As of 19 July 2026, large companies in the EU are prohibited from destroying unsold clothing, clothing accessories and footwear. Medium-sized companies will follow from 2030, while small and micro-businesses are exempt.
The ban is part of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and is one of its first concrete measures to directly affect the fashion industry.
So, what does it actually mean for fashion brands?
According to the European Environment Agency, an estimated 4–9% of textile products placed on the European market are destroyed before they are ever used. That is equivalent to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles every year.
The new rules are intended to keep products in use for longer and reduce the resources lost when perfectly usable products become waste.
Under the ESPR regulation, businesses must therefore prioritise alternatives to destruction. These include selling products through discounts or alternative markets, donating them, or preparing them for reuse through repair, refurbishment or remanufacturing.
The regulation allows destruction in certain circumstances, including when products are unsafe or damaged, counterfeit or infringe intellectual property rights, or have been rejected by charities or donation schemes.
But importantly, companies relying on these exemptions must be able to prove why destruction was necessary. Businesses must retain records for five years so national authorities can inspect them, and companies relying on exemptions are required to publish annual information about discarded products.
This means managing unsold stock is becoming not only an inventory question, but a data and documentation question.
For large fashion companies, this is no longer something to prepare for. The rules are already in application.
A good starting point is to look at three things:
Know where unsold products go.
Brands need visibility into whether products are discounted, moved to alternative markets, donated, repaired, recycled or ultimately destroyed.
Document the reason.
If destruction takes place under one of the permitted exemptions, the business needs the evidence to support that decision.
Look further upstream.
The best way to manage unsold stock is still to reduce how much of it is created in the first place. Better forecasting helps, but so do better product decisions, clearer processes and earlier visibility across buying, product development and the supply chain.
The destruction ban is one requirement within the much broader ESPR regulation, but it also says something about the direction of European fashion regulation.
There is no single piece of legislation called the EU’s “fast fashion regulation”. Instead, a growing number of requirements are putting pressure on the practices traditionally associated with fast fashion: high volumes, short product lifecycles, limited traceability and products becoming waste before their useful life is over.
The unsold-textile ban is a clear example. For fashion brands, the question is increasingly not only whether they comply with individual regulations, but whether their underlying processes and product data are good enough to support compliance as requirements continue to evolve.
When regulators ask what happened to a product and why, brands need to be able to answer.
Every month, we host a webinar, often in collaboration with our IT solution partners and leading industry brands. The topics vary, but one thing remains the same: we aim to make the fashion industry’s challenges more manageable and share our take on practical, hands-on solutions.
Check out this month’s webinar by clicking the button below.