Prato: In the workshops of this Tuscan textile hub, where recyclers have turned old cloth into new yarn for generations, a pair of European rules just changed the economics of textile waste. From the middle of July, big retailers may no longer destroy unsold clothing and footwear, and a new digital label has begun tracking what products are made of.

The two measures flow from the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the backbone of the Union’s circular economy push. One bans the destruction of unsold consumer goods by larger companies, ending a quiet practice in which wearable stock went to incinerators to protect brand value. The other switches on the digital product passport, a scannable record of a good’s materials, repairability and recycled content.

For a place like Prato the shift matters. Its recyclers thrive when they can identify fibres quickly and trust that discarded garments contain what the label claims. A passport that lists composition promises to cut the guesswork that has long slowed textile recycling and depressed the value of recovered material.

Brands face a harder calculation. Destroying overstock was cheap and discreet; donating or reselling it demands logistics, and disclosing what goes into each item exposes supply chains many firms prefer to keep opaque. Industry groups warn that compliance costs will land first on smaller producers, even though the destruction ban targets larger ones.

The Commission frames the rules as the opening act of a broader agenda. It has consulted on a forthcoming Circular Economy Act meant to build a genuine single market for recycled materials, lifting both the supply of quality secondary raw materials and the demand for them. The Commission describes that work in its consultation.

Textiles sit near the top of the list. Europeans throw away millions of tonnes of clothing each year, most of it burned or buried, and separate collection rules now force member states to gather used textiles rather than mix them with household rubbish. Without buyers for the resulting material, however, collection alone risks creating mountains of unsold bales.

That is why recyclers welcome the passport and the destruction ban as two halves of one bet. Better data should raise the quality of recovered fibre, and a shrinking outlet for incineration should push more garments back into the loop.

The delegated act setting detailed ecodesign criteria for textiles still lies ahead, and its recycled-content targets will decide how far the loop actually closes. For now, Prato’s mills read the new rules as a signal that Europe finally intends to treat old clothes as a resource rather than a nuisance.