Here's how this law is actually going to work.
Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2.
The disclosure paperwork and the s/contracts/bribes/ needed to do this will also serve as a nice deterrent for anybody trying to compete with H&M.
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.
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.
You appear to be agreeing with the person you’re replying to.
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"
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.
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.
When you negotiate the price to ”sell” at, it’s perfectly legitimate for that price to be negative.
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.
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.
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.
Both of those situations sound like a net win.
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.
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.
You are right. What will happen is somebody will pay “x” for the clothing, but the same company will charge “2x” for transport.
> manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes?
Surely these companies aren’t paying H&M for the privilege of destroying their surplus clothes, so by reselling them they’ll be getting paid to take the clothes and paid again when they resell them. Why would they ever destroy them?
Which is why this scenario won’t ever happen.
They would destroy clothing because it is not sold. This already happens to second hand clothing that is shipped to Africa. Part of it is sold, part of it is dumped. This is well documented.
If part of it is sold, isn't it better than if it had all been destroyed? It's literally what that law is for.
Define what you mean by "better". Putting them on a giant CO2-burning ship to transport around the world to find every last person who wants a $1 shirt is much more harmful to the environment than just throwing it into a hole in the ground and making another one.
The additional shipments aren't going to drastically go up over a few more companies throwing second hand clothing on ships. Large crate ships are relatively efficient for what they tow.
As basic napkin math, if there's 1000 cargo ships moving in and out of the EU in a year, and this law adds 10 more. That's 1% increase. It's a bigger 1%, but I wouldn't be surprised if the emissions are less than the 9% of discarded clothes talked about in the article.
I'm going to speculate that it won't "add" ships at all
As you say, ships are moving in and out of the EU each year - the question is, how many have "back loads" - if some percentage of the ships leave Europe empty to return to Asia for more manufactured goods, then it seems very likely that they can have the containers of unwanted clothes as part of the trip.
Yea they will, they'll resell what they can, and destroy the rest, probably by throwing them into a giant burn pit in a place with zero environmental regulations.
Ok, let's say that happens. Seems like a net win over throwing all of them in a burn pit.
> Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
This isn’t going to happen. But if it did, they would 100% sell them in local markets, not destroy them.
Yea, I'm not sure I understand how destroying the items would benefit these "resellers" ? What's in it for them?
What is going to happen is that what is left of European manufacturers in the sector are going to move production and warehouses abroad, and from there they will move to EU only about what they need. They will continue to operate as they used to, the only difference being less business (and less jobs) being done in EU.
cheap clothing is for the vast, vast majority not done in the EU, so this does not matter.
But also, this regulation applies to the company _selling them to customers_, so it's completely irrelevant.
Why wouldn’t these non-EU then just sell the goods in those countries? It would mean they turn a cost (destroying) into revenue (sales).
It’s not like there isn’t already a massive industry selling counterfeit goods. So in your hypothetical scenario, if those companies are already shady then I could easily see them selling those surplus stock in the same shady markets.
I live in a poor country. People here buy "American clothes" which importers get inside "pacas" (random bundles). Those clothes come USED from rich countries.
My assumption is these clothes are dumped to someone to get rid of them, and then that person bundles them and ships them to poor countries. Once here, someone buys the bundles, sort the content according to their expected retail price and sells them to resellers.
There is junk that can't be sold and is destroyed. Except in some cases, like in Chile, where they are just dumping the used junk "intact" in the desert.
Prohibiting destroying new clothes is a net positive. There is market for clothes in poor countries, but it is already being exploited. Some clothes will always be dumped in poor countries, but not all of it can be resold. The manufacturers will make less clothes, there is no way around it.
I thought you were going to go somewhere else with that. With excess clothing they'll unload it in Africa and Asia for cheap, weakening local clothes manufacturers. A bit of what happened with Tom's Shoes
Australia currently bans the sale of "recycling" plastic and e-waste to certain countries in South East Asia because of this problem (dumping to companies that have no qualms about throwing the waste into waterways etc)
The waste is still making its way to those countries, and the way that we know is that NGOs are tracking it[0]
I suspect that clothing will get similar treatment - initial illegal dumping as you predict, followed by determined NGOs holding the supply chain to account.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-30/gps-in-e-waste-from-a...
I feel like you accidentally flipped a minus sign in your equations and then doubled down on your conclusions. Who would pay you to take something away and destroy it for you?
It's fine to come up with creative solutions using an LLM, but you have to apply some critical thing before throwing your weight behind the conclusions!
Regardless of whether they respect the law, why would a business pay for goods just to destroy them? How does that make money?
And if they're NOT destroying the goods but are instead using them, then the law is doing exactly what it is intended to.
>Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.
Until one of them gets the bright idea to resell the clothes, which should take all of 30 seconds.
Your theory presumes the existence of a sketchy african company which will nonetheless remain scrupulously honest.