Currently, a lot of the discarding is done by individual 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 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 sense.