BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
Large fashion companies in the EU can no longer destroy unsold clothing, shoes, or accessories. As of this week, that’s illegal.
The change is part of the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which applies to companies with more than 250 employees and over roughly $55 million (50 million euros) in annual revenue. Those businesses must find other ways to move excess inventory: markdowns, alternative markets, charity donations. The exceptions are narrow: items that are unsafe, counterfeit, or too damaged to use, or that charities have already passed on.
Why companies were doing this in the first place
For most of the fashion industry, destroying stock wasn’t a statement. It was accounting.
Storing unsold goods costs money. So does logistics. Discounting cuts margins, and setting up charity donations takes staff time and coordination that smaller operations often can’t spare. Incineration was cheaper than all of it, and for years no law said otherwise.
The European Environment Agency found that four to nine percent of unsold textile products in the EU are destroyed each year. Online returns make the number worse. One in five fashion items ordered online gets sent back and never resold. The cumulative result is hundreds of thousands of tons of clothing every year.
What companies are required to do now
Large firms must sell or donate unsold goods instead of disposing of them: clearance channels, outlet sales, charity partnerships. They’re also required to publish annual reports on goods they’ve discarded and keep those records for five years.
The German Retail Federation’s managing director, Stefan Genth, said “not all unsold goods can be resold or donated easily,” pointing to damaged packaging, high logistics costs, and products with little demand left. He did note that shoppers would likely see more discounted and second-hand clothing available as a result. Medium-sized companies come under the same rules in 2030.
What the law changes
More than what companies can do with old stock, this shifts the math around how much they make.
The European Environment Agency put it this way: “A circular economy — where products are designed to last, and are reused, repaired and recycled — is no longer just a vision, but is being embedded in law.”
When disposal is no longer cheap, overproduction gets expensive. Companies that used to write off incineration as a line item now absorb the full cost of what doesn’t sell: storage, logistics, charitable redistribution. The ban is narrow in what it prohibits, but broad in what it forces companies to reckon with.
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