My mother kept a bin bag by the back door of her alterations shop in Porto, and it was almost never for the bin. A coat with a torn lining. A wedding dress somebody left and never came back for. Two pairs of trousers taken in for a man who died before he could collect them. She could not throw a garment away. It offended her on principle. Somebody had spent hours on those seams.
I thought about that bag this week, because on 19 July the European Union made it illegal for large companies to do, on an industrial scale, the thing my mother could not bring herself to do at all.
From that date, under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (the ESPR, in force since 2024), big brands and retailers can no longer destroy unsold clothes, accessories, or footwear. Textiles are the first product group to fall under the ban, picked deliberately as the worst offender. Instead of the incinerator, a company now has to try to sell the stock, discount it, donate it to charities or social enterprises, or repair and refurbish it. Destruction becomes a last resort, allowed only when an item is unsafe, damaged, counterfeit, or actually turned down by the charities themselves, and only with paperwork to prove it. And "destruction" is written broadly enough to include recycling and energy recovery, the second of which is burning by another name, so nobody gets to relabel the furnace as recycling.
The scale is the part that makes you put your coffee down. The European Environment Agency estimates that between 4 and 9 percent of all textiles put on the European market are destroyed before anyone wears them, somewhere between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes a year. The EEA puts the climate cost of processing and destroying returned and unsold textiles at up to 5.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, which it reckons is a shade under Sweden's entire net emissions for 2021. In France alone, the Commission says around 630 million euros of unsold goods are destroyed every year. In Germany, close to 20 million returned items are discarded annually, many of them presumably resellable.
None of this is new information to the trade. The number that woke the public up was smaller and more specific. In 2018 Burberry's own annual report admitted, as Forbes reported, that it had incinerated 28.6 million pounds' worth of stock in a single year, up from 26.9 million the year before. More than a third of it was beauty products. The company burned the stock rather than let it turn up cheap somewhere and dent the mystique, and after the outcry it stopped that September. Around the same time, FashionNetwork reported that Richemont, which owns Cartier, had quietly bought back some 437 million pounds' worth of its own watches over two years to keep them off the discount racks. Both disclosures predate the law by nearly a decade. This was fashion's open secret. It was just never said out loud in an annual report before.
France got there ahead of everyone, banning the destruction of unsold non-food goods nationally from the start of 2022. What the EU has done is take that idea and stretch it across all 27 member states, with disclosure rules whose standard reporting format only becomes mandatory for financial years starting on or after 2 March 2027, so the public numbers land later still.
Here is where I put my hand up, because I want to believe in this and I don't fully. The law bans the bonfire. It does not touch the overproduction that feeds it. A brand that makes ten times what it can sell has broken no rule by making it. It has only lost the cheapest way to make the excess vanish.
The exemptions are the soft spots. The ban lands on large companies now and medium ones in 2030, and leaves small and micro firms out of it entirely. COSH!, a sustainability research group, worries out loud that this "could create incentives for multinationals to route unsold stock through micro entities." Donation, too, has a clock on it. Wieke Maris, COSH!'s head of research, warns that if "cost-effective" is allowed to mean cheaper than repairing something today, "destruction could stay the easiest escape route." Fast fashion turns out a great deal of clothing that no charity can realistically resell, and once the donation window closes, the law and the landfill can still shake hands.
For a shopper, none of this changes the rails this month. Prices look the same, the racks look the same. Whether it changes anything at all comes down to whether national inspectors actually turn up, whether the fines bite, and whether companies treat reuse as a genuine redesign or a box to tick on a five-year records file.
I keep coming back to my mother and that bag by the door. The law now agrees with her instinct, that a finished garment nobody wore is a small waste worth taking seriously. But she had a shop, a tape measure, and the patience to fix things. An industry built on selling you a fresh want every fortnight has none of those, and no regulation can hand them over. The honest version of this news is smaller than the headline. Burning clothes is now illegal. Making far too many of them is still just business. So buy it once, or buy it secondhand, and let somebody else's overstock end up on your back rather than in the ground.
