed or killed with a machete in our close social circles. Countless crimes are being done by leaders who say “It is proven by science that these side-effects won’t happen.”

All your scientific studies mean nothing at the moment that legislators want to twist them to reach a solution.

Works for clothes, minimum wage salaries, losing against the Russians, letting the French suffer without aircon, or raping women. Leading a country through neutral scientific studies is the idea of “modernism”, a pipe dream from the 1960 implemented, for example, by Disney in EPCOT. We don’t live in modernist countries - perhaps post-modernist for some, but secular for 2/3rd of the world.

There is no global definition of "less common size". It varies greatly from one locale to another. At the same time, production has relatively high fixed costs and is centralized.

It would be very expensive for the global factory to customize the distribution of sizes manufactured for a retail store in Des Moines, Iowa. The order is tiny and it would require customized logistics, all of which greatly increases cost and complexity.

Yes, but those laws are pretty effective. They do deter murderers and thieves, and take them out of society so they cannot repeat their offences.

Ill thought out regulations can make things worse - I am convinced this is the case for the UK's Online Safety Act, for example. That (and the proposed ban on social media for under 16s) is also promoted on "we must do something" grounds.

I am very much in favour of some proposed changes under the law - e.g. improving repairability and reusability of some product categories.

I have doubts that some discouragement of destruction of new products fixes the big underlying problem with clothing: the production of cheap junk not designed to last. Under these regulations (at least as summarised in the article), they offer it to charity, charity rejects it, then they are free to destroy it.

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.

Isn't that law exactly trying to avoid that kind of waste?

Do you have proof of that assertion?

People eating donated bananas are not buying bananas if there are none available for free. They are just not eating bananas.

Why would this law make things worse?

What would your proposal be for fixing what you’ve identified as the underlying problem?

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?

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

Unfortunately, there is an issue with food pantries where people who are not in need use them because free food. People can be shameless. It is a minority but still too common and doesn't come with the stigma it deserves in some places. In Seattle, I've even heard a few anecdotes of people trying to resell food from the food pantries.

This behavior does impact prices in the normal market at the margin, particularly if it becomes normalized.

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.

Says who? Would you prefer free bananas or paying?

Yes. But in some cases the waste will be avoided by not doing a production run at all if the minimum production quantity is too high and the law prohibits destroying the unwanted product.