How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

I don't know if this EU regulation will work or not (most likely not), but I can share how it is done in China (where package volume is orders of magnitude higher).

China identifies "choke points" most packages pass: large platforms and logistics companies. Yes, Chinese e-commerce is more centralized on Alibaba/JD/PDD etc, but there are actually much more logistics companies in China than in EU.

They also do not introduce these regulations "from tomorrow" (well, sometimes they do, but it's a different topic). E.g. the non-degradable plastic regulation was issued in 2020 to come in effect in 2025. This gives time to prepare and implement (unlike EU border controls mess...)

So now if something is shipped in non-degradable plastic, the logistics company is fined along with the sender. This is much more scalable and easy to implement. Logistics companies might rise their prices a bit in light of expanded work scope, but it would be peanuts compared to every individual seller.

Could EU just ask DHL/Hermes/whatever to charge an additional €1 "for recycling"? Yes, but...

But of course EU is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the electorate, so nothing is really planned ahead.

One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated. EU will pass laws, countries will adopt those laws, but you end up with 20-24 different versions of those laws. With some countries being strict or lenient about the law that everyone agreed to. And a lot it is written from the perspective that large corporations are the only ones who do business throughout the EU. It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part. Modern technology makes it feasible, but old ideas just drags it down.

A couple of things to note:

1. The EU commission wanted a single central registry

2. It was the member states, via the Council of Ministers, that torpedoed this.

3. The EU now advises its member states to not implement/enforce this

4. Until the correction, which is on its way, can be fully enacted.

So the same old same old: member states do shitty stuff and blame the EU.

PPWR is an EU catastrophe.

Firstly for the reasons outlined in the article: it essentially makes being a micro/small business in the EU impossible, if your market is other EU countries.

Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level.

The legislation is so ABSURDIST that the EU have actually asked companies to ignore the law that they just implemented. I can assure you it is difficult to ignore a law that comes with a €200000 fine for non-compliance.

This echos the FCC rules in the US, which I believe are gotten around by not complying.

Even if you are not making an intentional radiator, and/or are using datasheet-specified layouts or modules, you still must comply, which makes these businesses non-viable if complying.

I believe Adafruit gets around certifying every device by declaring themselves a cellphone company and being on good terms with regulators. This isn't viable for the sort of businesses and people described by this article.

I'm not sure about the Ali/Amazon products. I'm assuming they just are not complying.

This is actively preventing me from sending packages to other countries as a maker. No matter how small the risk is, I don't want to risk a 5000 euro fine for sending a small amount of packages to other EU countries.

I initially learned about this from a luthier and plectrum designer, Hufschmidt Guitars, a one man shop in Switzerland. Some quotes from the update he sent to his customers:

""" For a one-person workshop, the result has been pretty brutal.

[...]

The numbers simply do not work for a micro-business like mine. Even in France and Germany, I send only around 1 to 2 kg of cardboard per year. In some other EU countries, I may send less than 100 g in an entire year. Paying annual compliance costs for one or two parcels makes no economic sense.

[...]

I have therefore decided to maintain EU shipping only to: FRANCE GERMANY """

UK has similar rules but, as with pretty much all other similar regulations, there are de minimis carve-outs:

≤ £1m turnover: no packaging EPR obligation, regardless of packaging volume.

£1m turnover + >25 tonnes of packaging: small producer obligations.

£2m turnover + >50 tonnes: large producer obligations.

The EU has been removing de minimis thresholds because 'China' can easily 'exploit' them. They're kind of right, but it's obviously an insanely stupid situation when someone selling something as a hobby, or just starting up on their own gets dragged into this.

This is a great read and I can extend this argument really to any small business. Tax filing, VAT, bookkeeping, privacy, consumer, workplace and sectoral requirements frequently impose a disproportionately large cost on microbusinesses. EU is more and more split along the enterprise and VC backed line, and everyone in between has disproportionate costs. My barber in Stockholm often complains about this - the amount of money they would need to earn to overcome all these costs is staggering. So they often do lots of gigs on the side.

This is not new though. "We do not sell to EU end users."

https://pcengines.ch/recycle.htm

"... there are separate registration and recycling schemes for each of the 28+ EU member jurisdictions (and even a few of their provinces). What part of COMMON MARKET was so hard to understand for EU lawmakers ?

Since there is no single registration available, and separate registration would involve mindboggling complexity, bureaucracy and costs, we do not sell to EU end users until the EU gets their act together. Please order from EU based distributors, or as a business customer.

Business customers are expected to meet their obligations by registering in the EU countries they sell in. "

That was already ages ago when I did some sofware for them. 2007 ish if I'm to trust my Linkedin.

As someone living in the tiny country of Estonia with just about 1.2 million residents, this worries me. No one but the biggest online shops in the EU will bother with the paperwork for such a small market. I'm expecting my import options to drop sharply in the coming years because of this.

The complaint is totally understandable, BUT the examples do not make sense. Arduino did not start as some dude selling less than 10 boards a year, but as an educational tool, which THEN ramped up to 100s of boards produced every day.

If your perspective is "I may sell 10 boards this year, maybe", your target is some local/national maker-faire, not a EU marketplace.

I think makers with such limited productions will just fly under the radar (if you sell so little, it's likely you probably won't need to incorporate or declare taxes in a lot of EU countries). If they sell 100s of products across EU, they probably have at least one over-worked accountant taking care of existing compliance stuff.

It appears there is space for "packaging and distribution in EU as a service" business model.

Creators, producers and manufacturers in many fields do not distribute or sell directly to consumers (musicians can't directly upload to Spotify and Apple Music; film producers don't upload to Netflix, writers don't print their books).

A small-time maker may pay a fee to the established distributor of the physical products, who takes care of compliance, and uses their packaging and distribution channels.

While the regulation is really stupid and could be done much better with either a one stop shop or with simply taxing/complying in the country of origin instead of destination.

It opens a very clear market opportunity for LECTRONZ themselves. Stop bitching and start doing the shipping and selling, you probably have the volume all the micro entrepreneurs will ship to you, comply with a single jurisdiction and you take on the task of complying with all the other ones.

The EU just printed you a licence to be a middleman, the words you are looking for are thank you.

as the whole world crushes small entities one has to wonder whether the EU would be the saviour or not. Apparently not. With its rules, they merely help crush small business as per usual.

I heard in the 50s an american could just startup a business installing septic tanks. But now the same person would need a myriad of regulations to be met, heavy equipment use mandated, all of which raise overhead to a level where its impossible to get off the ground.

I always felt the EU were the "good guys", IE not allowing corps to steam roll everyone, what with their rules fining poor behvaiour such as privacy violations, chargers being non standard etc.

However the same problem exists in weird ways you wouldnt even imagine.

For example if someone walks into a small "mom and pops" coffee shop and accuse the owner of "ejecting them due to harrasment reasons", that results in a court case, which can bankrupt the whole margin thin enterprise.

You might say, wait how on earth would a random troublemaker get funding to take a cafe to court, and for what benefit? For one its easier for a settlement to be reached regardless of fault that benefits the claimant than a long court process.

Now how could claimants have the resources? Unbelievably it turns out there are free national non profit corporations that will take any claim for free to court for situation mentioned above.

So what happens in the end? The small coffee shops cant survive but the larger corps who can afford the random payouts are fine, the competition seems to go away on its own and the claimants are happy with what amounts to random payouts for little work.

Please look it up it, and correct me if im wrong, I only know this from some little research into the forays of why small coffee shops find it hard to survive in western landscapes and risks, as I wanted to open my own coffee shop!

In summary, as always the road to ruin is paved with good intentions. So the EU trying to help a little guy in a specific context, ends up creating a situation that makes all small coffee shops non profitable.

I have no solutions.

And then there is Temu (as a platform). They've done all the necessary EPR/PPWR agreements with various European countries/vendors. It handles all the fees and reporting for Chinese sellers.

This could be easily solved if the EU sold tiny prepaid certificates-of-compliance that one could affix on the package itself (to show the fees were paid.) Larger weight package would incur higher fees. The post office then could stamp these certificates to prevent second use.

I imagine what will happen in practice is that the makers will simply ignore the law and hope not to get prosecuted or audited?

I've seen some conflicting claims on this law and to me it sounded like it affects mostly producers of packaging, but everyone else seems to be complaining about it too. Did everyone actually read the law or is this a game of telephone?

These blog posts often allude that the EU regulatory bodies are just slightly incompetent or short-sighted and these fragmented national models happen by accident. But unfortunately that's not the case: The EU pretends to be a single-market and almost mantra-like the EU officials keep repeating it. But the fact of the matter is that there is neither a single market nor is the European public ready for one. If there was a true single market (like the US has one) - then this would very quickly lead to massive changes in the labour market. Imagine all the Romanian construction companies suddenly building office buildings in Madrid. Or countless Polish architects suddenly undercutting the much more expensive architects in Milano. Whether they know it or not, Europeans would like to have all the benefits of a single market (mostly more competitive pricing) without any of the downsides (massive labour shifts) - but that option doesn't exist. So what they do is harmonize regulation for a few big corporations, while all the smaller companies (and their employees) still get to keep their national moats.

It is possible to ignore laws if it's too much bother to comply with them... it's hard to imagine the authorities will come after someone for mailing out 10 anti-static bags.

I understand the package complains, and I understand how it undermines the maker scenario. I think smartly using the scale of things might be helpful, but they are targeting Qualcomm and not Arduino users.

Unfortunately, because all of us have postponed thinking about solving the problem, now we have a problem and braking is safer than not breaking at all.

In my country we do have advanced collecting systems but it all falls apart when different materials can be prioritised. There were an interesting proposal of having the companies to buy back the recyclable rubbish but that was scraped.

I was up to this. Because they would need to emit in the docs the amount of money the package cost and how much they would pay back, it was possible to track the sources from a fiscal eyes.

I think it was scraped because people already thought on ways of breaking it, instead of giving better alternatives.

Laws like this really need to only be enforced for companies of certain sizes.

These sorts of regulations are killing not just companies in Europe but across most of the world.

Unless you are a medium to large-sized company, it is very difficult to remain fully compliant with the regulations in most nations now - across fields, from packaging, to agriculture, to food, aviation..

Odd that there not already is a minimum threshold in place.

This would even apply when selling a few electronic knik knaks on ebay?

The workaround here tends to be simple: Don't sell stuff as a incorporated business. Only do that once you cross a certain level of revenue.

But as with anything here in Europe, check your laws.

There is one thing European countries all agree on: Their lawmakers know it the best, thus all create their own carve outs and exceptions.

I don't know but I highly suspect this law will mainly effect people drop shipping from China and will benefit companies like us who for moral reasons work to re-shore production.

When I get packages from Europe it's always is recyclable cardboard while from China it's always wrapped in plastic.

When I get packages from Europe or the USA it's always branded so the company responsible is always clearly shown, while from China it's usually brandless.

Anti-EU regulation sentiment really seems to have an uptick in line with widespread availability of LLMs.

The EU isn't perfect, but the catastrophising I read feels mostly like astro-turfing attempts at destabilisation.

It's probably more easily noticed from inside the EU.

It's typical eco-suicide: give eurocrats more power and fake work to do, pretend most recycling regulations aren't scams, and practically destroy trade between countries in the union because you need one representative in every single country you want to sell anything in. As if adding a 5 (soon to become 7€) fee (plus tax) for every line of item (not package) outside the union wasn't enough. It is also quite obvious both must've been heavily lobbied by major retail groups through EuroCommerce.

Feedback for this utterly deranged regulation can be seen below, over 5k entries by many businesses in EU:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...

EU has a double-whammy problem that the average citizen is old, and the more ambitious youth has moved to London, Switzerland, or the US.

So those who remain are statistically too old or non-ambitious to think regulatory friction applies to them, and they are right.

I can attest to this. People say the Netherlands is among the best countries to be an entrepreneur. The visa policies for starting a business are good. But man, the whole tax system, shares, and holding management—belasting breathing up your neck—is horrible when I am trying to do firefighting. You never know when you might get hit by a tax bill. The tax system is built towards benefitting large organizations, and they can afford expensive tax consultants who can help them dodge it. The VC ecosystem is limited and not risk averse.

Having operated in multiple geographies, US is really business friendly.

The EU still believes in fair markets so I don't really see a valid suggestion in the article.. Every US or Chinese seller to the EU can be de minimus, etc, so the EU lowering its standards for consumers and the environment helps mostly foreign vendors who have lower standards to meet in employment, etc.

The new regulations and fee's are awsome good news, we need much more of the same, faster. Everybody needs to chip in and find new ways to regulate ordinary activities and charge fees for them, and to start with all contact or interaction with the goverment should be fee based with a minimum €100 base rate for calling a government number charged to your account as soon as the phone starts ringing, same charge for emails and each return email. Exemptions can of course be applied on a csae by case basis. * Only by working Together™ can we pull the roof down on our heads.

* completly serious, lets get it over with.

They don’t think, that they are killing innovation! I was told that they measure „innovation“ by „patents granted“ - and if you see it that way, only big enterprises can be innovative! And i bet most bureaucrats never worked at a startup!

as a european, the biggest problem with the EU is the actual EU, the core idea is good, but they have massive over reach and way to much power, they are supposed to be there for european countries, instead it's the other way around.

aah Europe and the EU. If we don't know how to do something properly, we just create new rules and regulations, or simply just add another tax, that's the european way.

Is there room for a company in the EU to spend some time doing the research as to what packaging is able to be used across all the different countries, then selling affordable packaging that meets those standards across the board? And also publish resources for how to effectively package stuff? A genuine question, I’m not from Europe. It just seems like something that would benefit everyone and help make this less of an issue. Or maybe this is the responsibility of the postal systems themselves? If you’re gonna mandate a certain way of doing things, at least give people the tools to do it the way you want them to.

Doesn't this new law overlap with the existing system? A manufacturer within the EU is already paying taxes, which in part should be used for managing waste. If they buy the packaging materials from another EU company, well that company is also paying taxes already. If they are importing from outside the EU, the packaging material pays taxes.

You really have to wonder what Xi Jinpeng thinks of all this.

The extent to which China can appear to do nothing while the west kills itself is just unbelievable. How could you possibly respect people that can't get out of their own way so repeatedly?

EU also recently introduced a 3 euro fee on all packages from China. Maybe well intentioned but it puts a huge markup, when a thinker wants to buy a very specific 0.05 euro spring from AliExpress or something along those lines.

The reason for this mess is because individual countries want to retain some kind of control over the whole thing such as VAT/tax investigations and implementation of the laws. In a way it’s the “worst” of both worlds federated and individual countries but somehow still better than the latter.

The new EU regulation on Digital Product Passports may have similar effects on small businesses.

I was expecting that they would build the "passport" on top of existing design standards but that doesn't seem to be the case, the recent webinar on it doesn't go into much detail though.

>A good idea, a terrible implementation

Idea is terrible, implementation is WAI.

> a fragmented national model

These approaches will waste billions upon billions of Euros for no good reason. Having different VAT rates per-country already leads to overcomplication in so many places.

I run a small hardware startup, InfiShark Tech -- we sell affordable battery-powered cybersecurity hardware worldwide. Europe has been by far the hardest market for us.

The costs in this article are understated for products like ours. This is not just for packaging -- they have separate compliance schemes for electronics (WEEE). If selling products with batteries, you must comply with separate battery regulations. If you pass a certain threshold or contain specific chemicals within your product, you must also comply with the REACH regulation. They work almost exactly the same the article describes, but often with higher costs.

Additionally, you must have CE certification for your hardware product. There is no threshold. This means going to a lab and testing RF capabilities, and for wireless / Bluetooth devices it can cost $1,500-$8,000. You can self-certify but it is risky.

We pay 800-2,000 EUR per country annually for the authorized representative (AR) and producer responsibility organization (PRO) fees. The AR's task is to hold some documents and provide them to the government when requested -- but that's it. We can do this for free. There's no reason the costs should be this high -- and I see minimal reason why they should exist in the first place. But we must comply.

It is important to understand which regulations and which fees to pay for the product. Therefore it is important to use something like PRONEXA -- a "One-Stop-Shop for simple compliance management".

With them, we paid ~800-1,000 EUR per country as a one-off registration fee. Then we pay 975 EUR annually per country to keep compliance. Note that these costs are ONLY to PRONEXA, not to each AR or PRO. They are effectively the middleman between us and the ARs / PROs.

The fee stability is quite poor, too. We paid the 2025 annual fees roughly a month before year-end and were charged another full annual fee in February 2026. In November 2025, we paid ~500 SEK for Sweden, and in Feb 2026, we were invoiced ~15,000 SEK for that same line.

With all of this burden we only pay the countries ~0.5-50 EUR annually for the actual environmental fees. This only makes sense for the government if that number jumps up to the thousands.

I think this contributes to lack of innovation in Europe. Small startups can't ship there, and you are limited to large companies overseas. The fix is dead simple -- just introduce a threshold, or charge a recycling fee upfront with each parcel coming in, depending on the HS code. What they did with IOSS is great. You register with one country, and all parcels under 150 EUR can be sent to all of Europe while being VAT compliant. They could implement the same thing for WEEE, battery regulations, packaging, and REACH. Register with one country and cover the rest.

We are barely break-even on some countries, and others we are totally underwater. We decided to do it as a future scaling opportunity, but this first year is quite tough. We are debating if we should continue selling to Europe at this stage.

FTR. The whole PPWR process started back in 2015, there was a public consultation period in 2020-21, the new rules were entered into force in February 2025 and now the general application happened. So there was plenty of time to prepare, as far as I can see. People that run a business in the EU and now claim to be surprised, they, well, surprise me.

Is it actually a bad thing? From Asia I definitely see so much shady business practices from small businesses. Customer protection is non-existent. Keeping small businesses in drive prices down, but also drive wages down. I don’t think this is a compromise that many people would be happy with.

One additional problem is that this reduces options as a consumer in smaller EU countries. Smaller ships no longer are willing to take on the risk and bureaucracy of selling to smaller markets, meaning only a few, large players remain. Like Amazon, Temu, Aliexpress, or larger local companies.

Is this not a business idea? Like register for packaging waste schemes in every country and sell it to small companies for some profit? Or doesn't it work this way?

What is amazing is that this goes so much against the concept of the EU. The EU was founded on the principles of four freedoms, Free movement of goods, Free movement of persons, Freedom to provide services, and Free movement of capital.

The EU even have a SME Test to maker sure small business are not overburdened by regulations.

Also there are thousands of lobbyists fighting for small businesses. Yes, this law will probably eventually be thrown out for small businesses but after how many years is a big question, and how many small businesses have lost there businesses.

And the law was devised by Ripa di Meana, who had been a member of the Italian Communist Party and the green party.

I believe the view layed out in the article is wrong. The German Wikipedia has an article about the PPWR. One Paragraph is saying: "The distributor must verify that the manufacturer and, where applicable, the importer have fulfilled their requirements, that all necessary markings are affixed to the packaging, and that the manufacturer is registered in the producer register pursuant to Article 44." That does not sound like you are responsible for registering yourself but you need to purchase your packaging from registered vendors and you need to verify that. Sound reasonable to me.

They'll get adequate feedback in the next elections If this doesn't get stopped, otherwise every business and their peers will likely vote for EU critic parties which means far left or far right.

If you are a small maker and looking for the loophole here, this is it: "PPWR excludes an object where it is genuinely an integral part of the product, necessary to contain/support/preserve it throughout its lifetime and intended to remain with it."

Sounds a bit like registering and reported to each country's VAT system, which almost no online creators do (even ones making hundreds of thousands of online subsription revenue)

Is this killing the makers or the marketplace? Can the micro-entrepreneurs still list/sell via larger marketplaces? I can see how this is killing the micro-marketplace though.

Opinion: Big companies are (secretly) in favor of regulation, because it burdens small competitors to the point of failure.

Ain't it the case everywhere?

Europe has been steadily eradicating freedom and entrepreneurial spirit for the past 50 years. They will suffer badly many years later. They are slowly walking to disaster, but nobody cares. Go on, downvote me for telling the obvious truth :)

my exact same conclusion

Europe would rather regulate companies out of existence than grow them.

The socialist state of the EU is why god invented tax planning and the possibility to open your company abroad.

I've been doing business in the EU a long time, and in order to be successful you need to:

1. Never follow all the rules. Focus on your business and customers, and ignore/pay someone to deal with the rest if it ever becomes reality.

2. Start your company in a low cost, low tax jurisdiction. There are plenty of them in the forgotten corners of the EU, or why not a US LLC.

But I think the EU will implode in a decade or two and return europe to a state of innovation and profitability. The nationalist trend will lock any decision making in the EU, and the EU:s deep state will take care of the rest, enriching itself at the cost of the tax payer. The result... countries will leave or just silently start to ignore the EU rules, and then block any legal moves the EU tries to attempt at the EU level.

Maybe we need to start charging the packaging materials explicitely on the invoice as individual items such as they become part of what the customer has ordered.

full disclosure: I'm a micro-entrepreneur and I suspended all orders to other EU countries.

The PPWR is causing a lot of buzz, but they are missing the main point for a market place such as lectronz. PPWR is only for packaging and shipping material.

There's something similar called WEEE* for electronics. It's when you need to pay a fee at the end of the product life cycle. This is very similar to PPWR, you need to register in each member state to be able to sell electronics. The solution is also a one stop shop. But Lectronz fail to also mention this. I would argue that this is an even bigger issue than PPWR since it's already in place. Even if the PPWR is solved it's still nearly impossible to sell electronics to other EU member states.

Someone has been sleeping when these regulations were being discussed...

[*] https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/...

As usual, throwing babies out with the bath water

Are these rules actually that destructive, or are we witnessing astroturfing campaign?

For any one interested in how deep these sort regulatory capture laws go in the EU, they can look at the deforestation laws on Agri. Pointlessly difficult for small farmers and medium and commodity traders to cooperate with demanding highly accurate coordinates for plots of land using specialized GPS devices and companies to plot the perimeter of the farm being very difficult to comply with getting the devices in place and plotting none of this actually stopping bad actors who simply lie about the origin of the commodities. I am some one who thinks environmental protection is important but these laws pretend to solve the issue while do very little and just add all these pointless tasks that become easy once you own lots of farm land like say nestle (though they pretend that it's the big players who are going to have a hard time). I deeply hate the EU but love Europe as a European, I hope Europe breaks from the chains of this pointless post war project.

> Exempt small-volume sellers and micro-enterprises from cross-border packaging obligations. The threshold would apply only to producers that are below a specific volume of waste and/or a specific yearly turnover.

AFAIK this exists SOMEWHERE in the PPWR regulation but it only applies for EU small businesses that are buying packaging from another business in the same country. If you're outside the EU you are expected to do 100% of the bureaucracy regardless of size.

My gut tells me that EU PPWR compliance will wind up having a cheap turnkey solution for small businesses eventually, but the way this regulation is written today seems to specifically foresee and preclude turnkey compliance.

These things are going to be sent by mail. You could just have the postal service charge a few extra cents.

My father had to give up selling cat houses from one smaller EU country to others because of the new packaging regulations. Hard to believe the EU has not foreseen this being impossible to deal with for micro-businesses. Honestly his friend who is doing Photovoltaics is also now forced to stop shipments to most other EU countries due to this law. I assume we are talking about hundreds of thousands of small businesses.

Sometimes I wonder if the lawmakers in EU are brain dead. The whole point of economic union is that free movement of goods without custom tax and this new rule is practically a custom tax for each country.

Regulatory capture in this case.

They need proportionality and size/qty exemptions

If you actually sell electronics you also need to register for electronic recycling (WEEE or equivalent) in each member state you sell to and the costs are even greater than PPWR costs alone. Probably 5x more at least.

I'm sorry I don't buy this. A "micro-entrepreneur" should be trusted to design a product complying with the regulations of 27 member states but cannot be bothered by the packaging requirements?

My guess is that most of the products on this website simply do not comply with the norms and regulations they ought to, thus why care if they don't comply to waste management either.

Seems like a problem Lectronz could solve for its makers.

Oh boy, another LLM generated article posted here as part of an anti-EU astroturfing campaing everyone takes for truth.

Does anyone actually bothers to read the actual regulation these days?

Yes it start applying starting August 12, 2026, but let's review the bloody requirements AFTER READING THE REGULATION, shall we?

Let's see what it says about recycling: - All packaging must be designed for recycling by 2030. - Plastic packaging must include mandatory minimum recycled plastic content targets for 2030 and 2040. - Per capita packaging waste must drop by 5% by 2030, 10% by 2035, and 15% by 2040 (compared to 2018 levels).

All these are sensible and the darn paper gives companies time to get with the program. It says so in the regulation black on white! For all the makers, small businesses and so on: You don't make your own packaging, you buy your bags and boxes from a dedicated supplier or get them from the delivery companies you use. Buy them from someone who makes them or use a delivery company that provides packaging according to the new rules. You have until 2030!

I run a small business and It took me about 6 months to get into compliance.

- Dangerous chemicals like cancer-causing PFAS in food-contact packaging are strictly restricted. Duh! Do we really need to complain about this? Seriously?

- Packaging must be as light and small as possible, eliminating empty space and useless layers. This is the only thing that seems ambiguous, some things are fragile, some are not, but maybe companies should be more reasonable with package sizes. If your packaging supplies has only one package size, find someone else. A 5 cm trinket doesn't need a 5mx5m box. Yes I've used the metric system, get over it!

- Standardised labels and QR codes for material sorting and disposal take full effect by August 2028 This is meant to make sorting and recycling easier across the whole market and you have 2 years to get into compliance! In my case, all delivery companies in my area already solved this and I get the QR codes already printed on the labels.

Most complains I've read in these comments are weird, missing the point and just posted to say the same thing: EU bad, EU bad, America good! America good! They're the same complains I read In any thread around here when it comes to EU regulations. Maybe someone need to change their openclaw prompts from time to time!

How is CrowdSupply, US based, managing?

> A good idea, a terrible implementation

Story of European regulations. At some point you have to concede that they are incompetent and unaccountable. What do they care if they depress economic integration and growth in Europe? No one will ever be blamed for diffuse bureaucratic costs that drag down the whole Eurozone.

I even resent people giving them credit for "well, the idea was laudable..". No. Again and again they introduce make-the-world-a-better-place regulations, and whoever opposes these or asks about tradeoffs or whether they are meaningfully useful must be a crazed libertarian or industry lobbyist who wants to poison the people.

I remember how smug Europeans were about the American PATRIOT act. Who could be so stupid to be fooled by such propagandist framing of laws? Well, here in the EU that happens frequently. The commission just has to wrap its degrowth policy in saving-the-world names and off we go. (See also the EU Supply Chain Act, i.e. Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, aka expensive paperwork for a good conscience)

This is a direct result of national politics.

EU member states want all the benefits of integration without giving anything up, especially things that they consider aspects of national sovereignty.

* * *

I'll give you an example.

I'm from Romania. In Romania in 1990 there were no private enterprises, so everything was state owned. There was a HUGE demand for commerce/retail, so small local businesses popped up. They were very basic because everything was brand new and expertise was extremely scarce. No one knew anything about modern supermarkets, supermarket chains, banks, loans, credit lines, basically everything related to modern market economies.

As Romanian headed for EU integration, foreign invested started... investing. In retail that meant that because Romania is fairly populous by EU standards, everyone was tempted by a potentially big and growing pie that was almost void of serious competition.

So we ended up with Lidl (German), Kaufland (German), Metro (German), Carrefour (French), Mega Image (Romanian, bought by Delhaize: Belgian), DM (German), Cora (French), Auchan (French), Profi (Romanian, bought by Delhaize: Belgian), Selgros (Swiss), Penny (bought by REWE: German), etc.

I moved abroad somewhere close to both France and Germany. At a company I worked for, I had both French and German coworkers.

At some point the Germans were talking about Kaufland and I started chatting with them about it. Some French people mentioned Auchan and I replied to that too. After a few more replies about German and French supermarket chains, one of them said: how do you know so much about both French and German supermarket chains?

And I told them:

We're right next to Germany and German supermarkets stop at the border. There is no Aldi in France. Most French people in the neighboring French towns haven't even been in an Aldi.

We're also next to France and French supermarkets stop at the border. There is no Carrefour in Germany. Most German people in the neighboring German towns haven't even been in a Carrefour.

In Romania your big companies bought everything local (or displaced it), there are hardly any locally owned stores so I guess the upside is that I know all your supermarket chains.

* * *

Repeat this for banking, IT, whatever. Europe is super economically segregated even with the EU operating. Each country has all sort of hidden protections for its local businesses. I can't really tell you what they are exactly, but in practice you can feel them. Each country has its own version of X, Y, Z businesses. Small versions of everything, instead of few really big and competitive businesses at a global level.

This even impacts US companies. You can't get a European Netflix subscription. You fly from Romania to France and when you land and connect your tablet to the internet, your Romanian Netflix account switches over to France and they delete Mad Men from your downloaded episodes because Netflix France hasn't licensed Mad Men (old example).

So, the complain is that there is no harmonization and you want more centralized harmonization, basically?

Meanwhile you still can't buy most food without tons of plastic wrapping it, unless you go to a farmer's market. The only problem this regulation actually addresses is not enough paperwork being generated.

> The main idea of EPR is sensible: businesses that place packaging on the market should help finance its collection and recycling.

Wouldn't it be better to put the burden on packaging manufacturers?

Isn't this double dipping? Consumers typically already pay for waste disposal to their local government.

That said, the EU and West in general through corruption like to pass legislation that ensures only big corporations can afford to comply with.

Whining on the order hand is always easy.

at this stage europe is a machine for politicians to become wealthy through corruption, mass immigration, censorship, mass media control. that is why they hate X and are now fighting to ban it.

Another daily round EU FUD.

Wait until Cyber Resilience Act kicks in.

"Since 1975, the US has created 7 companies worth over $1 trillion. Europe has created zero."

......... Yet most of the talent is here

My experience as a software engineer in EU was horrible. I wish I could say it was something out of a horror movie, but it would be too frustrating to watch.

I joined a major cryptocurrency project, saw its market cap briefly increase to $4 billion. I worked on it like crazy for 2 years whilst, unbeknownst to me, the founders began to sabotage their own project and ensure that it would slip out of the CMC rankings; I believe this was done to lower their public profile (and reduce scrutiny). But it all happened under the watchful, approving eyes of EU regulators. Also, the founders of that project defamed me and my team with outright lies to sabotage my spin-off project when we worked to improve the tech independently. I also witnessed other crypto projects which I knew to be scams receive funding from the EU commission, then the same founders raised money again after running the previous project into the ground with nothing to show.

This sort of BS - which is why the UK left the EU by the way, happens on EVERYTHING. By nature, the EU is an extra layer of bureaucracy which can only exist by: 1.hiring 2. producing regulations to justify its existence. I have quietly seen it dismantle anything that worked in European countries, all while being called a fascist or far-right extremist for doing so. Well, here is the result.

For the last time EU!= Europe, there are plenty more countries outside Brussels overach ffs

How much bullshit!

If you try to sell to China, Australia, UUSS and Colombia and Russia for example, you also need to comply with the regulations of each of those countries (and pay Tarifs in some).

To ease the collaboration between humans the European Union was created. But the European Union is not a country. Is the earth only collection of countries that agree to collaborate together to levels no other countries have in the world History.

It's success is so big, that people expects to act as an independent country, and complain when discovering Europe is indeed several countries. WTF!

Unfortunate choice of words, implies these people are being literally murdered...

Good post, bad title.

From the title alone, I'd expect a typical think-piece from someone (possibly outside the EU) about overregulation, "the solution is no regulation at all", etc. Instead, it's a solid critique of the recent packaging/packaging waste regulation debacle, from a constructive angle. The first section hits the nail on the head: "a good idea, a terrible implementation".

Unfortunately, this feels like a frequent refrain when it comes to the EU. And even more unfortunately, even just this ever-so-slightly-more-nuanced take seems to frequently be drowned out by the two extremes -- "all regulation is bad and we need pure unadulterated free market capitalism" or "all capitalism is bad and we need pure unadulterated regulation" -- which are by far the two loudest voices in the room.

The OP has some good suggestions about this particular regulation (which should definitely be considered! Fix things are broken; don't just throw the baby out with the bathwater!), but I'd personally be interested to see things that try to understand and treat the root cause instead of yet another symptomatic regulation. Maybe walking further down the path towards federalization? Iunno, but if I had a dime for every time I've thought "good idea, bad execution" as an EU resident... I'd have a lot of dimes.

It's funny, because what's actually, literally killing people is pollution...