German online retail alone handles some 20 million returned items a year, according to European Commission estimates. Until now, part of that stock never went back on sale but was destroyed – often incinerated, because inspecting, cleaning and storing it cost more than making something new. Since 19 July, that route has been closed to large companies across the European Union.
The legal basis is the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), in force since July 2024. Its chapter on unsold consumer goods now bites for the first time: clothing, headwear, clothing accessories and footwear may no longer be thrown away simply because no buyer was found. Instead the goods are to be resold, donated, reused or refurbished. In parallel, companies must disclose how much unsold stock they have destroyed – a figure that has largely stayed in the dark until now.
The rules apply first to companies with at least 250 employees, or more than €50 million in annual turnover or over €43 million on the balance sheet. Medium-sized firms follow on 19 July 2030; micro and small businesses remain outside the scope under current law.
What is at stake environmentally
The European Environment Agency estimates that between four and nine per cent of all textiles placed on the European market are destroyed without ever being worn – up to 600,000 tonnes a year. In Germany alone, roughly 17 million returned garments were disposed of in 2021. The European Commission puts the associated emissions at 5.6 million tonnes of CO2, close to Sweden's entire net emissions in 2021. Germany's environment minister, Carsten Schneider, calls as-new clothing in the bin a wasted resource: a throwaway society, he says, is no longer affordable.
Whether the ban shifts much in practice is an open question. The regulation allows exemptions, for instance where safety or health risks, legal obstacles or irreparable damage are involved; a delegated regulation sets out the detail. Michael Cieslik of Zero Waste Germany expects that checking, sorting and repackaging will take so much working time that some returns will still be weeded out. He warns against pushing the burden onto charitable collectors, who have to pay to dispose of unsellable used clothing. Viola Wohlgemuth of Deutsche Umwelthilfe considers the exemptions too broad and points to a practical gap: it is still unclear which authority pursues breaches, and which fines are meant to apply at all. Enforcement rests with Germany's federal states, while penalties are to be set by a national ecodesign act passed by the Bundestag. From industry, bodies such as the Südwesttextil association and the German sporting goods industry federation object that solid data and realistic cost-benefit analyses are missing.
The direction of travel is not in dispute: for the first time, the European single market forbids destroying as-new goods – a precedent the EU can extend to further product groups by delegated act.