As far as I can tell, this is a key driver of why the EU implemented anti-waste provisions for clothing starting in a couple years: because retailers will just order arbitrary amounts of clothes and shred (!) whatever is unsold, which since they made their profit, doesn’t cost them anything and saturates the planet in formerly-wearable clothes that have been destroyed out of wasteful sloppiness. If they actually had to put in effort to design production runs — or else see their clothes sold at the bargain store — then they may well start acting less “why bother, we got our money, next”. One hopes, anyways.
> because retailers will just order arbitrary amounts of clothes and shred (!) whatever is unsold, which since they made their profit, doesn’t cost them anything
This is so obviously untrue. It's painfully obvious that the less they waste, the more profit they make, so there's plenty of incentive for them to order the right amount.
> there's plenty of incentive for them to order the right amount.
If the incentives to avoid waste were effective in the market, the EU wouldn’t need to introduce regulations to halt it — but their industry is destroying a bit over ten kilos of finished products per person there each year, so the market carrot isn’t working and manufacturers have more than earned the regulatory stick (and can afford the share of profits compliance will cost them).
You seem to not even be addressing my point that what you said is objectively false.
You've instead changed the discussion to whether or not those incentives are "effective", which is a very different and subjective discussion.
You also make the dubious assumption that we should halt all destruction of retail clothing when the truth is that a supply surplus is a good thing to prevent supply shocks for consumers and the unused surplus does not necessarily make sense to donate or reuse. So a complete prohibition on the destruction of retail clothing seems like a very blunt tool here.
But, to engage with your new point: I would argue that retail clothing waste is not unique and that a much fairer system would be to tax commercial/industrial waste in general. For that reason, this move by the EU seems more like a publicity stunt than a meaningful measure to me.
