PPWR lands another blow to an precarious tabletop industry
rascal.news
rascal.news
There is no indications of what registration implies nor what packaging is actually required. We get this:
"That’s because one of the primary issues they face is the sheer amount of resources that they need to invest into remaining PPWR compliant."
but no indication of what that means.
This is a whine and whinge piece without any substance. I'm sure there are issues but there is nothing substantive here.
The article could be clearer yes but it's really an issue especially for small self employed artists selling by post in the EU. They're basically being killed off if they relied on shipping to other countries.
And the risks of non compliance are high fines. This was meant to punish AliExpress and their sellers for packaging waste but how are they going to fine Happy Goose Ltd in a basement in Shenzhen? They're not. Business in the EU however are going to be easy pickings. So the Chinese will just keep what they're doing and the EU independent artists are screwed with retarded bureaucracy.
For an Amazon it's a joke paying 200€ to register in a single country, but for an artist that may not even have single package to a certain country every year it's insane. And you can't even register when you have an order to send, you have to do it before.
It's deeply evil and totally meant to kill the little guy or girl.
There's some exceptions for small business but they're mainly bureaucratic, the hefty fees still apply.
For example I don't have to register in every EU country if I make a social media site in one EU country. I only have to register it in my country and that agency may or may not forward the information to others. The law doesn't have to say this - it's implied.
This is the kind of stuff that's in Draghis report, and it's economically equivalent to tariffs.
Can you find me evidence to the contrary?
It's literally in the top ten stupidest things that the EU has done, and the EU has done a lot of stupid things.
Note that I am an EU citizen who's committed to the EU in general, but stuff like this is just dumb.
The very first thing it means is that a firm has to understand the new law and then determine what changes it requires. And as a firm gets smaller that makes the relative burden higher. Of course this shouldn’t imply you never change anything, but it does mean every incremental new regulation is a ratchet that shifts in favor of large firms. The EU estimates this regulation avoids 23Mt of CO2[0], which is about 0.8% of EU emissions. Not sure that’s the place to focus unless you can make a case that it will have spillover effects into other markets.
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-00218...
What kind of source would you like next? "Just don't follow the law" might be a good advice for the American hypercapitalists of Hacker News, less so for someone in the EU.
That’s the point. There are 27 member states that each have their own regulations that need to be complied with.
The article has more details than your comment implies, such as the fact that some states like Spain have ongoing recurring fees too.
Dealing with changing regulations and fees that are different across 27 states on top of all of the other EU regulations is normal for a big company with a lot of staff and lawyers, but if you’re a small company trying to ship any product you have to start maintaining a list of individual states where you think you can break even and decide if it’s worth doing all of the work to try to sell there.
If you’ve never had to deal with regulatory compliance or shipped physical products this all probably does sound like whining to you, but that’s only because you don’t know how hard it is to comply with regulations for 1 EU state, let alone 27 of them multiplied by all relevant regulations.
After: for every one of the 27 EU countries you plan to ship to, you must pay hundreds or thousands of euros in registration fees as a packaging producer.
Somehow, regulation believers who think they are sticking it to the big man think this is a reasonable system, and not a complete killer of small time entrepreneurship for those not fortunate enough to have millions in capital.
How about Spanish-Portuguese specialty horse riding gear? https://picadera.de/en/ppwr-warum-wir-nicht-mehr-in-die-eu-v...
How about organic children's clothes from Sweden? https://shopdunssweden.se/
A solid bike lock made straight out of German engineering? https://www.pitlock.de/en/blog/post/eu-packaging-regulation-...
I could find these all day but let me just remind you that for literally _DECADES_ before this regulation there were no such restrictions to cross EU online shopping. Now the small players have closed entirely, and the more fortunate can only afford to serve the largest countries such as Germany, Belgium, Netherlands. It's insane.
And to add insult to the injury, substandard alternatives to all of these products are still readily available on Temu. They are fucking laughing at us in China!
This is exactly what I mean by regulation believers. Here you have all the evidence you need that the harm is done, yet you believe it's still about some philosophical debate whether the regulation even works that way.
If you sell directly to consumers from a web shop, that is you.
A selection of such guides:
https://www.ppwrconsulting.com/blog/ppwr-small-business-sme/
https://packdeclare.com/blog/ppwr-sme-guide
https://getreadycompliance.eu/ppwr-extended-producer-respons...
• Register with the government package registry in each country.
• Sign contracts with a "Producer Responsibility Organization" in the country to fund local recycling.
• Track the exact weight of all the packaging materials sent to that country.
• Submit reports and pay recycling fees.
• If you are based outside the EU, you have to appoint a local representative for these matters in the country. If you are based in the EU you are also supposed to do that, but the European Commission has recommended that members states suspend penalties for EU companies that do not do this.
If you use "fulfilled by Amazon" you still have to do all the above for your packaging. Amazon has to do it just for the outer packaging they ship your stuff in.
Officials have recognized this will be a major burden on many small businesses and are working on revising it to address that in legislation due later this year. Many are pushing for something similar to the way VAT is handled to be implemented for this.
The way VAT works is that you register with just your own country (or a country of your choice if you are not in the EU but sell there). You collect the correct amount of VAR on sales to each EU country, but then just file with and pay the country you are registered with. They tax authorities deal with then reporting to the other countries and paying them their VAT.
and this isn't just tabletop games. this is any business shipping anything anywhere. even when just shipping a single package in a year. the problem is that compliance costs several hundred dollars per country per year. among other things, a representative needs to be named for each country[1]. those are going to cost money. that means unless you make thousands of dollars in profits in any single country, you can't afford shipping to that country any more.
realistically speaking, this law is so dumb that i expect that we'll see a revision soon, because it effectively destroys the EU single market for small businesses.
there is talk about exceptions for micro-businesses, but for one those seem to be optional, and they may not apply to cross-border shipping which is the big problem here.
[1] i looked it up: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2025/40/oj/eng
(paragraph 123) when the packaging or the packaged product is made available by means of distance contracts directly to the end user, the producer could also be established in another Member State or in a third country. In such cases, if the producer is established in another Member State, it should appoint an authorised representative for the extended producer responsibility in the Member State where the end user is located.
If they're really just trying to target industries which DO produce a ton of packaging waste, then they should target it better.
Whatever nonsense the EU thinks it's going to achieve by forcing each individual to file paperwork with every member state accounting for his personal contribution to all boxes used, is stupid. If they have to (which they really don't), they should bill the end consumer, who is in a single country, for the cardboard one consumes. At least a person lives in one single country, and thus doesn't have to deal with every EU country. After all, a game company who produces and ships 1,000 copies of their game, isn't 100 times more environmentally irresponsible than a game company that produces 10. They're just more successful.
But a person who orders 100 boxes of merchandise a year is the one creating 10 times more waste than the person who orders 10.
If you want to continue business as usual, then it gets tricky.
I really don’t understand the complaining about this. If this is such an insurmountable burden for so many European small businesses, surely your MEP will be receptive to your grievances, yeah? And if you’re not in Europe, ignore the regulation or stop selling to unprofitable member states.
I've yet to find a country - anywhere in the world - where a member of parliament is receptive to anything that's not the party line to begin with without copious amounts of money involved.