The law reduces wasted production inputs — materials, energy, and labor — as well as production outputs — wearable shoes, here. This directly regulates a practice by brands where they destroy wearable clothing rather than see their latest branded fashion worn by people who bought it at a discount or received it for free. This also directly regulates corporations from using grinders, melters, incinerators, landfills, and overseas ‘recycling’ (=landfills) to replace warehouses with retailers, accelerate product cycle times and derive FOMO sales benefits without the cost of reducing their batch sizes. The apparel industry is destroying something like one third of what it produces, so it’s certainly earned regulation of its ‘this shall not be sold’ decisions to its disfavor.
I would expect Nike in the EU market to either increase product prices and/or decrease release intervals until their inventory supply is lowered to meet demand while claiming that it’s the EU’s fault that their hottest shoes aren’t yet available, rather than maintaining their existing cycle times and quantities by donating their wearable, branded, wealth-signaling shoes to be worn by poor people. (Perhaps that’s already begun?)
The EU has disagreed with Nike, and the law is now in effect.
I do agree that this law will have a more meaningful effect on luxury clothing brands, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if certain kinds of fast fashion become impractical to offer in the EU. More power to them, as long as people don't start complaining in a few years when Zara's trendsetting new line of blouses isn't available in European stores.
As far as I can tell (although I'm no lawyer, sorry Nike), the point is to reduce waste and to increase recycled content in use. With these two main objectives, what Nike is doing seem to be fitting within that. It's not the "destruction" itself that is bad, but what you do with that after the destruction, recycling it doesn't create waste (or maybe, as much waste) as outright destroying+throwing all of it.
Down-cycling is a thing. Even aluminum and steel get down-cycled.
I have no sympathy for recycling fetishism.
> The concept of destruction as outlined in this Regulation should cover the last three activities on the waste hierarchy, namely recycling, other recovery and disposal. Preparation for reuse, including refurbishment and remanufacturing, should not be considered destruction. Preventing destruction will reduce the environmental impact of those products by reducing the generation of waste and by disincentivising overproduction.
Basically, does it end up as waste or does it end up being repurposed in some good way? If the former, we should find a way of getting rid of it, if it's the latter, it's A-OK!
1. Destruction is conversion of any usable product X to any non-X form (even if the new form is usable).
2. Destruction is prohibited (for large businesses, right now).
Usable is not perfectly defined and will be a judgment call, but one can construct a common sense set of ‘what is unusable?’ definitions that an inspector or judge would accept — so long as sellers have not explicitly caused such outcomes:
- Product lacks structural integrity (a loose thread doesn’t count, a missing sleeve does count)
- Product is contaminated (tried on and didn’t fit doesn’t count, motor oil stains does count)
- Product is unsafe (tried on and didn’t fit doesn’t count, underwear returned with safety liner removed may count, product has been worn for more than try-on period may count)
Note that, for example, the EU is likely to say ‘launder it first, then donate it’ for products that are worn and returned but can be safely donated after laundering; so they are specifically aware of some of the loopholes that corps will aim for first.
When the manufacturer wants to destroy unsold stock - revoke the license to the design. You can now fully legally destroy unsold stock for "violating ip rights"
If they want to achieve their goals they should be aiming for demand destruction on _new_ clothes, once the clothes are unwanted it's too late.
But seems better to somehow incentivize fabric recycling and higher quality clothes. Even expensive clothes fall apart these days.
I hope this will result in lots of _new_ clothes being sold very cheaply in discount outlets.
Downcycling is when you reuse something for a less refined purpose. For instance you can use contaminated plastics (im the sense of somewhat mixed types, bits and bobs of labels etc) to make humble park benches, but you won't be then reusing that low grade park bench plastic to make the Hubble space telescope with.
Still, downcycling into carpet is better than dumping the shoes on a coral atoll of course. Yet it's a step below recycling.