California made history with SB 707, the first mandatory U.S. textile EPR law. Europe has been doing this since 2007 — proving that it’s harder than ever.
California made history in September 2024 when Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 707 — the Responsible Textile Recovery Act — into law. The state became the first jurisdiction in the United States to impose mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility for textiles, requiring the brands that make and sell clothes to fund and manage what happens to those clothes at the end of their lives. It was a landmark moment for American fashion regulation. And by European standards, it was also about 17 years late.
France launched its national textile EPR program in 2007. The Netherlands followed in 2023, Latvia in 2024. The EU’s revised Waste Framework Directive — which mandates that every member state establish its own national textile EPR scheme — entered into force in October 2025. As California races to build its compliance infrastructure before a July 2026 deadline, the continent has already accumulated nearly two decades of data on what works, what doesn’t, and what the fashion industry will do when left to its own devices. The answer, it turns out, is not enough.
What California actually passed — and what happens next
SB 707, authored by state Sen. Josh Newman, creates an EPR framework requiring producers of apparel and textile articles — including footwear, swimwear, undergarments, and handbags — to form and join a Producer Responsibility Organization, or PRO. That PRO is then responsible for designing and implementing a statewide system for collection, repair, reuse, sorting, and recycling of covered products. The law defines “producer” broadly, cascading from in-state manufacturers and brand owners down to importers, distributors, and retailers if no domestic manufacturer can be identified. Companies with less than $1 million in annual global turnover are exempt, as are sellers of only secondhand products.
The implementation timeline is tight. CalRecycle was required to approve a PRO by March 1, 2026. On February 27, it designated Landbell USA as the sole approved PRO, triggering a July 1, 2026, deadline for all qualifying producers to join. Stewardship plans must be submitted and approved by July 1, 2030, at which point producers who have failed to participate face penalties of up to $10,000 per day — and up to $50,000 per day for intentional or repeated violations.
Last July, three major industry trade groups — the California Retailers Association, the American Apparel & Footwear Association, and the National Retail Federation — signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly establish an independent PRO for textiles, signaling early, if cautious, industry cooperation with the law’s requirements.
The scale of the problem California is trying to address is significant. According to California’s own disposal facility data from 2021, 1.2 million tons of textiles were disposed of in the state that year, making textile waste the fastest-growing component of California’s landfills at that point, comprising 3 percent of the state’s total landfill volume.
Rachel Kibbe, CEO of American Circular Textiles, welcomed the law while flagging its limits. “We face the potential of sustainability teams turning focus and resources to compliance, over innovation and true progress,” she said in a statement. “A unified federal approach would streamline the system, prevent disjointed efforts, and better enable businesses to comply across state lines.”
What Europe has — and what it’s still getting wrong
The EU’s textile EPR architecture is substantially more advanced than California’s, but it is not without its own contradictions. France, the world’s longest-running example of what mandatory textile EPR looks like in practice, offers the clearest window into both the promise and the limits of producer responsibility as a policy tool.
France’s scheme, managed by Refashion, covers clothing, footwear, and household linens. Refashion coordinates collection across 47,406 voluntary drop-off points overseen by 583 local authorities, with 67 separate sorting companies involved in processing the waste. In 2023, the organization helped collect 268,161 metric tons out of approximately 833,000 tons sold on the French market — a 32 percent collection rate. The law demands a 60 percent collection rate by 2028, meaning France, despite nearly two decades of operation, is not yet halfway to where its own regulation says it needs to be.
The result offers a sobering corrective to the assumption that mandatory EPR automatically solves the problem. A working paper published by the OECD in December 2024 found that France’s approach is considered quite successful in comparative terms — achieving a 60 percent reuse and recovery rate of collected and sorted material, against a European average reuse rate of just 8 percent of collected post-consumer textiles. But the paper also concluded that implementing EPR alone is not sufficient, and that schemes must be accompanied by other regulatory approaches and economic incentives to drive meaningful systems change.
Maud Hardy, then circular economy director at Refashion, told attendees of the Dornbirn Global Fiber Conference in 2021 that if we want a circular model, “the cost of waste collection for textiles and footwear plus sorting and recycling needs to be less than the cost of household waste management, otherwise it won’t be profitable and it will not make any sense.”
The broader EU framework compounds France’s challenges with additional ambition. The revised Waste Framework Directive, which entered into force on October 16, 2025, requires all member states to establish their own EPR schemes within 30 months — meaning full compliance is expected by around April 2028. The EU generates approximately 12.6 million tons of textile waste annually, of which only one-fifth is currently separately collected for reuse or recycling. Meanwhile, mandatory separate collection of textile waste across all EU member states became a legal requirement as of January 1, 2025 — a deadline that many member states are still working to meet.
The eco-modulation advantage and who’s using it
The most sophisticated regulatory innovation on the European side is eco-modulation: the practice of adjusting the fees producers pay based on the environmental performance of their products. Under France’s Refashion scheme, eco-modulated fees have been in force since January 2025, with bonuses for product durability, certified environmental labels, and incorporation of recycled materials, and penalties for designs that hinder recycling processes. The baseline EPR fee is roughly €0.01 per garment, rising to a maximum of approximately €0.06 per item depending on eco-modulation criteria.
The EU’s revised directive extends this logic bloc-wide. Fees will be adjusted based on sustainability criteria developed under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, considering factors including durability, recyclability, and recycled content — and member states may impose higher fees on companies that engage in fast fashion practices. In Spain, a draft Royal Decree published in June 2025 includes eco-modulated fees tied to weight, recycling content, recyclability, and fast fashion business practices.
California’s SB 707 does not currently include an eco-modulation mechanism of equivalent sophistication, though the structure of the law does not preclude one being developed as part of the PRO’s eventual stewardship plan. Digital product passports — which would provide machine-readable data on material composition, recycled content, carbon footprint, repairability, and supply chain traceability — are expected to become mandatory in the EU for textiles from 2027 to 2030, creating the data infrastructure that could make eco-modulation significantly more precise and enforceable than anything currently possible.
The actual score
So who is winning? On timeline and sophistication, Europe is not close to losing. The continent has 17 years of operational data, an established PRO infrastructure in multiple markets, and a bloc-wide regulatory framework that will make textile EPR the baseline expectation for any brand selling into 500 million consumers. The eco-modulation mechanism, in particular, has no American equivalent — and it is the single most powerful policy tool for incentivizing sustainable design rather than simply managing waste after the fact.
But California’s significance should not be understated. As Kibbe noted, its economy is large enough to influence global brand behavior, and following SB 707’s passage, fashion industry groups including American Circular Textiles called for similar action at the federal level. New York is already considering a comparable bill through Senate Bill S3217, introduced in January 2025. The U.S. may be years behind Europe, but the direction of travel is now set.
What both systems share — and what the France data makes plain — is that mandatory EPR is a floor, not a ceiling. The collection rates, the sorting infrastructure, the recycling technology, and the consumer behavior change required to genuinely close the loop on fashion’s waste problem are all still works in progress on both sides of the Atlantic. The regulation is necessary. It is also, by itself, still not nearly enough.
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