Can I still destroy unsold furniture stock?

What you concretely have to do

What is expected of you

The ESPR contains a separate section on the destruction of unsold consumer goods: Articles 23 to 26 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1781. This section is separate from the digital product passport itself, but affects the same type of businesses: manufacturers, importers and sellers of furniture who deal with returns, showroom models, discontinued lines or excess stock.

Disclosure of destruction figures

For certain businesses, the regulation provides for an obligation to disclose how many unsold consumer goods they destroy, and to provide information about the reason for this. For a furniture business with 10 to 100 employees, this means that if this obligation applies, there must be a way to track those numbers: how many units, which product group, and why those units were not sold or resold.

Possible ban on destruction

The articles also provide for the possibility that the European Commission may introduce a ban on the destruction of certain unsold consumer goods through a delegated act. Whether and when this will be concretely applied to furniture remains uncertain. The text of the regulation gives the Commission the power to regulate this per product group; for furniture it is not yet known whether, and with what content, this will be done.

Exceptions and smaller businesses

The regulation takes into account the size of a business: there are provisions that treat smaller undertakings differently from large ones. What this concretely means for a business of a certain size is something that must be apparent from the regulation itself and the associated thresholds, and it is not something for which a figure can be mentioned here without consulting the text itself.

Relationship to the digital product passport

This section of the ESPR stands alongside the obligations surrounding the digital product passport, but there is a practical link: businesses that are already working on how do I approach the digital product passport for furniture step by step? often already establish which products, batches and variants have been produced and sold. That same administration can be used as a basis for tracking what is not sold and what happens to it.

Where things go wrong in practice

Showroom models are not regarded as "unsold". A showroom model that is removed after a few seasons falls in the perception of many furniture businesses under "normal showroom clearance" and not under a category that must be tracked separately. Once rules apply to the destruction of unsold goods, that distinction is not self-evident. Specifically for this category there is a separate section: may I still destroy showroom models and returns?

Returns are destroyed without registration. In project furnishing and web sales, there are returns that can no longer be sold as new — a damaged cabinet, a fabric that no longer fits the rest of the collection. These items are often quietly disposed of without anyone recording numbers or reasons, yet precisely that information may become relevant if a reporting obligation comes into effect.

Destruction is outsourced without any feedback being provided. An external company empties a warehouse or showroom, and the furniture business itself receives no overview of what was precisely removed. If there is then an obligation to publish figures, the basis for doing so will be missing.

Stock that remains after a collection change is shredded and disposed of. With a collection featuring many variants — different colours and fabrics of the same model — part of the stock may prove unsaleable at the end of a cycle. Anyone working with a furniture collection with many colour and fabric variants, often already has a system to distinguish variants; in practice, this system is rarely used to also track disposal per variant.

It is assumed that this topic is still too far away to take action now. Because the delegated act for furniture has not yet been published, this section is sometimes set aside entirely. That is a different consideration than the question of what can practically already be set up, as described at what can you do now while the rules are not yet final?

What you can put in order now

• An internal overview of unsold inventory, with date, product category, quantity and reason for non-sale (return, showroom model, collection change, damage).
• A record of what happens to that inventory: resale at a discount, donation, recycling, or destruction — with quantities per category.
• Agreements with parties that remove or destroy inventory, so that a feedback quantity and reason are available instead of only a disposal note.
• A fixed procedure for showroom models and returns, including the moment at which it is determined whether something is still saleable or not.
• A link between this record and the product data that are already being maintained for the digital product passport, so that two separate systems do not develop alongside each other. Companies that are wondering can I use my existing product database for the product passport, can often accommodate this record in the same system.

As long as the delegated act for furniture has not been published, there is no fixed date and no fixed content to submit. What can already be done is: ensure that your own administration makes a distinction between sold and unsold inventory, and between the reason why something remains unsold. That is not an obligation that follows from these articles themselves, but a basis that is useful once a concrete obligation applies.