EU ban on destruction of unsold clothes and shoes enters into application

This whole story that Europe suffers from overregulation is just in parts true, and mainly lazy thinking.

In fact there was a study by an American law school that came to the conclusion that the US has more bureaucracy than many European countries…

Recommended read: https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/04/the-lazy-myth-that...

I'm not sure your complaint works in this case.

You only write a report if you want the exemption.

The hypothetical business you're imaging shouldn't be looking for an exemption.

The law's effect on small business is conceptually not too different from eg laws against dumping toxic sludge.

At minimum, any medium business will be tracking disposal costs in its accounting books; the EU rule effectively taxes disposal by imposing regulatory processes upon it, so the net cost of disposal will increase to reflect the paper trail costs. The phased-in ‘large first, medium next’ started a while ago, giving mediums about twice as long (iirc?) to prepare for compliance as larges. One of the more predictable outcomes is that retailers will need to inspect and classify their completed-product waste streams, rather than simply dump every return bucket into the trash. Retailers are expected to do everything in their power to reduce the total volume of material inspected in order to increase profits, which in concert with stricter return regulations already in place, will force them to do various things.

Small retailers that process returns by taking the item out of the envelope, studying it, and then putting it back up for sale (either at full or reduced price, depending on new or cosmetic defect) will be entirely unaffected because their production costs vastly exceed their return inspection costs and they’ve been recording ‘sellable’ vs ‘worn’ vs ‘cosmetic defect’ somewhere this whole time anyways (or else they’d collapse even without these regulations!), and medium businesses will likely find their profits temporarily reduced — but since they were disposing of sellable products to begin with, they can either sell them to recover profits, donate them to reduce taxes, or accept the fractional inspection charge against profits and continue as-is.

Some possibilities: Reduce production defects (slower production/qa times), return rate), Reduce size variability (slower production/qa times), Improve fabric quality (higher production costs, lower future sales), Provide more detailed sizing charts (higher sales cost, lower return rates), Provide more consistent sizing (eg. band size 85 is not 80-90cm between different models and different brands), Reduce production batch sizes (less waste, more shipping costs), Reduce overseas manufacturing (higher cost production, lower cost/time shipping), Sell entire batches until sold out (increased inventory costs, maintains brand wealth-image), Donate wearable clothing to charity (tax deductions, goodwill), Switch from overseas large-batch production to domestic JIT (reduces inventory of never-sold products to zero), and so on.

As a mid sized business in touch with other mid-sized businesses - the burden you speak of doesn't exist. If you read the directive and others like it carefully, you will find they’re well integrated into reporting you already do. Each member state also adapts these to best fit their local legislation.

> but not for a small organization doing... something else

But for you to do your "small organization", shouldn't you be required to have to consider the environment around you?

A bar of course doesn't want to care about the noise the patrons do on the terrace for example, but because we live in the world with other people, they do have to care about this, even if it's "something else" than what they want to do.

Or data centers as another (maybe more contemporary) example, where sometimes they have things that needs to be disposed of in a certain way. Yes, the data center operators aren't in the business of "toxic waste management", but if you want to run a data center, you need to figure out how to deal with the byproducts.

I don't think clothing companies should somehow be magically excepted from having to care about others.

Socialist micromanaging you say? You should see what those maniacs do with there farmers. The job has literally turned into bureaucrat who ocassionally works a field as hobby.

The "regulation kills businesses" saying is often (not always) exactly right.

Yes, with the exception of ‘unsafe’ where a shoe is used and/or non-cosmetically defective.

The law reduces wasted production inputs — materials, energy, and labor — as well as production outputs — wearable shoes, here. This directly regulates a practice by brands where they destroy wearable clothing rather than see their latest branded fashion worn by people who bought it at a discount or received it for free. This also directly regulates corporations from using grinders, melters, incinerators, landfills, and overseas ‘recycling’ (=landfills) to replace warehouses with retailers, accelerate product cycle times and derive FOMO sales benefits without the cost of reducing their batch sizes. The apparel industry is destroying something like one third of what it produces, so it’s certainly earned regulation of its ‘this shall not be sold’ decisions to its disfavor.

I would expect Nike in the EU market to either increase product prices and/or decrease release intervals until their inventory supply is lowered to meet demand while claiming that it’s the EU’s fault that their hottest shoes aren’t yet available, rather than maintaining their existing cycle times and quantities by donating their wearable, branded, wealth-signaling shoes to be worn by poor people. (Perhaps that’s already begun?)

There is a lot more information about it here: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/strategy/circular-economy/e..., and the full (current) text being here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

As far as I can tell (although I'm no lawyer, sorry Nike), the point is to reduce waste and to increase recycled content in use. With these two main objectives, what Nike is doing seem to be fitting within that. It's not the "destruction" itself that is bad, but what you do with that after the destruction, recycling it doesn't create waste (or maybe, as much waste) as outright destroying+throwing all of it.

This seems kinda backwards, as far as I know charities and donation schemes are overwhelmed by clothing donations. Our problem isn't that we are destroying clothes that could be used somewhere else, the problems are manufacturing low quality clothing that lasts 2-3 wears, and fast fashion where people buy clothing for a specific event.

If they want to achieve their goals they should be aiming for demand destruction on _new_ clothes, once the clothes are unwanted it's too late.

But seems better to somehow incentivize fabric recycling and higher quality clothes. Even expensive clothes fall apart these days.

Create a holding company and register some trademarked design. Apply said design to the product. License the design to the manufacturer.

When the manufacturer wants to destroy unsold stock - revoke the license to the design. You can now fully legally destroy unsold stock for "violating ip rights"

Isn't that recycling instead of destroying?

I guess it comes down to if that is considered recycling. I'd personally consider it such, but not sure what the legal definitions will be.

Yes, this will likely exacerbate that further in the short-term: if retailers simply stop producing outlier sizes to reduce disposal of those sizes, then various niches will open up. In US women’s flats, very few go up to size 12+ (it’s already higher-cost to make products in outlier sizes and most don’t!) and so the one retailer (agaik) that offers that size has 100% market share, and keeps an inventory warehouse of unsold product that is listed until it sells at up to 80% discounts after a year-plus on the shelf. Another handful of retailers specialize exclusively in women’s clothing for people XL and above, which allows them to profit equally as well from less-common sizes.

My hope, however, is that this reduces overseas manufacturing in favor of domestic, which would allow retailers to dramatically reduce the shipping costs for small production batches, so that they’re able to simply produce more small batches of less-common sizes in response to demand. Sure, they might see a few percent lower profits per item, but they’ll be able to sell considerably more of their product simply by raising their supply to meet demand with finer granularity than the cheaper ‘produce an entire season one-time only and store it in a cargo container’ model offers today.

It can be made available online with a longer lead time if the manufacturers care enough about it. I guess it depends on whether the complexity is worth it, because if you're just selling cheap fast fashion then discounting/donating might still be worth it even if you produce excess, but more high-end brands probably won't stock uncommon sizes.

If they do not need to get rid of last months colors as fast, because the economic sweet spot has slightly moved towards longer production runs per design, they might as well also have longer intervals during which all sizes in production are in stock simultaneously.

The invisible hand of the market will rectify this of course. Nothing to see here.

How do you figure?

Destroying unsold clothes is financially the most efficient thing to do. It remains unclear to me how taking actions to maintain higher markups on products would be socially efficient in any way. Companies of course can keep doing it, they just will face financial and legislative repercussions for it.

That was my initial thought too; just make it a non-deductible charge, ideally, payable from executive compensation.

Or they could also just levy higher taxes/fees on synthetic fibers and clothing that cannot be repaired (there are several reasons), and at the same time support the industry for natural, truly biodegradable fibers and their research?

This seems like more ivory tower navel gazing.

And that doesn’t even touch on all the jurisdictional and financial shenanigans that immediately come to my mind how you can circumvent that.

Government legislatures really should have red team groups that have to be included in legislative processes with the objective of punching holes into legislation.