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.

> 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.

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

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 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.

People used to ice skate on the lake near my house during Winters up until the 70s. Now they're swimming there throughout the winter. We had a ski lift fifteen minutes from my house 20 years ago. Now in a good winter, we have a week where there's enough snow for kids to go sledding.

sure, though New York has gotten a real honest-to-goodness winter this year. There's been a foot on the snow on the ground continuously for the last month, and it's been cold enough that the pipes in one of my bathrooms froze. I think it's easier from the West Coast to bemoan the end of East Coast winters than to live through one :)

It’s honestly terrifying. I’m in the PNW and we haven’t had winter yet. Extremely low snowpack in the mountains and not even a single day below freezing where I live.

I’ve been observing the change for the past 10 years or so here and this is the first year that’s it’s been so “in your face” obvious instead of just subtle changes and effects.

If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.

Climate change needs to be the number one focus and policy for every nation on earth right now. Not AI, not economic growth, not wars.

> 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.

This regulation is not about consumption but about production. Yes, this would not solve the potential over-consumption (I agree generally with what you say) - people actually buying shit they use once - but imagine how bad it is if for each shit used once the company produce 3x that shit...

> 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.

It's good exactly because of this. Every company is pushing us to consume more, and Wall Street is at the top of this, growth at all costs (including human lives, mental health, just anything)

Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine.

We should be making shoes which lasts 4 years, clothes which last at least 2 years with no "fashion" industry pushing us to change it every 2 days.

It is ok companies think like that. It is not ok we let them do it without any limits or regulations. We just need to be careful with unintended side effects and tighten the controls carefully

+1 to Ascension, one of the most fine piece of filmmaking that tries to explain the world of today

Reduced consumption of non essentials is a good thing not a bad thing

> Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste

Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt cheap to produce, that they have less of an incentive to let it go to waste. When I buy socks they get holes after wearing them 7 times, and then they go in the bin too.

How will apparel be cheaper? When they lower production runs, it'll be less available, which will mean prices will go up.

If firms prodice less, prices will be higher.

more market economics framing of life, as if numerous very smart people haven't already tried to make this paradigm work for society, and failed.

Overproduction is not an issue. The issue is that they damage unsold things instead selling them for a market price dictated by supply and demand.

This is not only clothing and apparel, also sporting goods and many other items.

This should be forbidden across all industries. Unsold stock should be delivered to non-profits at no cost for further distribution.

If you can't prove that you either sold or transfer to non-profit an item you manufactured then you should be fined for each unaccounted item proportionally to their market price.

If they ship unused crates to Africa then they get cheap clothes. Win win all around.

How are pigs, rabbits, goats and venison more sustainable? Unless you mean eating meat twice a year.

I live in a farmer family; our cattle needs around one hectare each, because we don't feed them processed food, only grass; because concentrated food is even less sustainable, and more importantly, more expensive than letting them roam (fenced areas)

Rabbit is not sustainable. There were some people trying to commercially rise and sell them and it didn't work. They would need concentrated food, which is expensive.

Goat meat is much more expensive than cows because they are less efficient than cows and pigs and chicken. I know two people who rise goats to sell them, and it doesn't make them money; really, they do it because they kind of like the critters as a pet project.

Only pigs and chickens are more sustainable, precisely because of theirinhumane(?) short life and their genetics. They are very efficient meat producers.

I know poor people who rise chickens and pigs; those animals take longer to reach "maturity", and the meat is not tender; but since the animals are eating whatever they scavenge, it can't be done at scale; again, we would eat meat like twice a year (This might be an exageration, but chicken pig and cow farms really produce all the meat we eat; of those only cows eat grass under the sun)

This feels like the argument for why not deflationary currency. Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary. Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.

> Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y.

Does that actually happen? What I see happening instead in the bike clothing market is that either after the season, or if a new design is to be unveiled after several seasons, the items gets heavily discounted (often more than 50%). It's just your decision if you need the most expensive newest items right now or you buy possibly older or out of season designs much cheaper. But the branding is also very much integrated, so it would be hard to change the branding on an existing item.

There are a few brands that try to limit this and keep the discounts in check like Assos, but that only means it's harder to find a heavily discounted item, still possible.

> When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.

Sure, if you can find customers that accept that, why not. In that case just manufacture fewer items.

all that said.. most of the clothes are not so "branded"? Who cares if a GAP or something ends up in outlet or wherever..

Why would it require becoming a billionaire to benefit? A lot of big companies are able to purchased by the public. There are even fractional shares which lowers the bar even further in being able to get exposure to these companies.

Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.

If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.

The worth is zero because the producer doesn't pay for the externalities (pollution, landfill usage etc). So essentially it is "free" because it is subsidized by everyone.

The "headache" is just : produce what you sell, sell what you produce, don't fill the world with your shit.

Or rather, since we know fast fashion is horrible because of the things you just said - it forces a more thoughtful approach to production.

If the headache causes companies to improve their product pipelines so that there is less waste then surely there will be less recycling.

Discouraging superfluous production is not nothing.

> 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.

I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.

> 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.

You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.

If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust.

This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.