European lawmakers are preparing legislation that would hold the fashion and textiles industry accountable for the full lifecycle of their products, from design and manufacturing to the management of waste after use. Until recently, the industry has largely avoided oversight, despite its documented history of labour issues, and despite its outsized share estimated at 4% – 10% to global warming gas emissions.
Known as extended producer responsibility (EPR), the legislation, expected to be transposed by member states by June 2027, will promote circular economy practices by encouraging environmentally conscious design, standardise recycling, and force businesses to internalise waste management costs (now largely borne by municipalities as part of their solid waste management budgets, or displaced to beaches and deserts in poorer countries) resulting from the growing volume of fashion waste.
If only things were that simple. As lawmakers target the fashion sector, it would seem wise to consider lessons learned from how EPR has fared in the past when applied to product packaging, electronics, batteries and automobiles. Five key challenges stand out that must be addressed for a fashion industry EPR to succeed.
1) Who is the “producer” in a global, platform-driven market?
The premise of EPR legislation rests on the producer taking responsibility. Yet in a highly globalised, complex and often opaque supply chain, identifying the producer is no longer straightforward. This was already a challenge for EPRs covering electronics and packaging, particularly with small brands, imports through intermediaries and outright bad actors. With the growing dominance of e-commerce, finding the producer is getting ever more complicated.
The European Commission itself has confirmed that in 2024 4.6 billion low-value consignments (goods with a value not exceeding €150), entered the EU market equalling to 12 million parcels per day. This is twice as many as in 2023 and three times as many as in 2022. 70% of individuals in the EU 27 purchased clothes, shoes or accessories online in 2024. Global sales through social commerce – where purchases take place within social media apps – were expected to grow to $1.2 trillion in 2025, with the highest number of purchases in clothing. Responsibility becomes elusive when Temu or Amazon clog postal systems with unidentifiable labels, or when small EU-based importers sell whitelabel products via social media apps after slapping on a fictitious brand sticker.
The Commission must therefore clearly define the producer and keep free‑riders in check. This requires recognising e-commerce marketplaces as economic operators under EU law and ensuring their status is fully reflected in EPR schemes.
2) Will EPR drive design for the environment — not just downstream recycling?
The dumping of fashion waste in developing countries, often disguised as second-hand clothing donations, is causing environmental harm and stalling the growth of local fashion industries. Experience with packaging regulation shows that EPR fails if it is reduced to recycling alone while producers continue current business models and increase production volumes. The last “R” in the 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) was always intended as a mere contingency when the preceding Rs are not possible.
The EU’s EPR scheme must therefore shift focus away from recycling fashion waste and towards upstream measures that limit overproduction and promote alternative business models such as reuse, sharing and repair. These approaches reduce absolute material use and lower the sector’s environmental impacts.
EPR could also curb e-commerce strategies designed to fuel overconsumption. Companies that rely on free shipping and returns, buy-now-pay-later schemes, and gamified impulse-buying tactics would face higher, eco‑modulated EPR fees.
3) Can EPR help lift labour standards along the supply chain?
No one wants the sweat of children and underpaid adults dripping on clothes they wear to parties. In 2025 workers in 28 key garment-producing countries earned only on average 41% of a living wage, according to the Wage Indicator Foundation. European brands and consumers continue to benefit from cheap labour, particularly in producing countries in the global south, that no one should accept. The Asia Floor Wage Alliance has highlighted that most garment workers are in nutritional deficit, consuming significantly below levels of international poverty standards due to current wage structures in the sector.
As a basic requirement for placing products on the EU market, EPR should require monitoring and compliance with social and labour standards, including living wages, reasonable working hours, workplace safety, bans on forced and child labour, and non‑discrimination.
Beyond product criteria, legislators should require pre-manufacturing conditions such as mandatory functionality testing, prototyping and durability assessments. This would increase lead times, reduce pressure for excessive overtime, and slow the fast-fashion pace.
4) How will Europe stop exporting its waste problem?
The growth of fast fashion in industrialised countries is closely linked to environmental and economic damage elsewhere. EU businesses have repeatedly flooded other markets with cheap, unsold clothing, undermining local textile industries and creating vast dumping grounds through clothing waste exports. The European Environment Agency says that exports of second-hand textiles from the EU increased from approximately 400,000 tonnes in 2003 to 1.4 million tonnes by 2023.
Any new EPR scheme must include robust public oversight to ensure transparency and accountability, and to prevent harmful waste exports. All actors affected by global supply chains and waste flows must be considered in the scheme; the money, in short, must follow the garment. If used clothing or textile waste is exported to non-EU countries, recipient countries should receive EPR fees for costs of waste management.
5) Will EPR help break fashion’s petrochemical dependency?
The final challenge is to break fashion’s deepening reliance on fossil fuels and synthetic fibres. Even as energy systems decarbonise, fossil fuel use has intensified in plastics, textiles and chemicals. The surge in textile production since the early 2000s–alongside the rise of fast fashion—has been fuelled by cheap fossil fuel inputs. Synthetic fibre production has overtaken cotton and now dominates the global fibre market.
These materials do not biodegrade, and their production and finishing often involve hazardous chemicals, including PFAS, with serious implications for human health and ecosystems. Despite industry claims that synthetics offer superior durability, garments made from these materials are rarely worn for the lifespan promised—and are even less likely to be recycled. The growing mountains of discarded synthetic clothing on beaches in Ghana, in Chile Atacama Desert, and in forests in Cameroon are not anomalies; they are visible symptoms of a system built on unsustainable disposability.
Reducing output volumes and prioritising design for the environment remain the most effective ways to avoid these downstream impacts. EPR fees must be eco‑modulated so that synthetic fibres are priced to reflect their true environmental and social costs.
Combined, addressing all five challenges would allow EPRs for the fashion and garment industry to move beyond virtue signalling and have some real bite.
Leaders wanted
There is an apparent leadership vacuum in the fashion industry, leaving it stuck in response mode. The counterproductive thing about waiting for government legislation before acting is that the industry is losing the opportunity to tailor its future direction within growing material constraints. For an industry that has managed to fly under the radar for so long despite its huge impact, when faced with legislation in the absence of clear future direction, the fashion industry is reactively playing victim and whataboutism, blasting subliminal and social media messages to create choice paralysis in consumers, hiring armies of lobbyist to skew government policy processes, and devising ways of discrediting science. As they move forward, EU lawmakers must cut through this pressure.
Fashion should, at the very least, be fun, not anxiety ridden.
For more analysis see the report: Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable: Resizing Fashion for a Fair Consumption Space
An edited version of this was originally published in the Financial Times Sustainable Views on 26 Feb. 26
