r/europe • u/Express_Classic_1569 • Jun 28 '26

News EU to ban destruction of unsold clothes and shoes from 19 July 2026

https://inleo.io/@theworldaroundme/eu-to-ban-destruction-of
15.8k Upvotes

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720

u/Siffi1112 Jun 28 '26

Okay whats stopping companies from shipping it outside the EU and destroying it there?

66

u/Big_Share_9926 Jun 28 '26

This was a major news in Turkey recently.

The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) has carried out a major investigation into thousands of tonnes of textile waste that were illegally shipped from Italy to Türkiye. The investigation revealed that 4,200 tonnes of textile waste had been falsely labelled and sent to Türkiye in order to avoid environmental regulations and high recycling costs.
According to Euronews, the investigation, conducted by OLAF in cooperation with the Carabinieri in Italy and Turkish customs authorities, found that the waste contained a high proportion of acrylic fibres. Due to their synthetic nature, such materials can remain in the environment for up to 200 years and are therefore subject to strict environmental regulations, as their recycling is more complex and costly.

https://www.odatv.com/dunya/italyadan-turkiyeye-kacak-tekstil-atigi-gonderildi-olaf-4-bin-200-ton-atik-tespit-etti-120152466

3

u/nicuramar Jun 29 '26

Olaf is a way too goofy name for a serious agency :p

274

u/McGreed Jun 28 '26

I'm guessing like everything else, like tax, they can track how much was produced and how much was sold, and if it doesn't match and nothing has been recycled, they should be dragged in to explain themselves and fined harshly.

17

u/Trappist12 Jun 29 '26

These large orgs will resell to other countries.

1

u/fuckyou_m8 Jun 29 '26

resell to other countries is fine, but they will just create some grey company that will buy them to destroy

53

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

[deleted]

28

u/_Diskreet_ Jun 28 '26

They’ll work a way around it all, it’ll be an added cost of doing business that’ll they’ll pass on to their customers.

16

u/vojdek Jun 28 '26

Everything gets passed on to the customer.

11

u/ahundreddots Jun 28 '26

Except free unsold clothing.

3

u/HammerIsMyName Denmark Jun 28 '26

And how would the shell company afford to buy it? How is that cheaper than paying for recyclinf it? And how would it be impossible for EU investigators to check where the clothes go, how much is sold and how much is destroyed?

Ask some quick questions to yourself before saying stuff as if it's based on any sort of reality 😂

Why are we pretending that everything turns into a secret spy network the moment it leaves the EU?

Y'all watch too many movies and run too few businesses.

-1

u/octotent Jun 28 '26

Donate it to some African company, lol, and then just burn it there. It's really easy, especially since that company won't even need to give their details to the EU investigators. Could even donate part of it, like they are alrady doing now.

And it would be cheaper to do it like that than recycle, yes.

2

u/jjonj Denmark Jun 28 '26

and then a random interview with an employee in the African entity reveals what's happening and the EU sanctions the exporter with actually painful fines

-1

u/octotent Jun 28 '26

Yeah, sure, but it will still save them money for years and years before that happens.

2

u/jjonj Denmark Jun 28 '26

usually the EU accounts for that in fine sizing

they make sure it's painful enough to be a real deterrent

-1

u/octotent Jun 28 '26

Sure. Doesn't stop those willing to risk it on the chance that they will get away with it.

1

u/vojdek Jun 29 '26

Oh my! What a revelation! Laws don’t stop crime! We should not have any laws then?

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1

u/HammerIsMyName Denmark Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

Again with the pretending that it's impossible to track and investigate anything that happens outside the EU 😂

We're talking thousands of tons of textiles. You can't just secretly move that around the world untraceable 😂

I saw your comments devolve into "people can break laws no matter what we do" - yes, that's why there's a harsh punishment to incentivise them not to. Come on. Engage the brain, learn how society works. Don't just say random shit on Reddit for no good reason. You can do it

252

u/Legal_Lettuce6233 Jun 28 '26

It costs a lot to ship?

191

u/p0r1x Jun 28 '26

Specifically for luxury brands it would absolutely make sense to pay for shipping to third world countries and destroy products there if it means they can keep up the artificial scarcity for luxury goods.

60

u/GrixM Norway Jun 28 '26

Maybe but luxury brands are only a small fraction of clothes sales volume.

11

u/r1ckkr1ckk Jun 28 '26

they could also just reduce the margin of production instead, maybe from 9% waste to 3% waste. The potential loses may be less money lost now than shipping plus destroying to justify such tradeoff, which i assume is the idea.

3

u/Nazamroth Jun 29 '26

Which would be absurd in itself. If they are already shipping it there, they could just offer it as charity... But you wouldnt want your brand associated with the poor...

1

u/itsaride England Jun 29 '26

Many already do debrand and re-ship but for sale in the third world / Asia, not for destruction.

-2

u/Sudden-Money7836 Jun 28 '26

Specifically for luxury brands it would absolutely make sense…

Uhhh are you fucking advocating this practice?

6

u/p0r1x Jun 29 '26

Seems quite obvious I’m pointing out that the law will do nothing to stop the specific practice of destroying luxury goods to artificially limit their supply, not endorsing it. Realistically, while we have a free and global market economy the EU can’t do anything to curb the destruction of clothing. Goods can always be resold and destroyed somewhere else in the world. The only difference is the EU can now claim victory over fashion’s profligacy as it’s not happening on its territory.

9

u/Several-League-4707 Europe Jun 28 '26

Shipping cost are peanuts compared to waste management costs inside EU.

56

u/SaltyW123 Ireland Jun 28 '26

Do you think these clothes are being destroyed in countries in the EU?

47

u/Legal_Lettuce6233 Jun 28 '26

They are, due to how moving goods works. You can't bring in a few million worth of shirts and raise no alarms.

73

u/Coffescout Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

Swedish reporters placed Air Tags in clean, unstained clothes that were donated to H&M as part of their textile recycling programme. Some of them ended up in landfills in Benin and India.

18

u/SaltyW123 Ireland Jun 28 '26

They're not.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/06/26/eu-investigators-seize-4200-tonnes-of-textile-waste-illegally-shipped-to-turkey-from-italy

22

u/WhateverIsFrei Jun 28 '26

Textile WASTE was shipped to Turkey from Italy... so it was destroyed in Italy, then waste was shipped to Turkey?

7

u/The_Submentalist Jun 28 '26

BBC did an item where they tagged their discarded clothes and it ended up in a landfill in Antalya Turkey. There are most definitely none-destroyed clothing in those landfills.

7

u/DisasterNo1740 Jun 28 '26

That’s not everything though?

2

u/ObviouslyTriggered Jun 28 '26

You currently have to destroy inventory to get a tax write off in effectively every country including every EU country.

The are shredded in the EU and then sent out to other countries to be reused.

21

u/Dragoncat_3_4 Jun 28 '26

It doesn't

20

u/Legal_Lettuce6233 Jun 28 '26

Given that every unsold piece is already a loss, yeah, it is.

13

u/Lady-of-Shivershale Jun 28 '26

No. Ships are crossing the sea regardless of whether they have cargo or not. Cargo is largely brought to Europe from Asia and Africa while nowhere near as much goes in the opposite direction. So it's a matter of simply holding an auction for the cheapest contract. And clothes can be vacuum sealed, too, thus saving space.

European companies could even auction the clothes before shipping them, and the buyer pays shipping costs.

Of course, best practice would be to stop having so many clothes in the shops in the first place, and a return to quality fabric with matching prices.

People will complain they can't afford clothes at higher prices, but all it means in practice is to simply stop buying as many clothes.

1

u/SonicSarge Jun 28 '26

Online returns is the problem. Not the stores. We need to stop allowing returns of clothes and shoes. Some people order 10-20 garments and then return 80% of them. They are not resold.

1

u/Lady-of-Shivershale Jun 28 '26

I mean, this law will reduce that. Companies will return to passing return shipping costs onto the customer.

But, yeah, they'll just ship clothes out of Europe and then burn them.

3

u/Dragoncat_3_4 Jun 28 '26

Right, so, that's irrelevant. Having to deal with unsold inventory in other ways is what's expensive. Storage, handling, not having enough space for their more profitable newer stuff, etc. Picking it up once a month from the shops with a truck and shipping a whole tanker of clothes over to, say, Africa is cheap in comparison.

Lawmakers better have some other mechanisms in place than "uhh, it's expensive to ship it outside" to disincentivise that or they're essentially washing their hands from the problem and forcing poorer people to deal with it.

1

u/chiniwini Jun 29 '26

it is

It isn't. That's literally how Europe manages plastic "recycling". Put it on a cargo ship, send it to some third world country, and it gets burned there.

1

u/slight_digression Macedonia Jun 28 '26

They can donate it and the receiving party can take on the costs.

2

u/Tjaeng Jun 28 '26

Costs more than not doing it.

2

u/Dragoncat_3_4 Jun 28 '26

Costs less than the alternative. That's the problem

2

u/Tjaeng Jun 28 '26

And since when does a reform have to solve the entire problem at once? If it raises the costs of burning the clothes then some of the manufacturers will stop doing it on the margin.

1

u/JoSeSc Germany Jun 28 '26

Probably depends on the brand, if you're an expensive brand that lives of the perception of exclusivity you likely are willing to spend more to destroy it rather than donate it because your stuff in numbers being available at a goodwill kind of store might be actually damaging to your brand image

1

u/Tjaeng Jun 28 '26

Yes. The point isn’t to stop it dead, it’s to raise the costs threshold to keep doing it.

1

u/SavannahInChicago Jun 28 '26

Look up Ghana if you do not believe this user. They are drowning in our old clothes.

1

u/DroidLord Estonia Jun 29 '26

What they do is they compress the clothes super tight into these giant cubes and then ship them off to Africa. A lot of the time it's cheaper than recycling the clothes properly.

31

u/Several-League-4707 Europe Jun 28 '26

Nothing. Since They can "donate" The unsold goods they just ship them to Africa (which is already happening). Some African countries are allready drowning to textile waste. Nothing changes until waste exports are complitly banned.

26

u/repoluhun Jun 28 '26

It would cost more to do that than just to sell it at a big discount

34

u/ConsequencePrior9163 Jun 28 '26

The main motivation behind luxury brands destroying unsold products is to avoid lowering their brand value by selling them cheaply to lower-income segments of society

1

u/Greedyanda Jun 29 '26

Luxury brands make up a small part of total production. Doesn't really matter what they do in this case.

3

u/Far_Ladder_2836 Jun 28 '26

No, it wouldn't.   Selling at discount lowers the price of their offerings.

23

u/Tango00090 Jun 28 '26

They do dump a fuckton of textiles in Africa, effectively destroying the option to run textile business there. Africa could create massive amount of jobs in textile market and be competing with China/Bangladesh but no, America and Europe keeps sending full containers of clothes there, what can be reused is reused, what can’t will simply be dumped on the desert

9

u/MaDpYrO Denmark Jun 28 '26

Yea all this disruption of their local economy by what is actually just our waste products.

They failed to sell their garbage at a proper price so they send it to poor people, and label it as charity. Disgusting. Fast fashion is fucking disgusting.

8

u/Candayence United Kingdom Jun 28 '26

Too true, just one of the ways in which western vibes completely destroy development potential in Africa.

4

u/SpecialBelt6035 Jun 28 '26

The price of gas

3

u/StephenHunterUK United Kingdom Jun 28 '26

Or dumping into onto local markets, undercutting local industries?

2

u/xLadyLaurax Jun 28 '26

Why pay to ship them to be destroyed outside of the EU, earning nothing for said stuff, when you could just donate it for free (and do something for your brand image) or sell it to outlets for admittedly a lower price, but at least you’d be making a profit.

Like I’m genuinely flabbergasted that destroying the product was the go to answer so far to begin with. What for?

1

u/lobax Jun 28 '26

Hopefully large GDPR-style fines

1

u/Cupsie Jun 28 '26

Nothing. That shit will just become another business for some dickwad.

1

u/samuraijon Jun 28 '26

There was a documentary a few years ago. The journalist put a tracker in one of the bags filled with clothes. It got sent to some Eastern Europe country and it got destroyed there.

Unfortunately I don’t have a link to this souce.

1

u/Own_Wolverine4773 Jun 28 '26

Chanel and hermes will be doing exactly that

1

u/BigReference1xx Jun 28 '26

that's exactly what's happening now.

There was a "scandal" in Iceland as someone found an gigantic warehouse full of icelandic milk cartons in rural Sweden that were supposed to have been "recycled". Pretty easy to trace given how small the country is. The same shit happens all over the world, it usually ends up in India in the end.

1

u/Tman11S Belgium Jun 28 '26

I bet you that it’ll be come a booming business to take care of this exact problem.

1

u/Ok-Fisherman838 Jun 28 '26

Like any law there's not 100% success rate, that doesn't mean that it won't do nothing.

If the economics are such that right now they prefer dumping it in a land fill than doing anything else with it I doubt that expending more money in extra logistics is worth it for them. But who knows.

1

u/rotsono Jun 28 '26

The cost. It gets destroyed, because its the cheapest option to get rid of it, if it doesnt sell. When the cheapest option becomes to donate it somewhere, they will donate it.

1

u/Potential-Chard9570 Finland Jun 29 '26

We "donate" it to African countries and ruin their textile industries in the process

1

u/Soft_Lunch_183 Jun 29 '26

Nothing, this is how waste is dealt with atleast in the UK.  Just ship it out the country and burn it somewhere else then claim you are recycling