LONDON — Chanel is pushing back against figures recently disclosed in a Hong Kong courtroom, stressing they don’t reflect how the brand now handles unsold goods as Europe tightens the rules on fashion waste.

During the Tuesday trial of two former warehouse staffers accused of trying to steal 724 items earmarked for destruction, prosecutors said Chanel Hong Kong destroys 10,000 to 20,000 products every six months.

“The figure mentioned during the trial does not reflect Chanel’s current global practices, which have evolved in line with its sustainability commitments,” the company said in a statement shared with WWD.

“Today, all Chanel products worldwide that cannot be commercialized, including deadstock, unsold, or defective products, are managed through L’Atelier des Matières. Created in 2019 on the initiative of Chanel, L’Atelier des Matières recycles such products from luxury and premium brands in order to reuse them, supporting their reintegration into circular value chains,” the brand said.

L’Atelier des Matières sits under Nevold, an independent business-to-business hub for circular materials that Chanel formally launched in 2025.

Backed by 50 million to 80 million euros, Nevold pulls together L’Atelier des Matières, Filatures du Parc, a legacy wool-spinning mill with expertise in new and recycled yarns, and Authentic Material, an upcycled natural materials provider specializing in leather.

Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS, told WWD earlier that the goal is to turn waste into a resource at scale.

He noted that Nevold has already developed a thread blending virgin and end‑of‑life fibers that is being used by Chanel and other brands, and a recycled leather used for reinforcements inside handbags and shoes.

Around 30 percent of Chanel handbags and 50 percent of its shoes now contain those recycled components, with the brand targeting the removal of plastics in those areas.

Set up as a separate entity, Nevold is meant to work beyond Chanel’s ateliers in Rue Cambon, supplying recycled materials to other fashion players as well as industries such as sportswear, automotive, and aviation.

Pavlovsky argued that only by working at that broader, industrial scale can recycled options become price‑competitive and widely adopted.

Chanel’s response on Thursday could not be more timely.

From Sunday, the European Union is rolling out its Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which will ban the destruction of unsold clothing, footwear and accessories and force companies to disclose how much stock they write off and under what conditions it is destroyed.

By building its own circular materials infrastructure and making sure that unsold goods are now systematically captured by L’Atelier des Matières, Chanel is positioning itself as part of the solution rather than a symbol of the problem.

Raffaella Loncao, founder of On This Planet Advisory and a former luxury executive, said what’s happening around Chanel is part of a much broader shift that fashion is moving from managing waste to trying to design it out of the system.

That transition, she added, is being driven by forces such as tougher regulation like France’s AGEC law, the rollout of AI in demand forecasting and inventory planning, heavy investment in new materials, and fast‑developing traceability tools that started in anti‑counterfeiting and now underpin repair, resale, recycling and coming digital product passports.

France’s experience is seen as a test case. Having operated under AGEC since 2020, companies there including Chanel have already been forced to make the organizational and operational changes before the wider EU implementation.

“The lesson is not a specific policy mechanism to copy, but that this transition is manageable,” Loncao noted, adding that brands which use the moment to rethink product design, planning and circularity, rather than just box‑tick on compliance, will be better positioned.

“The discussion has evolved beyond the destruction of unsold products. The future of luxury will not be defined by finding better ways to dispose of excess inventory, but by becoming precise enough not to create that excess in the first place,” she added.