[cyclotron3k]

This is a fantasy.

No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.

So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.

[eddythompson80]

lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now. It took China putting on regulations on their side to disrupt that industry. Now you have to find other smaller economies to do that.

[ryantgtg]

You appear to be agreeing with the person you’re replying to.

[eddythompson80]

I'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law says we must do this. Please contact your representatives you dumb fucks"

[bonzini]

The original comment says "sell them to «resale» companies". Selling goods means being paid for it, while you and the parent comment are both saying money goes in the opposite direction.

[appreciatorBus]

When you negotiate the price to ”sell” at, it’s perfectly legitimate for that price to be negative.

[nerdsniper]

Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.

[ldng]

I don't think you can sell at loss in Europe (not sure, happy to be corrected), so might be small but it'll still be positive. The bet is it will be high enough to be a deterrent. The other bet is that at some point the rest of the world will push back being a corporate dumpster.

[yowayb]

This particular thread of the argument can go on for a while. I can't well articulate the doubts I have because I'm not in the industry, but many such well-meaning laws have a tendency to backfire once given enough time for bad/poor actors to game it.

[DigiEggz]

Brings to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

[belorn]

There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.

The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.

The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.

[thelastgallon]

Oil companies have been doing this for over a century in US. Sell abandoned well to a small llc, llc files bankruptcy, big OilCo off the hook! Everyone happy!

[55555]

Are you referring to this case? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/17/swedish-queen-... Thanks

[shiroiuma]

>The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner.

This is what these countries get for having weak laws that allow people to do illegal dumping and then hide behind a corporate veil to avoid accountability.

[hilbert42]

Trouble is if democracy worked properly then corporate entities wouldn't be able to lobby and influence governments to weaken laws out of self-interest.

[ryantgtg]

Read their comment and yours? What great advice. I would suggest you do the same, but I think you'll continue to misread it.

> No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.

> lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now.

They are saying that paying to dispose of the clothes/waste is how it's done. And then... you said the same thing. Perhaps you're assuming they're just taking a guess, rather than coming at it with understanding that this is how it has been done for a while.

[wakawaka28]

There's already strong financial incentives to not over-produce. Nobody wants to dump cash into inventory that can't sell. Trying to force them to sell it all is going to reduce choice and availability for consumers, unless the businesses find a workaround. I'm pretty sure they will find a workaround, and it won't be to sell at a steep loss to the same market that refused the products to begin with. But these workarounds will cost money, and consumers will pay for the fantasy that waste is being reduced.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

They will be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar so that some fraction of them can be resold for cheap in Africa or somewhere else poor. Those companies can then dispose of them however they wish.

The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever.

And, as usual, EU regulations achieve absolutely nothing -- if anything, this is worse than nothing.

[epolanski]

1. Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.

2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.

3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.

[lan321]

1. You can buy a cotton tshirt from LIDL for 3 bucks and it'll hold for years. It won't be cut perfectly or have the softest material but it's definitely not bad.

Of course, if I get it from Temu for 6 cents it'll probably fall apart in a week, but modern clothing isn't really covered by "the cheapest thing I can find".

Same for ultralight fabrics, that, while lovely in summer, usually get trashed in a season or two simply because the thing weighs fuck all.

I'd even say we're in a golden age for clothing. I can get a motorcycle jacket that can slide at 80kmh for 40 bucks with shoulder and elbow protectors and a thermo layer insert.

[epolanski]

Cheap cotton cannot hold for years, the fiber length and yarn quality makes it simply impossible. On top of that, cheap cotton is bleached and fast dyied which makes the clothing change after few washings.

I mean if you mean "hold" like, you can't still wear it albeit it looks nothing like it did two washings before, of course it does.

But then you look exactly like what you buy, someone with worn low quality clothing which looked nice in the shop and first wear.

[lan321]

The 3 buck LIDL tshirt isn't really intended for casual business attire tbh.

If you want good looking (symmetrically cut, better stitched, etc) tshirts long term I then raise you Uniqlo with 7 bucks per DRY synthtic tshirt and 12 for a supima cotton one. I pretty much daily them and in over at least 3 years they haven't shown significant aging. Only the supima ones have mostly lost the "supima" text on the inside at the back of the neck area.

Comically enough I also have 3 shirts from Primark for 1$ each that are now at least 5 years old, probably more like 7 that still look fine. I still wear them to work without worry. The shaping of them was all over the place though. No two in the pile were identical.

Dying could be an issue, I wear gray and black ones so your mileage may vary with colored washing. I also don't blast them at 90 degrees C but rather 60 for black/gray, 40 for everything else.

Or your standards are just ultra high compared to mine, for better or worse. From my perspective tshirt quality ends at Uniqlo and I then go to Olympus business/casual shirts. From there the only option I have to look more businessman-y is the wool suit.

[wolvoleo]

Same with my Jack and Jones T-shirts. 3 for 20€ and last for years.

[kapep]

> 2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.

The market for regular second-hand clothes is on the verge of collapsing in Germany though. Charities are flooded with low quality and unsalable stuff ever since it was made illegal to throw away clothes in the regular trash. You must bring them to recycling facilities instead now. It not profitable for charities to sort through them because of the volume. There is a market for quality vintage clothes but that's a totally different thing.

> 3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.

That's probably the only thing that motivates brands not to overproduce. But lets be real, they will rather find loopholes for destroying them instead of selling them for cheap.

[BoredomIsFun]

> Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.

Hard disagree. Live in Central Asia, buy locally produced relatively cheap clothes and they have been lasting years so far.

[epolanski]

You're not really describing fast fashion, aren't you?

[BoredomIsFun]

No I am describing "modern closing", as in GP post.

[red-iron-pine]

modern clothing that is not made in the EU -- which is mostly fast-fashion.

and the ones usually making it outside of the EU are tied to large European corps.

"I eat apples grown down the street, so EU apple law is bad"

[throwaway2037]

What about Uniqlo and Muji? They make exactly what you describe: mid-budget solid apparel. Their clothes last for years and resist multiple washings.

[jen20]

Both of those situations sound like a net win.

[Loughla]

Isn't it a thing that poor countries can't get their own textile and clothing companies going because of donations or cheap used clothes? I'm fairly certain that's a thing.

[johnnyanmac]

There seems to be 3-4 other issues colluding with that. If customers prefer or can't afford new domestic clothes, then it would make it hard for a business to succeed.

[jpfromlondon]

a firm isn't going to sell them to reseller in the third world as it will cause brand dilution, additionally current customer base will feel shortchanged and shop elsewhere.

Much more likely is as the op said: selling to a company that will dispose of the stock.

[singpolyma3]

How is achieving the exact goal worse than nothing?

[ThrowawayTestr]

Retailers don't want their excess inventory to be sold at a discount. They'd rather it be destroyed. A small fee to have someone else destroy it is just a business expense. The OP should have put "sell" in scare quotes.

[blitzar]

> A small fee to have someone else destroy

They just write it off, Jerry.

All these big companies, they write off everything.

[Ntrails]

Donate it to some charity which will ship it to Africa for you, so you can get the tax write off, _even better_

[nullocator]

China for decades paid the U.S. and Europe for their "recycling", this practice was only banned in recent years. Clothes seem more valuable than plastics waste.

[8note]

clothes is plastics waste

[master-lincoln]

Can be, but there are also natural fibers from e.g. cotton, wool or hemp. But yeah many fast fashion products are polyester..

[James_K]

That was because you could make money by turning old things into new things. Not so with garbage disposal, a service for which you almost always have to pay.

[overfeed]

> Not so with garbage disposal

There is already a healthy trade for second-hand clothing to 3rd world countries (see pics of kids with "<Final's losing team> World Champions 2022"). The prices will be better for brand new clothes. The gray distribution channels already exist and will readily pay for new clothes - at steep discounts, but pay for them nonetheless.

[James_K]

Describing it as a market is not entirely correct. The clothes these people wear are garbage. As a species, we produce more clothes than we could ever wear. I am reminded of a story of a charity that accepted clothing donations for the victims of an American hurricane, and immediately had to stop because their warehouse filled up. Many clothes are not even worn once before they're thrown away, and one of the cheaper ways to dispose of them is dumping them on 3rd worlders. It's quite dystopic really the underclasses who dig through our trash.

[speleding]

… and put local African cloth producers out of business. The same happened with shoes sent to African countries by NGOs. Well intentioned, but local shoe manufacturers went out of business. The local population did not really benefit, because traders would get a hold of the free shoes and sell them on for just a bit less than locally produced shoes.

[hinkley]

I’ve heard there’s a practice of selling bundles of clothes to Africa and then the purchases pick through the bundle for what’s good and what’s useless. The impression I was left with is that this used to be more lucrative but now you’re almost as likely to get complete garbage as something good. So it’s like a sad loot box.

[Saline9515]

It's a big issue in Africa, as it completely destroyed to local clothing industry. As a side effect, you see people wearing westerner style clothing even in the midst of Africa, which is quite unsettling.

[hinkley]

Now that you mention it, whatever I was watching that talked about this, also addressed the negative impact on the local textile industry.

So do you expect this law will increase the amount of dumping? Sounds like it might.

[Broken_Hippo]

That's not really true.

Some places sell their cardboard scrap. I'm guessing that places with the right sorts of metal scrap get paid for their waste.

And folks have to pay for much of the rest. Some of the issue with dumping waste in a business's trash is that the business pays directly for waste removal in many places, unlike a lot of private folks, which pay through taxes.

This is the current state of things. What has changed is the sort of service that they need to pay for. Instead of destruction, they'd be paying for recycling or resale. Like now, they have the option of donation or reduced prices.

[citrin_ru]

> a) not over produce

Forecasting demand is hard. If you will produce less than needed you will sell less than could have sold (lost revenue) while overproducing is relatively cheap.

> b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.

The main reason unsold items are destroyed is to avoid price depression - giving unsold items for next to nothing will reduce future demand for full priced items. It's wasteful and harmful for environment but as others noted it's hard to fight with this given that destruction could be outsourced to other countries.

[hilbert42]

"financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing."

That's not how it works in practice, with the economies of scale/production it makes more economic sense to produce goods surplus to requirements then destroy remaining stock so it will not detract from/devalue sales of next/forthcoming product.

It's an old trick and applies not only to clothes but many goods. There are variations such as destroying trade-ins, used equipment etc. rather than sell it to remove it from the market (thus only new equipment is available).

Some companies took this to extremes in that they'd only rent equipment which would be withdrawn from the market and deliberately destroyed at the end of its service life so it couldn't be sold or ratted for spare parts (photocopier manufacturers were notorious for this). IBM used a cleaver approach with its computers, they'd sell off old computers as 'valuable' scrap (some parts could be still useful to others) but anything deemed as spares for their existing machines would be partially disabled (still useful but couldn't be used as a spare part). For example, they'd break the edge connectors off circuit boards but leave the electronic components intact.

[DeathArrow]

>So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.

I think now the incentive is to produce less.

[skeptic_ai]

They won’t “sell”. Imagine LV selling originals in Africa , Africa would immediately resell them in Europe and us and Asia for much higher price and dilute the brand. It will be officially sold to a reseller, not officially they will pay a special African company to destroy it.

So same shit as before. Slightly more expensive. No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap.

[makingstuffs]

> No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap

This is just inherently incorrect. In Europe we have a load of outlet villages which is where big brands do exactly that. It’s where I do most of my shopping. Last year I bought two pairs of Nike Dunks for £25 a pop. I bought Salomon hiking shoes for £60 instead of £140. A pair of Levis 501s for £20. Just an example or my most recent purchases.

[skeptic_ai]

Nike yeah, but not luxury brands usually.

[makingstuffs]

Not sure what you’re considering luxury but it definitely is not just Nike et al: https://www.mcarthurglen.com/en/outlets/uk/designer-outlet-a...

[blitzar]

> Levis 501s

Ewww, those are last years 501s

[mbrumlow]

You are right. What will happen is somebody will pay “x” for the clothing, but the same company will charge “2x” for transport.

[Saline9515]

You have to pay to burn them, at home or abroad, and the cost is likely a few % of a clothing piece, where the margin is already >70%.

Tl;dr the EU will say "Mission Accomplished" because no clothing has been burned in the EU since 2026(tm), while all of the emissions are produced abroad.

The same show has been going on with industry, where the dirtiest parts are done in India or China, so that we can say that we are "clean".

[mcny]

The big brands should be penalized for doing the burning or destroying themselves, enforcing such destruction through contract laws or any formal communication, or even through punishment by denying future contracts.

The receiver on the other end should defect and renege on their contract and sell the goods in the open market for pennies on the dollar. While they won't be able to bring it back to western countries, they should absolutely be able to sell them locally. It should be legal for them to renege on any illegal contracts.

At least that's how I see it.

[Saline9515]

An unexpected consequence of such drastic rule is that sizes on both tails (xs/xl) may disappear as they become unprofitable for the producer.