ESPR and the Unsold Goods Destruction Ban

Among the ecodesign provisions of Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 sits a set of rules that has nothing to do with how a product is designed and everything to do with what happens when it does not sell.

They matter commercially out of proportion to their length, because they turn a quiet operational practice into a disclosed figure and, for two categories, prohibit it outright.

Two separate obligations

The provisions are frequently reported as a single ban. They are two distinct duties with different scopes, and conflating them leads companies to either over-comply or miss the one that applies to them.

The disclosure duty is the one most companies underestimate. It requires an annual figure, published, covering how many unsold consumer products were discarded and what happened to them — preparation for reuse, remanufacturing, recycling, energy recovery or disposal.

What counts as destruction

Destruction here means discarding a product that is still fit for use, deliberately, rather than any disposal event. The distinction that matters is between goods that could have been sold, donated or reused and goods that genuinely could not.

• Damaged beyond economic repair — a documented condition assessment, not a category assumption.
• Unsafe or non-compliant — where placing the item on the market would itself breach another regulation.
• Returned goods that cannot be made saleable — the assessment has to be per consignment rather than a blanket policy for returns.
• Counterfeit or infringing goods — destruction remains appropriate and is treated separately.

Why this connects to the passport

The link is not obvious until you try to produce the disclosure. Reporting how many unsold products were discarded, in which category, and by which treatment route requires knowing what the products were at item or model level.

Companies that already maintain product-level records with material composition and category can generate the figure. Companies that track stock by value and location can tell you what a write-off cost but not what it was made of or where it went, which is the wrong shape of data for this disclosure entirely.

The same record that supports a passport therefore supports the unsold goods disclosure, which is one of the few places where a compliance obligation genuinely reuses work done for another.

Why the rules exist in this form

The design of these provisions is worth understanding, because it explains why disclosure was chosen for most categories and prohibition for two.

Destroying saleable stock is rational for an individual firm and irrational collectively. It protects price positioning and avoids the handling cost of donation or resale, while consuming the entire environmental cost of having made the item. Disclosure changes that calculation by making the practice visible to customers, investors and competitors without prohibiting it outright.

Textiles and footwear were singled out because the volumes are large, the goods are usually undamaged, and reuse routes already exist at scale. In categories where those three conditions do not hold, an outright ban would force destruction to be replaced by something worse rather than by reuse.

What to put in place

Four operational changes cover most of the requirement, and none of them are technically difficult. They are difficult organisationally because they cross returns, warehousing and finance.

1. Record a treatment route for every unit written off, not merely the write-off value. Reuse, remanufacture, recycle, recover or dispose.
2. Replace value-threshold destruction policies with a documented condition assessment that produces an exemption ground where one applies.
3. Establish donation and resale routes before the disclosure is first published, because the figure is more comfortable when the alternative routes exist.
4. Tie the count to product category and weight, since that is the shape the disclosure takes rather than a monetary total.