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.

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