Destroying unsold textiles becomes illegal on 19 July — and now every brand has to account for what it throws away.

The ban: who, what, and when

ESPR — Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, in force since 18 July 2024 and directly applicable in every member state — prohibits the destruction of unsold consumer products. From 19 July 2026, that prohibition bites for textiles. Three precisions matter, because most coverage flattens them.

The wider net: the disclosure obligation

Separate from the ban, Article 24 of ESPR requires economic operators to disclose, each year, the number and weight of unsold consumer products they discard — broken down by type or category — together with the reasons, the proportion sent to re-use, recycling, recovery or disposal, and the prevention measures taken. It must sit on an easily accessible page of the company website, within 12 months of the financial year-end (CSRD reporters may fold it into the sustainability report, but must link to it). Supporting documents have to be kept for five years and produced to authorities within 30 days.

Two things make this the real story. First, its product scope is broader than the ban — it reaches leather goods and handbags that the destruction ban leaves out. Second, it is not pinned to 19 July 2026: the obligation runs on the financial-year clock, and the standardised reporting format was finalised in Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/2, applicable from 2 March 2027. So the question every brand faces is no longer “can we destroy this?” but “can we prove, by category, what we discarded and why?”

Why this is a product-data problem

Article 24 does not literally tell you to “trace your inventory” — it tells you to report quantities, weights and reasons by category, and to keep the evidence for five years. But you cannot produce those figures, broken down per product type, without a clean, classified view of what you made, what stayed unsold, and what happened to it. The reporting obligation is light on paper; the data discipline it assumes is not.

ESPR’s dedicated traceability instrument — the Digital Product Passport — is a separate track that will layer on later. But the unsold-products rules bite first, and they turn an operational habit into an accountable, classified, market-by-market record. Knowing which obligation each product owes, in which market, and being able to evidence it, is exactly the mapping Cleo maintains.

Who it actually hits — and how

Destroying unsold stock has long been a way to protect brand value, especially in fashion and luxury. ESPR ends that quietly — but not uniformly. The split is worth getting right: