[tjwebbnorfolk]

Define what you mean by "better". Putting them on a giant CO2-burning ship to transport around the world to find every last person who wants a $1 shirt is much more harmful to the environment than just throwing it into a hole in the ground and making another one.

[panick21]

Given how absurdly efficient shipping stuff in container ships is, I don't believe its actually worse. Specially if the company can just save money by being slightly more conservative in terms of how much they manufacture in the first place.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Sure, let's conveniently not count the horrifically-polluting trucks in <3rd world country with zero environmental regulations> to distribute them across the interior.

You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?

[johnnyanmac]

The additional shipments aren't going to drastically go up over a few more companies throwing second hand clothing on ships. Large crate ships are relatively efficient for what they tow.

As basic napkin math, if there's 1000 cargo ships moving in and out of the EU in a year, and this law adds 10 more. That's 1% increase. It's a bigger 1%, but I wouldn't be surprised if the emissions are less than the 9% of discarded clothes talked about in the article.

[awesome_dude]

I'm going to speculate that it won't "add" ships at all

As you say, ships are moving in and out of the EU each year - the question is, how many have "back loads" - if some percentage of the ships leave Europe empty to return to Asia for more manufactured goods, then it seems very likely that they can have the containers of unwanted clothes as part of the trip.