Prato: The first concrete delegated act under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation comes into force in eight weeks for large companies, banning the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear and setting a six-month reporting clock for the companies that fall inside its perimeter. The measure was adopted by the Commission in early February and has been moving through implementation guidance across the spring, with retailers, brand owners and the larger e-commerce platforms now matching their internal policy documents against the text of the act before the 19 July switch-on.
The headline rule is a prohibition. Large undertakings, defined under the Accounting Directive thresholds, can no longer landfill or incinerate unsold finished apparel, clothing accessories or footwear except in narrowly defined cases such as goods rendered unsafe by a regulatory recall or contaminated beyond repair. Resale, donation, remanufacture, recycling and material recovery sit ahead of destruction in the hierarchy of permitted disposal routes, and the act requires companies to demonstrate that the higher-tier options were considered before any residual material moves toward destruction.
The reporting obligation runs alongside the prohibition. Companies must publish annually the quantities of unsold finished products that they have discarded, the reasons for the discard, and the routes through which residual material moved off their books. The information must be broken down by product category, and the first reports will cover the partial year between July and December and become due in early 2027.
Medium-sized companies sit outside the perimeter for now but enter it in 2030, a phase-in that the Commission has framed as recognition that the smaller logistics base in those companies will need a longer runway to set up the reverse-logistics arrangements that the prohibition assumes. Micro and small undertakings remain outside the scope of the rule entirely, although they are still encouraged to publish unsold-product data on a voluntary basis under the broader textile strategy.
The Italian textile cluster has been one of the more attentive readers of the draft because the area produces both finished apparel and the recycled fibre output that the new hierarchy will pull demand toward. The view from operators is that the prohibition will accelerate the existing migration toward mechanically recycled wool, cotton and polyester, but that the infrastructure for sorting and grading post-consumer textile streams across the bloc remains uneven and may not keep up with the volumes that the prohibition will redirect.
The Commission has paired the prohibition with a parallel work track on the textile-specific delegated act under the ESPR, which is scheduled to set minimum performance criteria and information requirements for textile products themselves later in 2026 or in early 2027. That second act is the one that will close the loop between the destruction ban and product-level circularity by setting durability and reparability requirements at the design stage. The destruction ban handles the back-end of the product lifecycle in the meantime.
Enforcement will sit with national market surveillance authorities, with the Commission keeping a coordination role through the existing ESPR governance architecture. Penalties will be set by the member states, but the act sets out the criteria those penalties must reflect, including the volume of unsold product destroyed, the size of the company and the cumulative effect of repeated breaches.
Industry compliance teams have flagged that the trickiest operational question is the boundary between a returned product that has been used and a finished product that remains unsold. The Commission’s interpretative note draws the line at the point at which the product was placed on the market in a condition suitable for sale, with goods returned from end customers treated as a separate category that falls outside the prohibition.
