For most of fashion's history, what happened to a garment after it was thrown away was someone else's problem, usually the taxpayer's. Extended Producer Responsibility rewrites that rule, and for textiles it is moving from a French experiment to law across the EU and the United States.
This is the canonical guide to textile EPR: what it is, how the producer responsibility mechanism works, where it is now law, and what it means for a brand. It sits alongside the digital product passport as one of the rules reshaping fashion regulation.
What is Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)?
Extended Producer Responsibility is a policy principle that holds producers responsible for the whole life cycle of their products, especially the post-consumer stage. In practice it means the company that puts a product on the market pays for collecting, sorting and recycling it once it is discarded.
The idea was introduced by Swedish academic Thomas Lindhqvist in a 1990 report and later formalised by the OECD. It is a form of the polluter-pays principle: instead of municipalities and taxpayers footing the bill for textile waste, the cost shifts to the producers who designed and sold the product, which also gives them a direct financial reason to design it better.
How does textile EPR work? The PRO and eco-modulation
EPR almost never asks each brand to run its own recycling. Instead, producers pool their obligation through a Producer Responsibility Organisation (PRO), and the money flows through a simple loop.
- Producers register with the approved PRO for each market they sell into.
- They report the quantity of textiles they place on that market, usually by unit or by tonne.
- They pay a fee, an eco-contribution, on each item, scaled to what they sell.
- The PRO uses that money to fund collection, sorting, reuse, repair and recycling across the market.
The lever that makes EPR more than a tax is eco-modulation. The fee is not flat: it is adjusted up or down by how sustainable the product is.
- Bonus: products that are durable, repairable, made with recycled content or easy to recycle pay a lower fee.
- Malus: products that are hard to recycle, contain problem materials or are designed to be disposable pay more.
That bonus-malus structure is the whole point. It turns end-of-life cost into a design signal, rewarding the choices that make a garment last and be recyclable, and penalising the ones that do not.
Textile EPR in France: the original scheme
France built the world's first mandatory textile EPR scheme in 2007, and it is still the template everyone else is studying. Its PRO, Refashion (formerly Eco-TLC), runs the national system for clothing, household linen and footwear.
Refashion now counts more than 14,000 member companies and helps fund the collection of roughly a third of the textiles and footwear placed on the French market each year. Beyond simply paying for waste, the French scheme has grown to fund repair and reuse and to bankroll recycling research, using eco-modulation to reward better design. Nearly two decades of data is exactly why the French model is the reference point for the rules now arriving elsewhere.
Textile EPR across the EU: the 2025 Waste Framework Directive
The EU has made textile EPR mandatory for every member state. The revised Waste Framework Directive entered into force on 16 October 2025, introducing common EPR rules for textiles across the bloc, and member states must establish their national schemes by February 2028.
It builds on a rule already in force: since 1 January 2025, EU countries have had to collect used textiles separately from other waste, the collection layer that EPR then has to fund and organise.
- Eco-modulation tied to ESPR: EPR fees will be adjusted on sustainability criteria drawn from the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, such as durability and recyclability.
- A short prior list: before the revision, textile EPR was mandatory in only France, Hungary and the Netherlands, and voluntary in Flanders, so 2028 is a step change for most of the EU.
- A reuse carve-out: social-economy enterprises that collect and resell second-hand textiles are exempt from EPR obligations and can keep running their own collection.
Textile EPR in the US: California's SB 707
The United States now has textile EPR too, starting with California. Signed in 2024, SB 707, the Responsible Textile Recovery Act, is the first textile EPR law in the country, and it follows the same producer responsibility logic as Europe.
It requires producers of apparel and textile articles to form and join a PRO, which submits a state-approved plan for collecting, transporting, repairing, sorting and recycling textiles. Fees are eco-modulated on the same bonus-malus basis, cutting costs for reuse-, repair- and recycling-friendly design.
- The PRO is named: California's regulator, CalRecycle, approved Landbell USA as the state's textile PRO in early 2026.
- Registration has started: producers selling apparel or textiles in California must register with the PRO, with a statutory registration deadline in mid-2026.
- Enforcement has a horizon: producers face civil penalties from July 2030, or earlier once the PRO's plan is approved, unless they are covered by that plan.
California is also not alone in direction. The US has been rolling out packaging EPR state by state, from Oregon and California to Colorado, Maine, Minnesota and Washington, and textiles are following the same path, which is why other states are already drafting their own versions.
What textile EPR means for producers: your obligations
If you make or sell apparel in a market with textile EPR, you are a producer under the law, and the core obligations repeat across every scheme.
- Register: join and register with the approved PRO in each market where you place textiles on the market.
- Report: declare the volume you sell, by unit or weight, on the schedule the scheme sets.
- Pay eco-modulated fees: pay the eco-contribution per item, higher or lower depending on how sustainable the product is.
- Cover imports and online: selling into a market from abroad or through a marketplace usually still counts, so non-domestic producers typically have to register locally or appoint a representative.
The obligation is per market, not per company, so a brand selling across France, the wider EU and California is dealing with several schemes at once. The one thing they share is that better-designed products cost less, which is where compliance turns into strategy.
How to prepare for textile EPR
EPR is predictable enough to get ahead of. The brands that treat it as a design and data problem, not a last-minute filing, pay lower fees and avoid the scramble.
- Map your markets: list every country and US state where you sell, and the EPR status and deadline for each, so nothing arrives as a surprise.
- Get your product data ready: reporting and eco-modulation both need accurate fibre and composition data, one reason the digital product passport matters for EPR, not just traceability.
- Design for the bonus: durability, recyclability and recycled content lower your fee, so eco-design is a direct cost lever, the same logic that drives sustainable sourcing decisions.
- Keep claims honest: EPR data and sustainability claims have to line up, since the same regulators run the Green Claims rules, and a mismatch is a compliance risk.
From compliance to a design and sourcing edge
Textile EPR turns end-of-life cost into a design signal: the more durable, recyclable and well-sourced a product is, the less it costs to sell. That makes material and supplier intelligence a compliance asset, not just a sustainability one. Apshan builds the connected, sourced read that informs it. See how it feeds circular fashion, request access, or view the plans and pricing.