12 August 2026 marked the start of the general application of Regulation (EU) 2025/40 on packaging and packaging waste (Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, PPWR), repealing Directive 94/62/EC. A regulation conceived, on the legal basis of Article 114 TFEU, to harmonise the rules of the internal market and relieve operators of the kaleidoscope of 27 national regimes.
Within hours of its entry into application, however, a senior European Commission official described the new rules as ‘clearly disproportionate’, inviting Member States not to apply them and not to impose penalties, as revealed by Die Welt.
SMEs are meanwhile suspending cross-border sales, with immediate harm to European consumers too. An analysis of the legal issue and a proposal for urgent reform, inspired by the VAT One Stop Shop, follows.
PPWR, the legal context
The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (EU) 2025/40, PPWR, applies generally from 12 August 2026 and establishes a new regime covering the entire life cycle of packaging — design, risk analysis and declaration of conformity, new limits on PFAS in food contact materials, recyclability, reuse, labelling — as well as extended producer responsibility (EPR).
The legal context is moreover incomplete, given that numerous delegated and implementing acts — on recyclability criteria, the methodology for calculating recycled content, design for recycling — have yet to be adopted. The European Commission has meanwhile adopted its guidelines (Commission Notice C/2026/3084) and two editions of FAQ — frequently asked questions, in March and August 2026. Such interpretations are however devoid of legal value.
‘Manufacturer’ and ‘producer’
The PPWR concentrates responsibilities on two figures, defined as the ‘manufacturer’ and the ‘producer’, which rarely coincide with whoever physically makes or produces the packaging:
- the ‘manufacturer‘ is responsible for the design, risk analysis and declaration of conformity relating to the packaging, as well as any risk management. This role is generally attributed to the brand owner under whose name the packaging or packaged product is marketed, or to its supplier where the brand owner is a micro-enterprise (Dongo, 2026);
- the ‘producer‘ is instead responsible for contributing to the financing of the ‘end of life’ of packaging. This role may be assumed either by the manufacturer or by an importer or distributor that makes packaging or packaged products available for the first time in the territory of the Member State where it is established, or (only in the case of direct supply to end users) in the territory of another Member State. The operator that unpacks products without being their end user also qualifies as a producer (PPWR, Article 3). The result is a plurality of ‘producers’, across the various Member States, even for the same packaging.
Extended Producer Responsibility
The ‘producer’ must discharge a series of bureaucratic burdens — registration in the register of producers and extended producer responsibility (Articles 44, 45), with a view to financing the management of packaging waste — repeated in every Member State where its packaging or packaged products are distributed directly to end users, including via e-commerce.
Where the ‘producer’ established in one Member State directly supplies end users in another EU country, it must among other things grant a written mandate to an authorised representative for extended producer responsibility in each Member State of destination (PPWR, Article 45, paragraph 3).
In practice, an operator shipping across the whole Union must therefore carry out up to 26 separate appointments (27, for non-EU producers), each entailing registrations, volume declarations, fees and dealings with the local authorities. Facing, for such appointments, an overall annual cost which the experts consulted by the German press estimate at between €600 and €2,000 per country, regardless of volumes.
As for penalties, Article 68 PPWR delegates to the Member States the definition of ‘effective, proportionate and dissuasive’ measures, to be notified by 12 February 2027. Germany has thus adopted the Verpackungsrecht-Durchführungsgesetz (VerpackDG, 13 July 2026), with graduated fines of up to €200,000; those for direct infringements of the PPWR will apply only from 12 February 2027. Each Member State is however proceeding in scattered order, further fragmenting the control and penalty regimes.
Impact on the internal market, SMEs and consumers
The paradox is plain: a regulation founded on Article 114 TFEU, to guarantee the free movement of compliant packaging (Article 4 PPWR), erects administrative barriers that stifle intra-EU trade. Eurochambres, the association of the European Chambers of Commerce, complains that compliance costs ‘often exceed the commercial value of cross-border activities’ of SMEs, many of which are forced to cease sales to other EU countries altogether.
Food is one of the hardest-hit sectors, as regards e-commerce sales by the SMEs which account for around 99% of the European productive fabric and which in many cases had built their commercial outlet on the cross-border digital channel, yet are often devoid of the administrative structures needed to manage 26 national registers and unable to bear the related bureaucratic and economic burdens. Händlerbund, the German e-commerce association, has documented the cessation of cross-border shipments by numerous operators in Germany — where the penalties for the PPWR have already been introduced, as seen above — since as early as July 2026.
Consumers in turn thus lose access to SME products and to the variety of supply, and will probably face higher costs for their purchases.
Stakeholder reactions
Stakeholders express differing positions, which nonetheless converge in highlighting the need to reform the PPWR:
- Stefan Genth — director general of Handelsverband Deutschland (HDE), the national reference association of retail trade in Germany — complains that ‘for many companies, essential questions regarding responsibilities and their obligations remain open’ and that the Commission’s repeated attempts at clarification ‘have created new uncertainties’;
- EUROPEN (European Organization for Packaging and the Environment) — the association representing the interests of businesses and organisations active across the packaging value chain, including packaging producers and their users — calls for the temporary suspension of the authorised representative obligation, as a ‘pragmatic step towards simplification and a stronger single market’;
- EXPRA (Extended Producer Responsibility Alliance) and Recycling Europe, representing collective schemes and recyclers, ask instead that the obligation be maintained for non-EU producers, so as to avoid free-riding and traceability gaps;
- eight Member States (Czechia, Bulgaria, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia) had already flagged, in June 2026, the serious practical difficulties of implementation, after the reservations expressed in January by France, Luxembourg, Spain, Austria and Estonia over the risks of weakened controls.
Leaks from the corridors of the Commission
The revelations of Die Welt — which branded the PPWR a ‘bureaucratic monster’ — have brought to light the dissent within the very institution that is the guardian of the regulation. A senior EU official, under cover of anonymity, admitted that ‘the Member States and Parliament have unfortunately agreed on something that fragments the single market‘ and that the rules are ‘clearly disproportionate’. Then, the unprecedented invitation: ‘no one needs to stop exporting products now. We encourage the Member States not to apply the new rules and not to impose penalties’. According to the same leaks, the Commission is said to be working on a structural correction: a single registration valid throughout the Union and the abolition of the authorised representative obligation in the country of destination.
The Commission has indeed already proposed, in the Environmental Omnibus package of 10 December 2025 (COM(2025) 982), the suspension of Article 45, paragraph 3 until 1 January 2035, for producers established in the Union only. Negotiations have however stalled: the Council broke off its deliberations on 24 June 2026, in the face of opposition from a large majority of Member States, while in the European Parliament (rapporteur Ingeborg ter Laak, ENVI committee) a narrower text is under negotiation, with an exemption limited to companies with up to 49 staff and €10 million in annual turnover, and a first reading expected in October 2026 at the earliest.
Meanwhile the Commission, in the second edition of its FAQ on the PPWR (August 2026), recommended that national authorities warn rather than sanction, specifying that ‘the enforcement of the obligations applicable as from 12 August 2026 should not disrupt trade flows, supply chains, or consumer access to goods’ (section XVI); a position reiterated on the occasion of the official announcement of the entry into application. The rules are thus in force, but their enforcement is unofficially discouraged — so much for the legal certainty of the European Union.
The reasonable solution, an urgent reform
The solution, on closer inspection, exists and is already tried and tested in the legal order of the Union. Since July 2021, the VAT one-stop shop — One Stop Shop, Directive (EU) 2017/2455 — has allowed every business to:
- register in its Member State of establishment only;
- declare on a quarterly basis its cross-border sales, broken down by country of consumption;
- pay the tax to its own administration, which redistributes it to the authorities of the States of destination.
The same scheme can be transposed to extended producer responsibility, through a targeted legislative proposal amending the PPWR, which the Commission should present as a matter of urgency to the European Parliament and the Council, without awaiting the Circular Economy Act announced for the third quarter of 2026. The reform should provide for:
- a single EPR registration in the producer’s Member State of establishment, valid throughout the Union, with repeal of the authorised representative obligation for producers established in the EU;
- an annual declaration of the quantities of packaging (by material and category) placed in each Member State of destination, filed with the national register of the State of establishment in harmonised formats;
- calculation of EPR contributions at the eco-modulated rates of the State of destination and subsequent settlement of the shares among the national registers and collective schemes, on the model of VAT clearing;
- retention of the obligation of an authorised representative for producers from third countries, to safeguard traceability and enforcement, as requested by EXPRA and Recycling Europe;
- cross-checking powers among national authorities, with exchange of the declared data.
The feasibility of this reform hypothesis is concrete:
- on the legal level, the basis is the same as that of the current regulation (Article 114 TFEU), and recital 10 of proposal COM(2025) 982 already prefigures a ‘comprehensive reform of the extended producer responsibility system’;
- on the administrative level, cooperation among national registers already exists in nuce in the voluntary European National Registers for Packaging (EUNR) network, which brings together the authorities of 16 Member States for the harmonised application of the PPWR;
- at the operational level, the VAT precedent shows that periodic declarations broken down by Member State and financial settlements between administrations work at the scale of millions of operators. The only potential critical point — the eco-modulation of fees, which differs from country to country — can be resolved by applying the rates of the State of destination to the declared data, without touching the autonomy of national collection and recycling systems, nor the environmental objectives of the regulation.
Interim conclusions
The PPWR teaches that no environmental ambition can be achieved by sacrificing the fundamental freedoms of the internal market and the survival of small businesses. A ten-year suspension of Article 45, paragraph 3 — stalled in Council, moreover — would postpone the problem without solving it. The EPR one-stop shop with annual declarations and settlement among national authorities is the reasonable, urgent and technically mature reform that the Commission should propose to the co-legislators at once. In the meantime, agri-food operators must in any event attend to the requirements already applicable — conformity, PFAS, technical documentation — on which the team at FARE is available.
Dario Dongo
Credit cover Vinson Tan ( 楊 祖 武 ) from Pixabay
Riferimenti
European Union regulatory sources
Regulation (EU) 2025/40 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 December 2024 on packaging and packaging waste, amending Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 and Directive (EU) 2019/904, and repealing Directive 94/62/EC. Consolidated text: 22/01/2025. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2025/40/2025-01-22
Commission Notice – Guidance document for Regulation (EU) 2025/40 of the European Parliament and of the Council on packaging and packaging waste (OJ C, C/2026/3084, 10.6.2026). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ%3AC_202603084
European Commission. (2025, December 10). Proposal for a Regulation suspending the application of the rules on the appointment of an authorised representative for extended producer responsibility for batteries and waste batteries and packaging and packaging waste (COM(2025) 982 final). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A52025PC0982
National regulatory sources
Verpackungsrecht-Durchführungsgesetz (VerpackDG) of 13 July 2026 (Bundesgesetzblatt 2026 I no. 207, published 17.7.2026), Federal Republic of Germany.
Institutional documents
European Commission. (2026, August 11). New EU rules on packaging enter into application. https://environment.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules-packaging-enter-application-2026-08-11_en
European Commission. (s.d.). EU VAT One Stop Shop (OSS). Your Europe. https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/one-stop-shop/index_en.htm
European Parliamentary Research Service. (2026). Circular economy act [Briefing PE 782.628]. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2026/782628/EPRS_BRI(2026)782628_EN.pdf
Stakeholder positions
Eurochambres. (2026, August 12). New EU packaging rules contradict competitiveness and single market policy objectives. https://www.eurochambres.eu/publication/new-eu-packaging-rules-contradict-competitiveness-and-single-market-policy-objectives/
EUROPEN. (2026, March 17). Industry coalition supports temporary suspension of national authorised representative requirement under EPR. https://www.europen-packaging.eu/news/industry-coalition-supports-temporary-suspension-of-national-authorised-representative-requirement-under-epr/
EXPRA. (2026, June 29). Parliament takes a more targeted approach to the EPR ‘authorised representative’ suspension. https://expra.eu/2026/06/29/parliament-takes-a-more-targeted-approach-to-the-epr-authorised-representative-suspension/
Handelsverband NRW – Rheinland. (2026, August 11). Neue Verpackungsverordnung: Handelsverband beklagt Rechtsunsicherheiten und offene Fragen [comunicato HDE]. https://rheinland.hv-nrw.de/blog/2026/08/11/neue-verpackungsverordnung-handelsverband-beklagt-rechtsunsicherheiten-und-offene-fragen/
Händlerbund. (2026, July 21). EU-Verpackungsverordnung: Wenn Bürokratie den Binnenmarkt frisst. https://ohn.haendlerbund.de/haendlerbund-news/eu-verpackungsverordnung-buerokratie-binnenmarkt-frisst
Händlerbund. (2026, August). PPWR: EU-Kommission fordert Abschaffung der Bevollmächtigten-Pflicht. https://ohn.haendlerbund.de/haendlerbund-news/ppwr-eu-kommission-abschaffung-bevollmaechtigten-pflicht
IHK Regensburg für Oberpfalz / Kelheim. (2026). EU-Verpackungsverordnung (PPWR). https://www.ihk.de/regensburg/fachthemen/energie-und-umwelt/umwelt-und-rohstoffe/eu-verpackungsverordnung-ppwr-2-6933434
Recycling Europe. (2026, March 10). Reaction to the proposed suspension of the mandatory appointment of an authorised representative for EPR in the Environmental Omnibus. https://recyclingeurope.org/publication/reaction-to-the-proposed-suspension-of-the-mandatory-appointment-of-an-authorised-representative-for-epr-in-the-environmental-omnibus/
Qualified press and legal analyses
Berliner Zeitung. (2026, August). Chaos um EU-Verpackungsverordnung: Staaten sollen neue Regeln ignorieren. https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/kaum-in-kraft-schon-der-rueckzieher-eu-staaten-sollen-neue-verpackungsregeln-ignorieren-10310149
Die Weltwoche. (2026, August). Neue EU-Verpackungsverordnung: Kleine deutsche Unternehmen stoppen Lieferungen ins Ausland – Brüssel will Regeln abschwächen. https://weltwoche.ch/daily/neue-eu-verpackungsverordnung-kleine-deutsche-unternehmen-stoppen-lieferungen-ins-ausland-bruessel-will-regeln-abschwaechen/
Dongo, D. (2026, 10 luglio). Il ‘fabbricante’ di imballaggi ai sensi del PPWR. FARE (Food and Agriculture Requirements). https://fareagrifood.com/2026/07/10/fabbricante-imballaggi-ppwr/
etailment. (2026, August 13). Verpackungsverordnung: Kommission steigert das Chaos. https://www.etailment.de/magazin/2026-08-13-verpackungsverordnung-kommission-steigert-das-chaos
GvW Graf von Westphalen. (2026, July). More than just the PPWR: The new Packaging Act and its implications for businesses. https://www.gvw.com/en/news/blog/detail/mehr-als-die-ppwr-das-neue-verpackdg-und-seine-folgen-fuer-unternehmen
PackagingLaw.com. (2026, January). EU Environmental Omnibus Package impacts packaging. https://www.packaginglaw.com/news/eu-environmental-omnibus-package-impacts-packaging
ppc.land. (2026, August). EU packaging law needs 27 registrations. Sellers are already leaving. https://ppc.land/eu-packaging-law-needs-27-registrations-sellers-are-already-leaving/
Dario Dongo, lawyer and journalist, PhD in international food law, founder of WIISE (FARE - GIFT - Food Times) and Égalité.
