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The EU ban on destroying unsold clothing will encourage product reuse and promote more sustainable production practices, BACT Executive Director Sirma Zheleva and Eleonora Yosifova of the For the Earth Zero Waste team told BTA on Monday. They emphasized that the primary goal must be to curb textile overproduction and reduce its environmental impact.
The ban officially entered into force on July 19, 2026. Currently applying to large enterprises, the measure is part of the broader Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR).
“We expect the ban to push manufacturers to improve production and distribution planning. Reuse is now the only permitted option for handling unsold items. Unrestricted destruction, a practice used by some companies, is no longer allowed.”
— Sirma Zheleva, Executive Director, BACT
“The ban alone will not be enough to significantly cut textile waste. It must be part of a broader policy to curb overproduction, set binding targets for textile waste prevention, and promote durability, repair, and reuse.”
— Eleonora Yosifova, For the Earth Zero Waste Team
Yosifova noted that For the Earth is part of Zero Waste Europe, an organization working to reduce textile waste by one-third by 2040 compared with 2020 levels.
The experts also addressed the role of recycling in future compliance strategies.
“Recycling must not become an easy alternative to destruction. In the waste hierarchy, prevention, extending product life, repair, and reuse come before recycling.”
— Eleonora Yosifova, For the Earth Zero Waste Team
“Recycling is also treated as destruction under the ESPR. It is allowed only if the need for destruction is proven and takes precedence over other recovery or disposal methods.”
— Sirma Zheleva, Executive Director, BACT
“The ban was introduced because of a business model built on routinely producing more clothes than the market can absorb,” Yosifova said, citing Zero Waste Europe data putting average overproduction in the sector at roughly 20%.
Low production costs, rapidly changing seasonal collections, and free returns for online purchases further drive excessive manufacturing and over-ordering. Unsold or returned items are frequently destroyed, generating avoidable waste and consuming critical raw materials, energy, water, and labor.
“When a new garment is destroyed, all the resources used to make, dye, transport, and package it are lost,” Yosifova emphasized.
While the ban currently covers large corporations, medium-sized enterprises will fall under the same rules by 2030.
“The ban also covers goods returned after a purchase is cancelled or a right of return is exercised. Companies will have to find ways to manage unsold items, focusing mainly on alternative markets where they can be distributed for reuse. Destruction is allowed only in specific cases, which must be substantiated and documented,” Zheleva added.
“A major problem is the lack of sufficiently detailed, publicly available data on the quantities of textiles placed on the market in Bulgaria, collected separately, prepared for reuse, exported, recycled, or left in mixed municipal waste,” Yosifova noted. “Without reliable data, it is difficult to plan a national system and measure whether it is actually reducing waste.”
She stressed that Bulgaria requires a dedicated textile waste management system that prioritizes prevention, reuse, and repair ahead of recycling.
More than 8,000 tonnes of textile waste—including industrial scrap—were collected separately in Bulgaria in 2024, according to BACT data released in late 2025.
“At least 70% of textiles collected through separate collection containers are usually prepared for reuse or recycled, while reuse remains the priority with the greatest environmental value,” Zheleva explained.
The practical implementation of the ESPR destruction ban, textile waste prevention strategies, reverse logistics frameworks, and advanced sorting technologies will be primary topics of discussion at next year’s textile recycling 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.