France’s parliament on Thursday backed a string of measures making low-cost fast fashion, especially from Chinese mass producers, less attractive to buyers.

  • federalreverse-old
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    8 months ago

    Good idea. I wonder if the implementation works correctly though:

    A surcharge linked to fast fashion’s ecological footprint of five euros ($5.45) per item is planned from next year, rising to 10 euros by 2030. The charge cannot, however, exceed 50 percent of an item’s price tag.

    So the 1€ shirt from Shein is going to cost 1.5€? That’s not going to have much effect when sustainable shirts start around 15€.

    I also guess Chinese marketplaces may still evade the law by hiding behind exaggerated shipping costs or maybe even splitting up into multiple entities with a lower release cadence. Afaics, people already buy clothing from sketchy, Tiktok-advertised Shopify sites.

    • @[email protected]
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      48 months ago

      I still don’t understand how this would work - everything is staying the same production wise, workers are payed poorly, unsafe conditions, but the product will cost more? And then customers will pay more for their clothings and that will be used to push other, more sustainable manufacturers?

      • federalreverse-old
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        8 months ago

        That is my understanding as well, yes.

        I think there’s some rhyme and reason to it: France has limited insight into random manufacturing operations somewhere in Asia, so it can’t directly regulate there. That’s especially true if the clothing is sold by a Chinese platform as well which I don’t expect to care much about the EU supply chain regulation either.