In short
- 19 July 2026 is in the past. For a large enterprise the prohibition has applied since that day.
- 19 July 2030 is the next fixed date and it belongs to medium-sized enterprises.
- The annual disclosure has no recorded calendar date, and ecodesign requirements for textiles have no date at all. We do not invent either.
The next fixed date is 19 July 2030, when medium-sized enterprises come into scope. The date still described as upcoming on a lot of pages is 19 July 2026, and it has passed: since that day a large enterprise has been prohibited from destroying unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear listed in Annex VII to Regulation (EU) 2024/1781. Two things have to be true by your date. No Annex VII goods leave your business to be destroyed, and you publish an annual account on your own website of what you discarded and where it went.
There are only two hard dates in this rule and both are in the table below. The rest of this page is about what carries no date, which is more of it than most timelines admit.
What is the whole calendar for an apparel business?
Two of these belong to the unsold goods rule. The others are neighbouring obligations that share the same policy origin and get muddled into the same timeline, so they are marked as such.
| Date | What happens | Whose rule | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19 July 2026 | Destruction of unsold Annex VII consumer products prohibited for large enterprises. Annual discard disclosure applies on the same basis | ESPR, Articles 24 and 25 | Passed. Live now |
| 27 September 2026 | Environmental claims made to consumers about garments in scope | EmpCo | Passed. Live now |
| 17 June 2027 | Member States must have transposed the revised waste directive | Textiles EPR, a different instrument | Upcoming, and it binds governments rather than you |
| 17 April 2028 | National producer responsibility schemes running. Producer obligations start on the national date, at the latest this one. In the Netherlands, producer responsibility for textiles has applied since 1 July 2023 | Textiles EPR | Upcoming |
| 17 April 2029 | Producer responsibility extends to enterprises with fewer than 10 persons and turnover and balance sheet not above EUR 2 million | Textiles EPR | Upcoming |
| 19 July 2030 | Medium-sized enterprises come into scope of the destruction ban and the discard disclosure | ESPR, Articles 24 and 25 | The next date in this rule |
Micro and small enterprises are excluded from the ESPR rows, and no end date to that exclusion is recorded in our verified file.
Which date is still being sold as upcoming?
19 July 2026. That date has passed, but many pages have not been updated since.
The phrasing to watch for is future tense: the EU will ban the destruction of unsold clothing, brands will need to stop shredding stock, new rules are coming for unsold goods. All of that was written before the date and never updated. The regulation says it plainly in the present: from 19 July 2026 the destruction of unsold consumer products as listed in Annex VII is prohibited.
The consequence for a large enterprise is not theoretical. If your disposal arrangements have not changed since 2025 and you have not asked your contractors what treatment route your goods took, you have been operating under a live prohibition without checking whether you are on the right side of it.
Does the annual disclosure fall on a particular day?
We do not know, and we are not going to guess.
Our verified record says the disclosure is annual and published on an easily accessible page of your own website. It does not record a first publication date, a fixed day in the year, or a rule tying it to a financial year. Several summary pages state one. None of them showed us a source we could check, so the entry stays empty.
What that means practically is that the safe assumption is the conservative one. Treat it as due for each full year in which you were in scope, publish it on the same cadence as your other annual reporting, and read the article itself before you fix the date internally. If somebody tells you a specific day, ask which article it comes from.
Why does 19 July 2030 matter now if you are medium-sized?
Because the compliance is quick and the preparation is not.
Working back from that date, the sequence looks like this. You need a complete map of every route by which unsold goods leave the business, which usually turns out to be more routes than anybody has written down. You need each disposal counterparty to tell you the treatment route by weight, which for most brands requires a contract change rather than an email. You need the stock and waste records to produce units, weights and types by category rather than a single write-off value. Only then is the disclosure a formatting exercise.
None of that is quick when it touches multiple disposal counterparties and several product categories, and four years is not generous for a business that is also growing across the size threshold. Growth is the other reason to start now rather than later: a medium-sized brand that becomes large during this window gets the earlier 2026 date, not the later one.
What in this area has no date at all?
Ecodesign requirements and a digital product passport for textiles.
These would arrive through delegated acts under the same regulation. The Commission adopted its first working plan in April 2025 and textiles with a focus on apparel is a priority product group. As of 28 August 2026 no delegated act had been adopted for textiles. Indicative years for adoption and for compliance circulate widely. We could not confirm any of them against the working plan document itself, so this page gives none. If you are building a roadmap, put this item on it with a blank date rather than a plausible one, because a plausible date will be treated as a real one by everybody downstream of you.
What has to be true before your date arrives?
Five statements, and you should be able to make all five without qualification.
You can list every channel through which unsold stock leaves the business. You know, by weight, what happened to last year's write-offs. Your disposal contracts oblige the counterparty to report the treatment route. Your stock system distinguishes goods sent for reuse, recycling, recovery and disposal rather than lumping them into one adjustment. And somebody owns the annual page on your website, by name, with a calendar reminder.
Note what is missing from that list: any greenhouse gas figure. This rule counts items and kilogrammes. If you were told it needs a carbon calculation, that is a different regime and probably a different budget. The one live rule in this cluster that reaches a carbon number is the environmental claims regime, and it reaches it only where you already published a claim, which is what our EmpCo claims checklist covers. Customers asking for value chain data are a separate pressure again, usually answered in a format such as the VSME standard.
Where does Hedgehog fit against a fixed date?
Nowhere on this rule directly, and on the adjacent work in a limited way.
The Hedgehog platform builds an organisational carbon inventory and reports against the GHG Protocol, which is the deliverable that customer questionnaires and claims substantiation actually need. It does not track stock disposal, and it will not write your discard page. The platform page reports 5,000+ users and you can open a free account without talking to anybody.
One limitation that is directly relevant to a deadline page: a Small-Business reviewer on G2 in August 2026 rated the platform 5 out of 5 and said it has no forecasting, adding that Hedgehog had told them it is on the development list. If your plan for 2030 assumes the software will project your position forward, check that assumption now. Forward planning of that kind is currently work for people, which is what carbon footprint consulting covers.
Sources: Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, Articles 24 and 25 and Annex VII, Directive (EU) 2025/1892, the Hedgehog regulation and industry fact base, and the Hedgehog platform page. Verified 28 August 2026.
Facts on this page were last verified on 2026-09-17.
