I don't know if it's necessarily that malicious.

Just ... if your store ordered a lot of a certain clothing item, assuming it would sell well, but then it didn't sell well, what do you do with it? If you leave it on the store shelves, it's taking up valuable retail space that could be better utilized for displaying and selling something people actually want. Storing it in some back room isn't going to work well -- that will build up over time and you'll end up having a whole warehouse of unwanted clothing.

Option 1: The right thing to do would be to put those items on sale/discount until they do sell. All the way down to free if you have to. But some stores think that would 'cheapen their brand', and most stores don't want you to buy something at a steep discount if it means you'll no longer buy a similar item for full price.

Option 2: You could send the unsold stock off to a discount/outlet retailer and let them sell it at a discount ... if you even have such a company anywhere around. Or you donate it to some charity for a tax writeoff. But then there's the expense of actually getting it there.

Option 3: You could send unsold stock back to the manufacturer ... but that would be expensive shipping and the manufacturer usually doesn't want it back, which is why nobody does this.

Option 4: You destroy it and/or just toss it in the dumpster out back. Cheap, fast, and easy.

Hopefully, making Option 4 illegal will make Options 1 and 2 more appealing.

best

*least worst.

It will all just get dumped in the Atacama desert, like they already do. Every year tons of fast fashion wearables get dumped there.

No need for 3rd world country, Ukraine is enough. There is war there so humanitarian help is just fine.

But that turtle looked cold!

I hope so because then I can hire a bunch of 3rd world children for 50 cents per month to gather up, match, repackage, and export to North America to re sell in sketchy ass discount liquidation stores in run down strip malls. Every 100k pair of pumas comes with one free baby sea turtle.... hell, if sales are fast enough it might even still be alive.

While a ban may make sense on paper, it doesn't take into consideration that fast fashion is literally designed to last a couple of days. If only the production of fast fashion was more regulated..

Currently, a lot of the discarding is done by individual shops/resellers. I know of a few instances where basically all customer returns and unsold merchandise was slashed at the orders of the manufacturer to make them unusable, and then thrown in the bin.

If that is made illegal and everything would have to be returned, stored, processed and then sent somewhere else anyway, the chance that it's going to end up with destruction greatly diminishes - opening that outlet section/shop or selling them to a local outlet company suddenly makes a lot more finacial sense.

The key is that you still dump it in that warehouse but then when that warehouse is full you do actually sell it to a shell company who isn't going to bother with oversight and they ignore it until it catches fire or is otherwise destroyed or somehow become someone else's burden, then they collect the insurance money... maybe with more shenanigans, but problem is solved.

Companies do it with dangerous chemicals that are burdensome to dispose of all the time.