Prato: In the warehouses of Europe’s oldest textile district, a habit that used to pass without comment is about to become illegal. From 19 July, large companies across the Union may no longer send perfectly wearable but unsold clothing, footwear and leather goods to the shredder or the incinerator. The prohibition, written into the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, ends a practice that campaigners have long called the fashion industry’s quiet scandal.

Brands built entire business models on scarcity, destroying surplus stock rather than let it reach discount racks and dilute a label’s prestige. Regulators decided that logic no longer holds when Europeans discard roughly twelve kilos of textiles each year. The Commission wants the clothes that already exist to stay in use, not to burn so a price point can be protected.

The ban lands first on big operators, with smaller firms handed a longer runway and micro-enterprises exempted altogether. Companies that still destroy unsold clothing must now disclose how much they scrap and why, a reporting duty designed to shame the worst offenders into changing course before enforcement bites.

The clampdown arrives alongside a second lever that will reshape how products are sold. The Commission is finalising the technical rules for a Digital Product Passport, a scannable record that follows a garment through its life and tells buyers, repairers and recyclers what a jacket is made of and how to handle it once it wears out. Textiles sit near the front of the queue for these passports.

Manufacturers grumble that the paperwork will land before the recycling plants capable of using it are built, and they have a point. Europe still recycles only a sliver of the fibre it throws away, and much of what is collected leaves the continent for sorting elsewhere. A ban on destruction does little on its own if the collected material has nowhere useful to go.

Officials counter that supply follows demand. Once producers cannot burn their way out of a glut, they argue, the incentive to design durable, repairable and recyclable goods grows sharper, and investment in reprocessing capacity should follow. The wider circular economy strategy leans on exactly that chain of consequences.

For a place like Prato, which has rebuilt an industry around recovered wool, the rules read less like a burden than a vindication. Firms that never stopped sorting and respinning old cloth now find the law pointing in their direction. The question for the rest of Europe’s retailers is whether they adapt their catalogues or keep fighting a battle the Union has already decided.