It’s been a month since the ban on the destruction of unsold clothing, textiles and footwear was rolled out in Europe, preventing enterprise-scale fashion brands from incinerating or landfilling usable products. Now brands are busy collecting and organizing fragmented supply chain data, and establishing new channels to deal with their unsold stock.
The ban’s implementation marked a significant milestone for the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which was first proposed in 2022 and adopted in 2024 by the European Commission. More is to come: by March 2027, brands must publicly disclose volumes of destroyed textiles using the commission’s reporting framework. But despite the ban now being in effect, experts say that questions and concerns remain over practical implementation, compliance requirements, and exemptions to the ban. More broadly, they wonder whether it will achieve its ambitions: to catalyze Europe’s circular economy and incentivize brands to reduce overproduction of clothing at the top of the value chain.
The destruction ban comes as no surprise to brands, many of which have been preparing for years by partnering with or developing circularity solutions to manage and reduce unsold stock. LVMH’s CEDRE venture launched in 2010 to recover perfumes and cosmetics, expanding into materials and unsold fashion products in 2023. In 2021, the group partnered with textile recycling startup Weturn to recycle its maisons’ unsold stock and IP-protected items into new yarns. Elsewhere, Europe’s largest e-commerce retailer Zalando uses a range of solutions like physical outlet stores, wholesale partners, and clothing donations to aid organizations like Humedica. And H&M, which in 2018 reported $4.3 billion in unsold stock, has spent years reducing inventory volumes. In June 2026, the group reported its lowest inventory-to-sales ratio in 10 years.
Several brands have made headlines for their unsold stock over the years, from luxury brands slashing and burning products to protect their perceived brand value and intellectual property (IP), to fast fashion brands sitting on extraordinary volumes, sometimes billions of dollars, of unsold goods. But how big is the problem, really? It’s a difficult one to quantify. Most brands still don’t disclose the total number of products they make each year, let alone how many they destroy, and attempts to tally up these figures vary wildly. The EU Commission estimates that between 4-9% of all products on the market are destroyed before use, as much as 594,000 tonnes a year. Meanwhile, a 2023 report by WGSN and OC&C estimated that globally between 15 and 45 billion garments made annually are destroyed before they’re ever sold.
Unsold inventory can be the result of internal planning errors and external, uncontrollable factors, from unpredictable weather patterns to inaccurately predicted trends, missing key sales windows if shipments are delayed or stuck in customs, or returns that are marked with makeup or other stains. “When you have such short-lived sales windows for many items, that means the value is going to drop off very quickly, and it’s very difficult then to rescue the value that comes from these items,” says Joanna Lambert, co-founder and chief executive of Opera Garment Solutions, a Barcelona-based platform that connects a brand’s excess inventory to different circularity solutions like repair and reconditioning services for resale. And the longer brands sit on unsold inventory, the fewer circularity solutions are available to them because products might become mouldy, stained, or simply out of style.
There is no shortage of circularity solutions on the market, including cleaning and repair services, dedicated and in-house resale and rental platforms, as well as donation channels, but connecting these to inventory can be complex and costly. “The challenge is that it’s so new for so many companies, not just for the brand, but also multiple downstream partners that have to be involved in this process,” says Christina Dean, the founder of Hong Kong-based textile waste organization Redress. “You need collaboration, but it’s complicated. The solutions are there, but it’s expensive.”
With the ban now in place, and more transparency to follow, what happens now?
Exemptions or loopholes?
There are a number of derogations, or exemptions, to the rule that account for the complex realities of the apparel sector. If stock is damaged beyond repair or unsafe (think toxic chemicals), infringes on IP rights (a licence collaboration or outdated football jerseys), or has been rejected by charities and other donation avenues, as a last resort it could be recycled or destroyed. Brands must provide evidence to be eligible for derogations.
“In order to communicate to the authority on a derogation, you need a lot of paperwork, and that is intentional,” says Marina Prados Espínola, director of Policy Hub, a Brussels-based organization guiding the fashion industry through the regulatory landscape. “That is to make it burdensome for brands to go under interrogation. Everyone is nervous right now because we now have rules that are applicable, but we don’t have any reaction from authorities on how this may be interpreted in life and practice.”
In July, the Environmental Action Germany (DUH), a Berlin-based NGO, issued a statement asserting that the derogations won’t prevent the overarching problem of overproduction — a practice the ESPR aims to disincentivize. “The ban on destruction only addresses the symptoms, not the cause: the mass overproduction of short-lived fast fashion textiles,” said Viola Wohlgemuth, senior expert for textiles and circular economy at DUH, in the statement. “When the bathtub overflows, you don’t grab a mop — you turn off the tap.” The organization identified what could be considered loopholes in the regulation: if stock isn’t accepted as donations, or if repair is deemed too expensive, destruction will be permitted. Indeed, Article 25 (b) in the regulation makes exceptions for products “which cannot be repaired in a cost-effective manner.”
Implications for textile recycling
A point of contention has divided the sector: recycling unsold stock is currently considered destruction, and is banned unless derogations apply. For brands that might have once sent a batch of unsold T-shirts to a recycler to be turned into yarns, this will no longer be possible. (This only applies to pre-consumer stock which could still be used, not post-consumer waste, as regulators don’t want recycling to become a ‘get out of jail free’ card for brands looking for an easy fix for unsold stock.)
That could pose a major hurdle to textile recycling companies, which are racing to scale, and in need of feedstock. “According to many companies, this is stupid because we are trying to fill the capacities of recyclers,” says Matteo Aghemo, co-founder and chief executive of Musthad, who hosted a webinar on the destruction ban for more than 100 well-known brands a few weeks ago.
Espínola from Policy Hub says the derogations provide a necessary caveat to the rule: “It doesn’t make sense to categorize recycling as destruction of the product and to completely prohibit recycling, because there are cases where you need to do so,” she says. “Conceptually, it was a big fight to have recycling included under the definition of destruction because we need to incentivize and stimulate recycling to move to the next stage of recycling infrastructure globally.”
Many organizations agree with the regulation that recycling unsold stock should be the last resort after all other avenues have been exhausted. “We need to consider the waste hierarchy,” says Andreas Dorner, general manager of Re&Up Recycling Technologies, which is a member of the T-2-T Alliance. “If a product can be resold and reused, it should stay in the circle as long as possible.” He says that brands shouldn’t look to Textile-to-Textile recycling of unsold stock as a viable long-term solution because it won’t address the core issue at play. “It’s not the right way to do it from the ethical side or the economic side,” Dorner says. “We just reinforce overproduction by using more and more raw materials, and then we will have more to recycle.”
Too soon to say
While the EU has set the goalposts, national authorities will be responsible for ensuring compliance and can impose penalties, but it’s unclear whether additional funding is being provided. “They are going to be checking for all these different pieces of legislation, and are we considering increasing resources? Are we considering what they need?” asks Espínola. “That is key. We need a level playing field. If we have the rules, we need to apply the rules in an efficient way to make sure everyone is complying.”
In July 2030, the destruction ban will roll out to medium-sized brands, who will be keeping a close eye on how enterprise scale businesses approach the ban and manage the compliance paperwork in the intervening years. It’s too soon to say whether the ban will scale circularity in Europe, or indeed whether businesses are taking this opportunity to tackle overproduction through better planning and reduced inventory. Some experts believe unsold stock is an unavoidable reality. “[Brands] are aware the core problem is in the beginning of life rather than in the end of life,” says Aghemo. “Still, I am absolutely convinced, and they are too, that the end-of-life problem is physiological. You cannot avoid it. You can just reduce it and control it.”
Others take a more optimistic outlook on the ESPR and broader suite of circularity regulation it sits within. “It’s about forging entirely new supply chains with different partners and improving the transparency, the processing, the reporting, the separation, and the recycling,” says Dean. “All of it has to be improved very quickly. I think it’s very exciting because all of these businesses are operating in silo to one another, and now the legislation is there, and it’s a massive catalyst to connect the dots to get the job done.”
