People tend to overestimate the costs of production versus recycling. You could easily spend, in terms of CO2, vastly more resources trying to sort, clean and ship around this stuff, rather then just setting the pile on fire - particularly if it's principally organically-derived fibers (cotton) and not synthetics.
Perhaps the economic calculus is to keep prices of existing clothing high by destroying excess inventory rather than selling at steep discounts to encourage purchase at a S&D intersection via sell-downs, selling this inventory to secondary markets like Ross, TJ Maxx, Salvation Army, and Goodwill, or giving it to charity. It seems like such a waste that could've been captured and used more efficiently. It was perhaps the most expedient action used by a small number of less than resourceful corporate employees trying to write-off excess inventory.
The case of plastic bag recycling is outrageous deception.
I walked by an HM that had trash bags filled with new condition shoes. I started looking through them before I realized they had stamp cut holes through the soles so people couldn’t use it.
If the margins are high enough, then it's optimal to overproduce and then sell to everyone who will buy at a certain price point. If discounts will reduce your ability to sell the same brand in the future at that price point, it can be financially optimal to destroy it instead.
And what about competing clothes sellers willing to sell at lower margins and hence lower prices to customers?
The reason this works with clothing for some brands is that some utility of the clothing is in the signaling it provides to the humans wearing it, and the signaling comes from the scarcity of that type of clothing.
A clothes seller selling clothing that signals the wearer is able to afford a more scarce type of clothing is thus ruining their own products’ value proposition by decreasing the scarcity of the clothes.
That is why it might be better to destroy than see it on sale at TJ Maxx or Walmart or whatever cheap store.
Bottom line is clothes sellers are catering to what clothes buyers want. They are not stupid about how to operate their business.
And o11c’s comment about glass makers breaking windows is irrelevant since the glass maker does not own the window they are breaking, whereas a clothes seller owns the clothes they might be destroying.
The BASF in Germany burned 1 month of cerosine for Frankfurt airport because there were no flights while lockdown. Why didn’t they store it? Because storing is more expensive than burning it. Maybe the same happens to clothes.
Chances are that a good portion of that clothing was offered to or went to local secondary markets before being sent overseas. (That isn't to say that it was offered for sale. But there is too much for them to handle, particularly since they don't want to dilute their own prices.)
People tend to overestimate the costs of production versus recycling. You could easily spend, in terms of CO2, vastly more resources trying to sort, clean and ship around this stuff, rather then just setting the pile on fire - particularly if it's principally organically-derived fibers (cotton) and not synthetics.