The ban on destroying unsold textiles and footwear

What has applied since 19 July 2026

Since 19 July 2026 large companies in the EU may no longer destroy unsold clothing, clothing accessories and footwear. The legal basis is Article 25 of the Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 - the ESPR, which also introduces the Digital Product Passport.

That is the decisive news for textile brands: unlike the product passport, whose key dates still lie in the future, here there is nothing left to prepare - the obligation is running. The European Commission officially confirmed the start of application in July 2026.

“Destroy” here means more than burning new goods. It covers any disposal of unsold products as waste - including landfilling and shredding - without reuse, donation or refurbishment having been attempted beforehand. The ban therefore reverses the burden of proof: it is not for the authority to demonstrate that goods were destroyed unnecessarily; it is for the company to show that a permissible exemption applied.

Who does the ban apply to?

The decisive test is the EU definition of company sizes under Recommendation 2003/361/EC - the same one that applies to funding programmes and other EU regulation. The employee criterion has to be met, together with one of the two financial criteria:

The official delineation can be found in the EUR-Lex summary of the SME definition.

Three points on which companies regularly misjudge their position:

• Linked enterprises count. Anyone belonging to a group adds the employees and financial figures of partner and linked enterprises, proportionally or in full. A small limited company within a group is not a small enterprise in regulatory terms.
• The threshold takes effect with a delay. As a rule, the classification only changes when a threshold is exceeded or fallen below in two consecutive financial years.
• Exempt does not mean irrelevant. Micro and small enterprises are exempt from the ban - but not from the coming DPP obligations. What is coming for smaller brands is set out in the SME roadmap.

Which products are affected?

The ban currently covers clothing, clothing accessories and footwear intended for consumers. Accessories such as belts, scarves or gloves therefore fall under it just as much as outerwear and sneakers.

A product is unsold if it was offered in retail, or intended to be, and found no buyer - including returns, seasonal goods, sample pieces and surpluses from repeat orders. Production waste and goods that never reached a saleable condition are not covered.

Other product groups - furniture, electronics, tires - are not covered by the ban so far. The ESPR does, however, expressly allow the Commission to add further groups by delegated act. If you want to follow the development, you will find the overview in the deadline overview and in the ESPR deadline checker.

When is destruction still permitted?

A delegated regulation of the European Commission of 9 February 2026 sets out exhaustively when destruction remains permissible. The most important case groups:

• Dangerous products that may not remain on the market under the General Product Safety Regulation (EU) 2023/988.
• Legal infringements where destruction is legally prescribed or proportionate.
• Counterfeits and infringements of intellectual property rights, confirmed by a court decision or an equivalent decision.
• Expired licence or distribution agreements that prohibit resale after a given date.
• Non-removable markings - for example logos or prints that cannot technically be detached.
• Damaged, contaminated or spoiled goods whose repair is not technically or economically possible.
• Unsuccessful donation: the product was offered to several charitable organisations over a defined minimum period and accepted by none - or it was accepted but found no takers.

What matters is the evidential side: for every exemption case the regulation requires specific evidence, which has to be kept electronically and submitted to the authorities on request within a short period. The retention period is five years after the destruction. An exemption that is not documented is in practice no exemption at all.

The reporting obligation

Alongside the ban there is a disclosure obligation under Article 24 ESPR - and it reaches further, because it also applies where destruction exceptionally remains permitted. Affected companies have to state annually on their website, easy to find and publicly accessible:

• the quantity and weight of the unsold products destroyed,
• the type or category of the products,
• the reasons for the disposal and the exemption relied on,
• the waste treatment applied along the waste hierarchy,
• prevention measures taken or planned.

The exact format of the disclosure is made concrete by implementing acts of the Commission; these draw on existing customs and logistics codes in order to limit the effort involved. Publication relates to the completed financial year. Micro and small enterprises are exempt from this obligation as well.

What happens in the event of infringements?

The ESPR does not set EU-wide uniform fines. Each member state determines the sanctions itself; the regulation merely requires that they be effective, proportionate and dissuasive. The level therefore differs considerably between member states.

In Germany, market surveillance sits with the authorities of the federal states under the Market Surveillance Act; the specific penalty provisions follow from national implementing law. Alongside fines, the ESPR provides for the accompanying option of taking infringements into account in the award of public contracts. If you read figures on expected fine levels, check which national law they refer to - there is no Europe-wide figure.

This guide gives an overview of the destruction ban under Article 25 ESPR and does not replace legal advice in individual cases. The exemption cases and reporting formats are made concrete through delegated acts and implementing acts.

What brands should do in practice now

1. Establish your size class definitively. Determine employees, turnover and balance sheet total including linked enterprises, and record the result in writing. This classification decides everything else - and the question of whether the next key date already falls in 2030.
2. Make stock data visible. Anyone who cannot analyse today how many pieces of which category are sitting unsold in the warehouse, and for how long, can neither comply with the ban nor report on it. That is not a legal question but a master data question.
3. Build secondary channels. Outlet, B-goods channel, resale platform, donation partner, refurbisher - each with a fixed contact person and a documented process. The donation exemption applies only if serious offers can be evidenced.
4. Adapt the returns process. Returns are the largest single item of unsold goods. Checking, cleaning and returning to stock has to be the standard route, and disposal the exception that requires justification.
5. Treat documentation as a mandatory field. Every destroyed unit needs its exemption ground, evidence, quantity, weight and disposal route - retrievable for five years. This is cheapest when it arises in the merchandise management system rather than being reconstructed after the fact.

The connection with the Digital Product Passport

The destruction ban and the Digital Product Passport are two instruments of the same regulation - and they have the same cause: companies know too little about what is sitting in their stock. Without material composition, goods are hard to recycle; without clean article and variant data, hard to resell; without quantity and weight figures, hard to report on.

The connection therefore lies at the data level, not at the level of the obligations. A brand that has already built structured product data for the product passport - materials, origin, weights, categories per article and variant - is measurably better off afterwards: it can steer residual stock deliberately into resale, donation or recycling and assemble the required information, instead of reconstructing it from delivery notes. Who is responsible for the product passport is clarified in the guide on the allocation of roles; the framework of the regulation is explained in ESPR explained.

Conversely: the destruction ban is not a software question. It requires decisions about purchase volumes, returns logistics and recovery partners. Software can supply the data basis; it cannot replace the processes.

Next step

If your brand falls under the ban, the stock side is next. If it does not, the product passport is still coming - the data work is the same in both cases. What is coming for textile and footwear brands is summarised on the sector page DPP for textile companies.

For carrying out that data work - importing products and variants from Shopify, capturing material, origin and care information per article, validating it against the mandatory information and publishing it as a hosted passport page including QR code - SolveDPP’s DPP software is built.