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Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation: Understanding the Ecodesign Measures and Their Anticipated Impact on Fashion Brands

As Europe strides confidently towards a greener future, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) heralds a transformative era for European businesses.

Expected to be formally adopted by next spring, this ground-breaking legislation not only aims to elevate product sustainability across the EU market but also sets a precedent for global environmental practices. For EU business leaders, understanding the ESPR’s ecodesign measures is not just about compliance; it’s about seizing a strategic opportunity to lead in sustainability, enhance brand value, and foster deeper consumer trust through transparency and innovation.

Following our latest article on the ESPR series, which covered its impact on the destruction of unsold goods, this piece offers you a full analysis of the Regulation’s ecodesign requirements and what they represent for major sectors, such as fashion and textiles. So let’s explore all the expert insights prepared by the Ohana team to help you navigate the upcoming changes.

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Objectives of the ESPR’s Ecodesign Measures

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is part of the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, designed to provide citizens with high quality, functional and safe products, which are efficient and affordable, last longer and are designed for reuse, repair, and high-quality recycling.

Instrumental in advancing the Union’s green transition, the ESPR comes to raise the sustainability bar for businesses interested in placing their products on the EU market. The measures it includes should not only make goods more sustainable by design but also foster conscious consumption among Europeans, through higher transparency standards.

The ESPR introduces a framework for establishing ecodesign requirements to meet three main goals:

Making sustainable products the norm on the EU market;
Reducing their carbon and environmental footprints over their lifecycle;
Ensuring their free movement within the internal market.

The requirements established by the Regulation, which are to be specified in delegated acts for given product groups, must be met before the products enter the EU market.

Ecodesign Requirements: What Exactly Do They Entail?

In simple terms, the ESPR empowers the EU Commission to adopt delegated acts that set requirements to reduce the environmental impact of specific products or product groups.

These ecodesign requirements will be classified as performance and/or information requirements as we will later explain, but both types can be established regarding several product aspects, such as:

Durability, reliability, reusability, upgradability and reparability;
Possibility of maintenance and refurbishment;
Recycled content;
Presence of substances of concern;
Energy, water, and resource use and efficiency;
Possibility of remanufacturing, recycling and of recovery of materials;
Environmental impacts, including carbon and environmental footprints and expected generation of waste.

The EU Commission will assess all product aspects and determine which ones will be relevant and of significance for apparel and textile products when regulating product specific eco-design measures.

Performance Requirements vs. Information Requirements

Two different types of ecodesign requirements can be created by the Commission, as we will detail below.

Performance Requirements

As the name implies, performance requirements are defined to ensure a specific level of performance in relation to one or more product parameters, and can be either quantitative or non-quantitative.

Quantitative performance requirements will determine a minimum or a maximum standard to be met, such as a minimum amount of recycled content, or a maximum concentration of a substance of concern.

Non-quantitative requirements, on the other hand, will focus on functionality, such as prohibition on the use of technical solutions that limit product reparability or of substances which make the product more difficult to recycle.

Information Requirements

Information requirements are the ones designed to elevate the level of transparency practised by EU businesses on products and help consumers in making environmentally conscious purchase decisions.

Such requirements create an obligation for producers to disclose clear and easily understandable information regarding product parameters, with the following being set as the mandatory minimum:

Digital Product Passport (DPP) – All the information required as part of the Digital Product Passport (DPP), which may also need to be provided on the product itself, as in packaging or labelling, or via an easily accessible website.
Substances of Concern – Information related to substances of concern, such as chemical content, safe use, health or environmental hazards, and decontamination and recovery (once they become waste).

Examples of Potential Performance and Information Ecodesign Requirements

To illustrate the difference, and how these measures could look like in practice, below you will find examples of performance and information requirements, regarding the two product aspects.

Recycled Content

Information requirement: the obligation to disclose the amount of recycled content in a product.

Performance requirement: the obligation to meet a certain threshold of recycled content in a product e.g. % weight

Carbon Footprint

Information requirement: the obligation to disclose the carbonl footprint of a product

Performance requirement: the obligation to meet a certain maximum threshold of carbon footprint of the product

Assessing the examples of ecodesign measures, for brands and suppliers to be able to comply with them, large efforts on traceability in the supply chain when it comes to materials and environmental footprint must be guaranteed and improved. The above examples are likely only a subset of eco-design measures for apparel products, and therefore the impacts on brands will go significantly beyond this.

ESPR Ecodesign Measures: Textiles under the loop

The Commission has announced its intention to release an initial product working plan within nine months of the ESPR coming into effect, and that it should cover at least the next three years. The plan will detail prioritised product groups and estimated timelines for establishing ecodesign requirements, but will also undergo regular updates to ensure its relevance and effectiveness.

Nevertheless, the institution has made it clear that textiles, specifically garments and footwear, will be listed as a priority group within the initial plan.

As a high polluting sector, textiles has been the focus of multiple EU environmental initiatives in recent years, and the ESPR should also greatly impact the future of the industry, as Marina Prados Espínola, Public Affairs Manager at Policy Hub, explains.

ESPR will be a giant step forward in regulating the textile industry for more sustainability and circularity. It will establish a clear roadmap on the targets to be achieved both on the key physical aspects of products’ sustainability and on the information to be shared to enable product circularity and engage more directly with consumers. The materialisation of the textile ecodesign requirements will also require greater cooperation and exchanges among the industry and with the EU institutions. These efforts will seek to further solidify sustainability practices within the complex framework of the textile value chain.

Compliance Impacts for EU Businesses and Next Steps for The ESPR

For European businesses, non-compliance with EU ecodesign requirements carries significant legal and financial risks, as well as potential market access limitations. Brands will need to get ready for a much broader scope of product compliance and internal processes linked to compliance.

Should, however, non-compliance be identified, member state authorities are mandated to ensure that the offending products are corrected or withdrawn from the market. Persistent non-compliance may lead to member states taking actions to restrict or entirely halt the product’s market availability. Furthermore, penalties for non-compliance should be stringent, with member states required to implement fines and possibly exclude companies from public procurement processes temporarily.

As with other EU environmental initiatives, such as the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes, the ESPR also increases producer accountability regarding what happens in their entire value chain, regardless of the location of where it has been produced.

In most cases, it will be brands who will be responsible should a non-compliant product cause consumer damage, and thus also grant consumers the right to seek compensation. This liability falls firstly to the manufacturer. Under the ESPR, brands who sell their products under their own trade name are seen as manufacturers.

Considering the global scope of the fashion and textiles value chains, this aspect of the legislation could pose a significant challenge for companies within those sectors, which will need to enforce new quality standards across several countries and suppliers outside the EU.

What Happens Next

The development of the requirements for textiles should happen over the next 18 months, during which the EU Commission will conduct the preparatory work, and organise consultations to draft the ecodesign measures.

To expand on these consultations, the Commission also plans to set up an Ecodesign Forum, bringing together specialists appointed by Member States and a diverse group of stakeholders, including representatives from industries, unions, consumer advocates, environmental organisations, and the research community. An interesting aspect of the forum is that it will assist in defining priorities, drafting of new ecodesign standards, sharing best practices, and other key efforts.

In addition to evaluating their worldwide operations and making adjustments to meet the ESPR’s ecodesign requirements, European businesses should aim to help shape the future of such measures.

If you are looking to develop new sustainability strategies and efficiently engage with policymakers, Ohana’s complete range of public affairs services will help you turn the upcoming challenges into competitive advantages and business opportunities.