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13 January 2025

Ecodesign: The EU’s journey to sustainable products begins now

By Alison Grace
By Emily Best
By Valeria Botta
By Rita Tedesco

Ecodesign is one of the EU’s crowning achievements, making products more sustainable by ensuring environmental impacts are considered from the outset. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) will make this a reality for more products than ever. What will happen in 2025? How will this framework be implemented? How can every product become sustainable by default?

Earth Overshoot Day — when humanity has consumed more resources than the Earth’s capacity to regenerate them — arrives earlier and earlier every year. That’s largely because so many products we consume are short-lived, disposable, inefficient, toxic, or unrepairable.

This reality is a choice we have collectively made, not an inevitability. Choosing instead to produce only products that respect our planet’s natural boundaries is possible. But how?

Designing with sustainability in mind

Focusing only on recycling and end-of-life is not enough to mitigate the harms of how much and what we consume. Most of a product’s environmental impacts are determined in its design phase — and that’s where the right regulations can help to reduce the resources we use dramatically.

Wasteful products should be designed differently from the outset, limiting their impacts on the environment — from resource extraction and manufacturing to use and disposal. If ecodesign laws prevent unsustainable products from being created, they will never make it to market, and whole sectors can be brought within planetary boundaries.

The ESPR, Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, will help to make this happen in the EU by improving circularity, energy performance, and the overall sustainability of almost all physical products on the EU market. It builds on the successful 1994 Ecodesign Directive, which applied to energy-related products and activated huge energy savings. In 2020, these policies saved 10% of the EU’s primary energy consumption, avoiding 7% of all greenhouse gas emissions for the bloc.

The ESPR establishes a strong framework to set ecodesign rules for a variety of sectors, but the final list of products has not yet been established, and the rules have not yet been written. The right foundations are in place, now it is time to build.

A sector-by-sector approach to sustainability

The ESPR will cover a wide range of products, first focusing on setting stricter sustainability requirements for categories with the biggest environmental impact. The first ESPR Working Plan, expected imminently, will list these priority products. Many sectors* — from textiles to car tyres, cosmetics to toys, steel to plastics — have been mentioned as possibilities.

Every sector covered by the ESPR will have its own Delegated Act(s), developed by the European Commission with advice from the Ecodesign Forum — a diverse group of experts, including civil society, Member States, industry, and recyclers. ECOS has been approved as a member of the forum. Other experts can apply now to join, with applications assessed on a rolling basis.

For the notion of a ‘sustainable product’ to really mean something, every rule must maintain the high bar set in the ESPR — as well as being coupled with measures on sustainable resource management. Ecodesign rules must work alongside clear and binding targets to reduce resource use and material footprint in the EU by 2050.

Here’s how every sector can use the ESPR framework to become more sustainable:

  • Tackle the most environmentally impactful and polluting products first to ensure they’re dealt with.
  • Introduce horizontal measures that apply to multiple items to reduce potential delays.
  • Ban the destruction of unsold goods — the most wasteful scenario of all.
  • Combine ambitious minimum environmental requirements with effective market surveillance and enforcement, guided by the best available evidence.
  • Focus on materials (‘intermediates’) as well as final products, and on the impacts generated during manufacturing and production.
  • Implement a digital product passport and clear information requirements. This will help to enhance transparency throughout the supply chain.

* The full list of products that will be dealt with under the ESPR has not yet been published, but a wide variety of sectors have been mentioned. For example, products including textiles (notably garments and footwear), furniture, bed mattresses, tyres, detergents, paints and varnishes, cosmetics, toys, fishing gear, absorbent hygiene products, energy-related products, and ICT products/other electronics. And intermediate products including iron, steel and aluminium, lubricants, chemicals, non-ferrous, non-aluminium metal products, plastic and polymers, pulp and paper, and glass.

2025: Setting the stage

Agreeing sector-by-sector rules will take years, but the process starts in earnest next month, with the first meeting of the Ecodesign Forum scheduled for February, and an ESPR Working Plan expected shortly after that. These important milestones will finalise the list of priority sectors and set the tone of ecodesign in the EU for the long term.

ESPR implementation will begin with measures addressing the wasteful practice of destroying unsold goods, starting with textiles. The first measures for individual product groups, e.g., textiles and steel, are due to be adopted at the end of 2025, with the first requirements expected to apply in mid-2027.

There’s a lot to do — and a lot of opportunity

ESPR implementation is supported by strong foundations, but ultimately the success of this law will depend on which sectors make it into the final list, how rules are implemented and enforced, and how inclusive the process is.

Many sectors are being brought under the ecodesign umbrella, so there’s a lot to do to incentivise manufacturers to prioritise the environment and push polluting products off the market. But we’re on the right path, and ECOS is there for the journey.

ESPR resource hub

Want to know more? We’ve got you covered!

Contact Alison Grace, ECOS Press Manager, to be connected to a spokesperson who can share more information about the ESPR, as well as our work and positions.

Related work area

Decarbonised and efficient energy consumption

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ECOS is co-funded by the European Commission and EFTA Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EISMEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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