The European ban on destroying unsold clothes, accessories and footwear took effect on 19 July, and it will not reduce how much gets made. What it does is convert a quantity nobody has recorded into one every large company must publish. Footwear has no ledger capable of producing it. Article 25 of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation forbids large firms from destroying unsold apparel and shoes; Article 24 requires them to disclose, once a year, how many units they discarded anyway and what those units weighed. The first is a rule about behaviour. The second is a rule about arithmetic, and it is the harder one.

The Commission’s own case for the ban rests on a number it cannot narrow. Its announcement that the prohibition had entered into application cites the European Environment Agency’s finding that 4 to 9 percent of textile products placed on the European market are destroyed before use. A four-to-nine range is not a measurement; it is the width of the uncertainty around one. Converted to mass, it covers everything between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes a year. Underlying the estimate is a reporting gap the EEA describes directly: “Few companies report on the volume of unsold goods and the numbers that exist are based on companies’ own reporting and lack transparency,” its briefing noted.

What replaces that guess is specified to the decimal. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/2, which applies from 2 March 2027, sets the template: legal entity, financial year, product category, number of units discarded, total weight in kilograms, reason for discarding, the percentage split across preparing for reuse, recycling, other recovery and disposal, and the measures taken to prevent destruction. Supporting records must be kept for five years. On paper this is a proper inventory account, the sort a warehouse system produces on request. The trouble sits in two provisions the compliance briefings have mostly skipped.

Disclosure is delimited on the first two digits of the Combined Nomenclature. Annex II of the implementing regulation names the product categories that must be reported at four digits, and neither apparel nor footwear appears there; the only leather entries cover articles of apparel and furskin. Every shoe a European group destroys therefore files under one heading.

Chapter 64 holds the ski boot and the espadrille.

The second provision decides what the unit count means. A footnote to Annex I lets the number of units be estimated from the accurately determined total weight of what was discarded, with the result marked ”±”. Weight is what a waste contractor measures at the gate, so for most operators it will be the true input and units will be reverse-engineered from it. That back-calculation needs an average mass per pair, and inside Chapter 64 no such average is worth having. France’s mature system concedes the point in its pricing: the per-pair eco-contribution runs from 8 cents to a little over 20 depending on weight and type, as FashionUnited reported from a webinar the Spanish footwear federation FICE ran with the collective scheme Gerescal.

Footwear is the worst case for every part of this. Julia Villaplana of FICE put the physical problem in a line at that session: “It’s not the same to recycle a shoe as it is to recycle a T-shirt.” A shoe is several bonded materials, which is why its end-of-life route is contested and why the treatment-percentage column will be the softest figure on the form. Returns make it worse. The EEA puts the overall EU return rate for footwear at around 30 percent, half again the clothing rate bought online, which it estimates at 20 percent. Returned stock is where the unsold pile forms, and a pair that ships, comes back, gets re-boxed and ships again passes through several sets of hands before anyone rules on its fate.

The one place the regulation does force unit-level records is the exit. Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/296, adopted in February and applying from 19 July, lists the grounds on which destruction stays lawful, and the operative one for ordinary surplus is failed donation: the goods must have been offered for donation, either directly to at least three suitable social economy entities in the Union or by way of a public notice kept live on the company’s website for at least eight weeks, and refused. That is a dated, documented, per-batch procedure, and it is the closest thing to an inventory ledger the regime creates. It exists only for stock a company has already resolved to destroy. The pile it came from stays uncounted.

The strongest objection is that accuracy was never the point. Disclosure regimes work by embarrassment rather than audit; a rough figure published every year is enough to make destruction a board-level liability, and firms will over-comply rather than test the line. For that to hold, the published figures must be comparable between companies, because embarrassment is a relative quantity. Implementing Regulation 2026/2 gives up comparability by design. A ±-flagged unit count, reverse-engineered from tonnage, at two-digit resolution, produced by each firm’s own method, cannot be ranked against a rival’s. The EEA already ran that experiment and got a band 330,000 tonnes wide.

France shows what a working count looks like, and what it counts. Refashion, the country’s textile and footwear scheme and the benchmark the FICE session pointed to, reported 281 million pairs of shoes sold in France in 2025, part of the record consumption year we covered in June. Refashion can likely produce that figure because the eco-contribution is levied per unit placed on the market, which makes counting a tax base rather than a report. Nothing in the ESPR attaches a charge to a destroyed pair. So the entry side of the French ledger is precise to the pair and the exit side does not exist. What gets counted is what gets billed.

Two counting systems are now being built over the same shoes, and they do not share a unit. The extended producer responsibility regime that Directive (EU) 2025/1892 made mandatory obliges member states to have schemes running by 17 April 2028 and counts pairs entering the market; the ESPR disclosure begins in March 2027 and counts kilograms leaving it, resolved to a customs chapter. If they stay separate, large footwear groups will file two incompatible accounts of the same inventory, and neither will settle the question the ban was written to settle. The fix is not another form: it is to express destruction as a ratio against the EPR declaration, units discarded over units declared, and hand the denominator to the scheme already collecting it. Brussels has the number that belongs on the bottom of that fraction. It chose not to ask for the one on top.