The impact of proposed CSRD changes for the textile industry

The CSRD is a key regulation in sustainability reporting. Recently, a number of changes have been proposed for the CSRD, with the intention of making it more effective and streamlined for businesses. In this blog, we explore the proposed changes and their impacts on the textile industry.

What is the CSRD and why is it evolving?

The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is a European Union regulation that was adopted in July 2023. It put into place several requirements for sustainability reporting, including more comprehensive reporting, double materiality, digital reporting, and stakeholder involvement.

In February 2025, the Omnibus legislative package was proposed by the European Commission to address and amend the CSRD, CSDDD and EU taxonomy... The overall goal is to boost European competitiveness, while maintaining the EU’s climate and decarbonisation objectives. This includes reducing administrative burdens on businesses, especially smaller and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to make it easier for businesses to comply with sustainability requirements.

What are the key changes and what do they mean for textile businesses?

Textile businesses, particularly those involved in workwear and PPE, are closely watching the CSRD evolution due to their reliance on complex, multi-tiered supply chains and growing pressure to demonstrate environmental and social compliance.

The European Textile Service Association (ETSA), representing companies in the textile service industry (including workwear and PPE), has certainly welcomed simplification measures, provided environmental ambitions remain intact. In a position paper to the EU, ETSA and its members advocated for:

Scale double materiality proportionally: maintaining double materiality assessments (IRO’s impact, risk and opportunity analysis) but adjusting expectations based on company size and capacity to ensure relevance and feasibility.
Simplify assurance requirements: reducing the complexity and cost of limited assurance processes, particularly for companies operating across multiple jurisdictions, to alleviate financial burdens.
Streamline reporting data points: eliminating non-essential or overly complex indicators, focusing on most relevant, measurable, quantitative data to enhance reporting efficiency and comparability.
Introduce reporting thresholds: setting thresholds to exempt business locations with negligible impact from detailed reporting, reducing unnecessary administrative efforts.
Limit Scope 3 emissions reporting: indirect Scope 3 emissions reporting presents a particularly high administrative burden due to the difficulty of obtaining reliable third-party data and the complex nature of value chain interactions.

ETSA strongly supports the simplification of Scope 3 disclosure requirements, and recommends that expectations be aligned with practical data availability and sector-specific limitations. Overly prescriptive requirements risk undermining both accuracy and comparability, particularly for decentralised or service-heavy industries.
Protect SMEs from excessive data requests: limiting the information that larger companies can request from SMEs to what is specified in the CSRD voluntary sustainability reporting standards (VSME standard).

Overall, the adoption of these changes within the textile industry would mean a huge reduction in administrative burdens. This would allow businesses to report on the most relevant data, and therefore spend more time developing best practice action plans. In turn, businesses would then have more capacity to develop their strategy and policy in regards to sustainability, and working towards the objectives of the EU Green Deal.

What are the next steps?

While it is important to remember that these changes are still only at proposal stage, they have been welcomed within the textile industry. ETSA has acknowledged the initiative as a much-needed step toward simplifying EU sustainability reporting obligations, allowing businesses to maintain environmental ambition while reducing unnecessary administrative obligations. We expect further updates and information on the changes proposed by Omnibus in the final quarter of 2025.