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From 19 July, large companies across the EU are prohibited from destroying unsold clothes, clothing accessories, and footwear. Medium-sized companies will be subject to the same rules from 2030.
The measure, introduced under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), aims to prevent the waste of valuable products and the resources used to make them. When new, usable goods are discarded, the raw materials, water, energy, and labour invested in their production are lost, while their disposal generates avoidable greenhouse gas emissions. By encouraging reuse, repair, and more resource-efficient business practices, the new rules support the transition to a more circular and competitive European economy.
Under the new rules, businesses must prioritise keeping products in use by selling them (including through discounts or alternative markets), donating them to charities or social enterprises, or preparing them for reuse (repairing, refurbishing, or remanufacturing). Destruction will be allowed only under specified circumstances and must be carried out in accordance with the waste treatment hierarchy, giving priority to recycling.
Companies may only destroy unsold clothes and shoes in limited cases, such as when items are unsafe or damaged, counterfeit or infringing intellectual property rights, or are rejected by charities or donation schemes.
To prevent misuse, businesses relying on these exemptions must provide proof (e.g., documents or test results) and publish annual reports on what they have discarded.
National authorities will check compliance and can impose fines for violations. Companies must keep records for five years to allow inspections.
To reduce paperwork, businesses will use existing customs and logistics codes when reporting. Small and micro-businesses are exempt from these requirements.
The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which came into force in 2024, sets EU-wide rules to make products more durable, repairable, recyclable, and resource-efficient.
The ban on destroying unsold textiles is one of the first concrete measures under the ESPR. Textiles are the first product group subject to this ban due to the negative environmental impacts of current business models, which often lead to the destruction of unsold goods. According to the European Environment Agency, an estimated 4–9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.
The Commission developed the rules after wide consultation with businesses, NGOs, and experts to ensure they work in practice without creating unnecessary red tape.
The practical implementation of the ESPR destruction ban, standardized inventory reporting metrics, and the scaling of reverse logistics and sorting infrastructure across Europe will be primary topics of discussion at next year’s Textile Recycling Focus Day.
A team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has engineered a recyclable yarn made from polyethylene, offering a scalable solution to the global challenge of textile waste. Detailed in ACS Materials Letters, the research was led by Svetlana Boriskina, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, alongside first author SeongHyeon Kim and co-authors Duo Xu, Volodymyr Korolovych, Domingo Flores-Hernandez, Kaniz Moriam, and Daniel Braconnier.
The MIT team demonstrated that garments crafted from the engineered yarn can be melted down at the end of their lifecycle and respun into fresh fiber or molded into solid plastic hardware, such as buttons and belt buckles.
ABB and Swedish textile impact company Syre have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore how automation, electrification, and digital technologies can support the development of Syre’s first industrial-scale textile-to-textile recycling facility in Gia Lai province, Vietnam.
The exploratory collaboration provides a framework to assess how advanced process control, quality optimization, and electrical infrastructure can enable safe, efficient, and scalable production of circular polyester.
UK retailer Aldi and dairy cooperative Arla Foods have partnered with recycling tech specialist Polytag to initiate an operational pilot aimed at tracking milk bottles through the UK recycling stream using advanced ultraviolet (UV) tagging technology.
Building on an initial pilot conducted in 2023, the collaboration seeks to gather granular, data-driven insights into how packaging moves beyond the point of sale and behaves within municipal waste systems.