> companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels

Isn't that good though? Unless the defects make the product somehow dangerous, this means that it found its way to users who are OK with it, thus avoiding waste. And someone even made money in the process.

(all assuming the product is not sold as "new")

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michaelt 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Isn't that good though?

It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.

Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling.

If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:

1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.

2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation

3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.

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bryanrasmussen 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>and sends them for recycling.

>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then

the recycler will have undoubtedly violated a contract they have with ExampleCo and will lose in civil court and pay significant penalties greater than the money they made selling never worn ExampleCo jeans and also, undoubtedly, suffer from not having ExampleCo as a customer for their services in the future.

	▲	eddythompson80 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But the recycler has all the papers and documentation that they lawfully contracted an overseas company for wholesale recycle of the product. What's your civil court's jurisdiction? You might be able to play wack-a-mole with ebay, temu, alibaba express sellers through civil court in your jurisdiction assuming you have the money of course.

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kshacker 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels? Or why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?

I suspect this will need to be a cultural change. If ExampleCo does it but not RandomCo, of course your reputation will suffer. But if the law is for all of EU, it gives everyone an equal footing.

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ninalanyon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> ExampleCo's quality control does its job,

Then this will be the pressure that is needed for the company's quality assurance to be improved.

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blackoil 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How feasible is to remove tag, scratch serial number?

	▲	oblio 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Especially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.

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idopmstuff 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.

	▲	iamkonstantin 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.

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buckle8017 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is the eBay sellers always label defective stuff as simply new product.

People buying it may or may not be ok with the defect.

Think bad welds, usually they're fine for a while and then they're very much not.

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acdha 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s not hard to mark things as defective, liquidated, etc. so those eBay sellers can face fraud charges. We shouldn’t be sending stuff to landfills just to save a few pennies in permanent marker.

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ljf 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Had this recently, bought a dehumidifier for a good price, marked as new - arrived and had obviously been opened and didn't work. Out of a desire to have a dehumidifier sooner than later I was about to open it up when I saw it already had been, so I opened a return instead and sent it back.

I can only assume it is worth it for the seller to sell untested goods as new, a good number must work long enough for the buyer to be happy.

	▲	bombcar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I still remember Fry's Electronics and trying to find anything that hadn't been opened-returned-reshinkwrapped. Often it was impossible. Not sure why they had so many but eh whatever, it mostly worked fine.

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mschuster91 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> all assuming the product is not sold as "new"

And that is a very big assumption to make. Recycling is ripe with fraud simply because how much money is in the system.

The only way you can really be sure that "recycling" companies don't end up screwing you over is to do rough material separation on your own and dispose of the different material streams (paper packaging, manuals, plastics, PCBs) by different companies.

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b00ty4breakfast 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If I donate something on the premise that it's going to be used for some charitable cause and then it just ends up on some skuzzy listing on ebay, that would, at best, be deceitful. It's "good" insofar as the item is not being dumped in some landfill but it's not "good" insofar as it was obtained through deception.