How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

I would think that someone could make a business that sells "standard" packaging that's registered throughout the EU, and that a small business could use that packaging instead?

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something?

it seems weird to me, because normally legislation of this sort has a minimum amount of revenue required, or company size requirements, but not this one? I mean reading the article it seems not, but if it was just some guy telling me this on the street I would naturally expect they were misinformed and there was a requirement for the law to apply that they had missed in their review of the matter.

All regulations end up being scheme’s to protect incumbents. Especially when the incumbent is ostensibly, and loudly against the regulation.

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.

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.

Hmm, I wonder who could have predicted this.

Maybe the corporations who pushed the laws?

I have no info here, just thinking "what would I do if I was a wealthy corporation?" Dig a deeper moat!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah time for EU to change, all these legislation and rules never helped EU to grow. I guess it's up to Gernamy/France to finally figure it out

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.

The problem here is that government regulations don't work. Only punishment works and punishment should be based on number of infringements.

So if some poorly discarded packaging is found in a forest by a government official, they can document it. At the end of the year, the companies involved in the making of the improperly discarded products would be fined some amount proportional to the number of recorded infringements and magnitude of infringements (e.g. total weight) to cover clean up costs pertaining to that particular source of waste.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

> 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.

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 :)

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.

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?

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

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?

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.

Seriously? You should only ever need to walk to the village market to buy anything, and walk back with your own bag.

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.

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).

As usual, throwing babies out with the bath water

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.

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

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

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.

Same thing applies to California except at the most elite levels. Yes you can get your tech start up funded, but try opening a car wash... the taxes and regulations are overly burdensome for small businesses.

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.

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/...

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.

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.

Regulatory capture in this case.

They need proportionality and size/qty exemptions

Seems like a problem Lectronz could solve for its makers.

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.

How is CrowdSupply, US based, managing?

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.

> 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)