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.

> 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.

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?

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?

This is a big blow to High-end Luxury Branded Companies, Many of these companies willfully destroy unsold inventory to not devalue their Brand. Manufacturing costs are just 1/20th of the marketed price.

Most probably, the returned items just sit in the warehouse of the companies than selling to ordinary customers. Golden times for warehouse companies.

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.

> most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare.

It shouldn't be cheap. The world got used to the luxury of cheap meat by being unethical and harmful to the environment (humans' environment) and animals.

Cows are insanely resource-intensive to farm, bad for the air, bad for the water, bad for the land. Factory-farmed chicken meat is infamously inhumane, using genetic mutants to produce more meat faster, as well as being bad for the environment. They require more land and water use just to produce the feed for the animals. Both produce toxic runoff that goes into our water and land. Drugs pumped into animals land in us or our water, causing cancer or breeding superbugs. And we accept all these negatives so we can buy a cheap burger we don't need (we have plenty of other food).

Pigs are actually pretty sustainable, as are rabbits, goats, and venison. We used to eat a lot more of them, before the factory animal farms changed our diets to prefer cow and chicken.

I'm guessing EU bashing

"Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare."

What an over exaggeration.

> 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.

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.

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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.

>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?