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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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

Why do you assume that the entire EU has brain damage and did not think of this _most obvious_ loophole? Sure the companies could commit crimes but if that is enough of a reason not to pass laws then we better start striking murder of the books as well.

The EU cannot control every avenue you might be sneaking products out for destruction. The goal is not to prevent all sort of destruction, just make it risky enough not to be worth it: Since it's illegal to do, you now have something to fear when you try to get away with your (now) crime.

ESPR regulates the entire placement of products, not only the destruction, e.g. the Digital Product Passport (DPP) which every product has to have (it's slowly being phased in over the coming decade) gives information about repairability, resource used, recyclability,... To do the exporting for destruction you would need to fake the entire paper trail of the product, committing countless numbers of document forgery.

In general the "you are not allowed to destroy unsold goods" part is arguably the small element of ESPR. ESPR also contains the right-to-repair legislation, where ESPR introduces requirements (or at the very least disclosure requirements) for - Design for durability - Availability of spare parts - Access to repair information - Software support obligations - Design for repairability / Restricting design practices intended to hinder repair

The "don't destroy working items" is just a one component of this. The more important component is the DPP which makes the product lifetime traceable.

Indeed. Rather than deal with it, there will just be some shell company in non EU they can export to and have it destroyed there...

Though that will obviously incur a larger cost than today.

Or perpetually store it in an "open warehouse" where it rots over time.

Sounds like a lot of extra work which will make this kind of behaviour less financially viable vs. just selling or overproducing it.

The EU is doing everything it can to fail. The only thing that seems to be coming out of the EU in the last 20 years is regulation. It seems to be its only invention and contribution to itself. They have no upper bounds on creativity when it comes to creating rules that disrupt business.

I can't tell if this is coming from jealousy or incompetence—or perhaps a combination of both. They see the rest of the world, especially the United States and China, getting richer and more advanced, and their response seems to be to shield themselves from it instead of competing.

Volkswagen in Germany is going to lay off 100,000 jobs and shutter plants. Half of the EU is recklessly in debt. And Germany is supposed to be the good country with the good economy.

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.

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.

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.

Because it promotes recycling instead of being another tax.

Now I'm imagining someone dumped in the river chained to a pallet of t-shirts rather than a cinder block.

I mean at this point they may as well have a deal to let the mafia steal cars in the parking lot and share the benefits...

Who pays for the logistics cost of moving and stocking these products in discount stores and giveaway centers? That is a large percentage of the total cost of production and the reason disposal is cheaper.

If those costs are paid for by taxpayers then the consumers are in effect involuntarily buying products they would not have otherwise bought, just with more steps. We already see this with agricultural subsidies.

If those costs are charged back to the producer then it becomes economically optimal to under-produce, which will cause prices to rise and risk shortages but eliminate waste. One can make the argument that higher prices for basic goods to reduce waste is a social good but it also impoverishes consumers.

All of these scenarios have happened empirically countless times. That almost every producer over-produces to some extent at no profit to themselves when allowed has strong "Chesterton's Fence" characteristics.

> that would create a new ecosystem of discount stores and giveaway centers, and save everyone a ton of money.

No. The real cost storage and selling, not the finished product. You don't magically get competent organizations to sell that popping out of the ground.

I have worked at a donation center like goodwill before. They get tons of stuff and throw away most of it. People won't buy it and they don't have time or space.

It may be an incentive to produce less and restrict options available. It really depends on how much harm it does to the company to donate or mark down their product.

Food4Less I think is owned by a larger grocery store brand. They sell near due date or past due date foods at a reduced price. There are also third party past due grocers in secondary cities.

I think that's the point. EU doesn't actually want these factories to operate in the EU. They just want to buy the clothes from elsewhere.

But then of course they cry a lot when they realize how easy it has become for China and USA to squeeze them.

Tough consequences of stuff like this.

No, this will give EU textile manufacturing an advantage, because they mostly produce low volume high value products. This will hurt fast fashion importers the most.

> I often think in terms of home remodels that a family might do at least once

Very interesting point of view, as someone who never done a home remodel, it surely brought a new perspective for me.

> That's much more waste than a family could ever generate directly or indirectly in clothing.

I'm not sure, if you have two kids who are into trendy clothing and you're able to let them make choices around clothing, then I can imagine that there is quite high turnover on those things.

Besides, the proposed rules seems to try to address waste generated by businesses rather than individuals or families. I guess currently they throw outdated clothing in order to make space for the new clothing lines?

It's companies dumping unsold ranges of clothes as new ranges come in. Not people.

My dad worked at a logistics facility, the amount of perfume he took home was ridiculous - and you’d think that something like perfume would never go stale. It does from a brand perspective and they do everything they can to have it destroyed so it doesn’t end up being sold to prices that would hurt the perceptive value. Obviously he wasn’t allowed to take it either.

I did a remodel last year. I filled 2 largeskips by the end of it. This is the first large job this house has had in 10 years, and it’s a 130 year old house.

The cafe at the bottom of my street has roughly that amount of waste collected every 2 weeks - they fill their commercial trash bin every 2 days. I don’t know how much of that is waste vs old food but they generate orders of magnitude more waste than I do even when I’m making a huge mess.

One of my clients (a clothing brand) burns something in the range of 60-100 tonnes of clothes at the end of each season (4/year) here in the EU. They do it because it is easier and cheaper than to optimise the logistics chain. It is also cheaper than to recycle it. And they refuse to discount it or sell to secondary outlets to ”avoid brand dilution”.

I lived in a small building along with a French family with 5 children. The amount of trash they had every week was incredible. We had our small trash bag and theirs would be a heap of bags chest high. I sometimes wondered if he was throwing out trash from his business too.

While living there the system changed from paying for a disposal service to pre-buying special bags that cost around 2.50chf per 35L bag. The French family moved back to France within a couple of months.

Is fast fashion not a thing in the US? I was under the impression it was, but perhaps I was wrong...

The keyword is _unsold_. If you bought clothes, they aren’t unsold

This is about businesses, not families.

I reuse everything from remodels. Seems a shame to throw out always. And other skips are getting bought by others to use in their building projects.

it's a pretty big _international_ problem

basically

- company cheap mass produces clothes/shoes

- new session (1/4 year) comes in (at beast)// it's fast fashion and there is a new trend (at worst)

- the "old" clothes are sold with rabatt but either before the session end or limited to clothes already shipped to stores

- this leaves a ton of clothes not shipped to physical shops and not sold in time

- selling them very strongly discounted means they compete with the new batch of different clothes, not discounting them means they might block up store space (physical store) or storage space (online shop, storage cost at scale shouldn't be underestimated, especially if some clothes just don't sell)

- so companies just destroy the unsold clothes _and write the production cost off as loss_. Turns out destroying + write off is more profitable then gifting or discounting... :(

- this is especially true for brand-clothes. They are often produced for a fraction of sales price and don't want to see their stuff being sold for more then a small discount. For some of this brand clothes their values outright lies more in "you needed to pay a bunch for it" then it "being high quality" (beyond a certain baseline of quality).

now the relevant question: Will this prevent companies from finding loopholes to still trash their clothes, especially brand clothes?

Yes it won't prevent it. But it increases the cost/complexity of it so it will likely reduce it by quite a bit. But some big next "<brand still dumps clothes through loophole>" scandal is basically just a question of time.

Still overall it looks like it will be beneficial from a wast, environment and climate POV while harming (way too) fast fashion which is good as fast fashion is harmful for all the previous points, laborer treatment, cloth quality and some others.

This law doesn't apply to individual consumers, only manufactures and retail stores.

You're half joking but this actually happens already. As you can imagine there's a lot of backlash on dumping good clothes on Europe itself so they export them in bad conditions just to have it burned out of sight.

https://changingmarkets.org/report/trashion-the-stealth-expo...

And it's not just old clothes being discarded, another related study showed that around 30% of clothes returned from online stores are not even looked over to see if they're worth selling again and are discarded straight away.

That loophole has become very difficult:

https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/...

At least they're trying.

At that point they might skip the bonfire part (or the locals would without asking their permission), which is kinda the whole point.

That can be penalised too.

We really have to get away from the idea that curtailing intentional industrial waste production is futile. Perhaps in American style capitalism it is because the system is rigged and the biggest money bag always wins. But we don't want this here at all.

We have to get forward as humanity and treat our planet with respect. Otherwise we won't have one worth living on. Making money isn't the only thing that counts.

I'm pretty sure they're docking the ship right now.

The EU is definitely studying the donations / tax-credit economy across its states; I expect that working group will be paying very close attention to donation outcomes union-wide in the coming months.

Tax incentives for donations to social economy entities: Models, trends, and challenges (2025) https://social-economy-gateway.ec.europa.eu/document/downloa...

Yes, clothing companies and stores will very commonly destroy clothes if they determine that selling at a discount would undermine the brand value. They do things like cutting holes in the soles of shoes before discarding them.

Yes. The primary cost is distribution, storage, and sales.

A likely outcome is stores carry fewer options and you need to order what you want.

Some stuff you basically have to give away for people to buy, some stuff just isn't so attractive to most people. With limited store space, you could miss out on profits if you don't update what you have available. Every item you carry is another item you cannot fit to carry.

I think this largely is about brand protection. They worry that discounting the clothes means they will just cannibalize sales of that brand's full-price clothes.

If the full price is €6, there isn’t much room for a discount. Destroying and freeing up store space for something that does sell can easily be profitable.

Thats also the case for a lot of electronics, it’s not just a problem with clothes

> Is it cheaper to destroy than sell at discount?

Yes.

Artificial scarcity + the urge to impose fashion cycles, sadly

Selling cheaper cannibalizes next season's fashion.

Particularly for “luxury” brands as selling at a discount devalues the brand. I use quotes because most of those brands sell cheap stuff (double digit manufacturing cost using forced labor [0]) but with a fancy logo making them worth 4 figures.

[0] Better link: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/jul/24/made-in-ital...

Luxury brands don't want the poors to be seen wearing their merchandise.

It hurts brand perception.

The EU can control companies that operate within the EU, they can't stop a Chinese company operating in China from destroying things. They could prevent the sale in EU without proof that the companies don't do that, but this is a good start.

This also isn't targeting the waste that comes from temu. This is targeting luxury brands that create artificial scarcity and destroy items rather than sell them at a discount. Think Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc.

This has nothing to do with consumers throwing away their old clothes. It's specifically about companies throwing away clothes that were never bought by consumers.

Makes it more expensive for everyone and also decentivize donating food to homeless or anyone in need.

There are actually laws in EU countries to prevent this. Supermarkets have to discount food that is soon to expire instead of throwing it away, perishables from restaurants and fast food joints can be taken home by employees at the end of the day, and even donations to charities of said goods, or farms for produce unfit for human consumption is encouraged/regulated.

This is already the case in France since I believe 2016.

There's was uptick around this story 4 months ago, so I'm not sure if those were bots resurfacing it or whether something changed in the law.

1. There are no Whole Food in europe 2. Clothes don't go bad and poison people in general

So I buy my own factory and produce my own pollutants and I dont have the right to do whatever I want with them, mad world.

On a planet with infinite resources it may be a mad world. On one where oil will be depleted at some point and fast fashion brands are collectively creating thousands of disposable plastic clothes models in dozen of millions of nuits per month, it's common sense to limit the madness of this industry

it is not the year 1800 any more, some things have changed

> The state of perishable goods is much worse. A lot is dumped in food and short shelf-life items. Nothing can be done here.

That’s already regulated in multiple countries