Letter to MEPs - English

Honourable Members of the European Parliament,

I am writing to you as a small/micro business and supporter of Eu-MEA (European Micro Enterprises Alliance) to request that you vote on the Omnibus proposal (COM/2025/982) to suspend the requirement for an authorized representative under Article 45(3) of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) until 2035, and on Parliament's draft report, which seeks to limit this benefit specifically to micro and small businesses.
Please also advocate for a single EU point of registration and payment to amend the current fragmented and costly EPR regulation.

The Single Market is in crisis for small creators. It is now harder, more expensive, and more bureaucratic for an independent artist, crafter, or micro-enterprise to send a package or a letter to their neighbour within the European Union than halfway around the world.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) was designed to hold major polluters accountable. Instead, it has created a disproportionate barrier that imposes a "pay-per-access" system, stifling microbusinesses and favouring multinationals.

Multinationals, with entire legal departments, readily absorb these compliance costs. But for an independent artisan, self-employed person or small enterprise ​​is financially and administratively unsustainable to ship even just 10 small packages a year to another EU country, being forced to register with 27 different national registries, hire expensive local authorized representatives, pay minimum annual fees, and submit complex reports in multiple languages.

This system doesn't protect small businesses; it destroys them.

THE REALITY WE FACE AS MICRO AND SMALL BUSINESSES

The absurdity of unit costs: while large companies pay fractions of a cent per package, a microbusiness selling just five handmade items is forced to pay hundreds of euros in fixed registration and compliance fees just to legally ship those few packages.

Distortion of the Single Market: Instead of the free movement of goods, small creators face artificial internal borders and bureaucratic extortion between member states.

Barrier to entry for new businesses: Who can afford to start a creative business today, when the initial cost of legal red tape for packaging in Europe exceeds thousands of euros? The EU is stifling the next generation of entrepreneurs before they even get started.

The environmental and social paradox: the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) penalizes local artisans who produce sustainable and environmentally friendly goods, while mass-production giants pay taxes and flood the market with plastic waste. It also affects female entrepreneurs, rural creators, and self-employed artisans who depend on cross-border sales for their livelihoods.

It's already happening: countless independent artists, artisans, and small shops have announced they are cancelling shipments from the EU or closing their businesses. It's heartbreaking to see a single, poorly conceived regulation destroy thousands of livelihoods, creative dreams, and passion projects overnight.

Small national markets alone cannot support independent creators, and people cannot wait years for Brussels to solve this problem. We need to pay our bills and buy food today.

I care to emphasize that the aim of this initiative is not to exempt micro and small enterprises from responsibility for the packaging they place on the market or from paying a proportionate contribution for packaging waste management, but to establish a system in which the administrative burden and compliance costs will not be disproportionate to the actual scope of business and the quantities of packaging placed on the market of individual Member States.

WHAT WE ASK AS Eu-MEA

That's why I, along with Eu-MEA ask you, as the MEP representing us in the committee vote, to vote on the Omnibus proposal (COM/2025/982) to consider the proportionality of the EPR obligations in question for micro and small enterprises, the inclusion of additional administrative simplification, the establishment of a single European access point for reporting and fulfilling obligations, and the introduction an appropriate de minimis threshold for very small quantities of packaging in cross-border sales.

HOW THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ARRIVED TO THESE DAMAGING RESULTS

FIY - EACH POINT IS DELVED INTO HERE BELOW

1 - Legal and factual elements: An impact assessment for the PPWR was carried out, it is not missing. It was prepared under DG Environment and executed by external consultants: Eunomia (consortium lead), with Arcadis, Milieu and COWI (SWD(2022) 384, section 1.4, "Evidence, sources and quality"). It passed through the Regulatory Scrutiny Board (the Commission's own quality-control body) twice: a negative opinion on 13 May 2022, then a positive opinion with reservations on 30 September 2022.

The gap is not procedural absence. It is what the procedure measured, and what it did not. The assessment quantified costs for large players and for the waste sector, for example, €10.3 billion in one-off business costs for harmonised labelling, but the burden on the smallest cross-border seller, a micro-enterprise shipping packaged goods to customers in other EU countries, was never turned into a figure, even though the Commission was expressly warned of it during its own consultation.

2 - Legal and factual elements: The rejection was not a formality. Across its two reviews, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board raised sixteen substantive comments on the impact assessment (SWD(2022) 384), six in the first round, ten in the second. They concerned coherence with the Single-Use Plastics Directive, the choice of a Regulation over a Directive, the distribution of costs between packaging producers and consumers, the cost-benefit analysis, the effect on employment, and the "One In, One Out" administrative accounting.

Not one of those sixteen comments concerned micro-enterprises, or the small distance-seller placing packaged goods, as opposed to packaging itself, on the market of another Member State. The Board scrutinised the assessment closely and sent it back for rework, yet the smallest cross-border businesses never entered its list of concerns.

3 - Legal and factual elements: This omission cannot be explained by lack of information, the Commission was told, in its own consultation. In the public consultation on Extended Producer Responsibility, participants stated plainly that the administrative costs of proper EPR membership and product registration can far exceed the end-of-life treatment cost for small businesses (SWD(2022) 384). That is precisely the micro-enterprise's situation: a fixed administrative cost larger than the actual cost of disposing of the packaging it sends.

The warning was not isolated. At a stakeholder workshop in June 2021, during the discussion of the empty-space (packaging minimisation) measure, participants warned that requiring customised packaging could disproportionately affect small businesses, and industry raised concern about the lack of support for SMEs to adapt. The Commission recorded both warnings. It turned neither into a measured cost broken down by company size.

4 - Legal and factual elements: The contrast is sharpest when set against what the assessment did quantify. For harmonised labelling, the Commission produced a precise figure: €10.3 billion in one-off business costs, which it argued would be outweighed by the administrative savings from removing divergent national labelling schemes (SWD(2022) 384). The capacity to generate precise, large-scale cost estimates was therefore clearly there.

For the burden on a three-person business shipping packaged goods across borders, no equivalent figure exists anywhere in the assessment. The same document that could calculate labelling costs down to the billion produced not a single number for what compliance would cost the smallest cross-border sellers, the very group that had flagged the problem during consultation. What could be measured for large players was measured; what fell on the smallest was left uncounted.

5 - Legal and factual elements: The assessment contains a dedicated section whose entire purpose is to set out who bears which cost: Annex 3, "Who is affected and how?" (SWD(2022) 384, Part 2/2). It sorts everyone into three columns: Citizens/Consumers, Businesses, and Administrations.

Every business, of every size, is placed in that single "Businesses" column. Reading the full annex, the words "micro," "small enterprise," and "SME" do not appear in it once. A three-person workshop and a multinational corporation sit in exactly the same box, treated identically, with the cost expressed only as one aggregate figure for "businesses", never broken down by how differently that cost lands depending on a company's size. In the one place in the entire assessment designed to show who the law affects and how, the smallest businesses are not distinguished at all.

6 - Legal and factual elements: This is not an isolated failing of a single file. A joint review by Europe's own business federations (the SME Test Benchmark 2022, produced by BusinessEurope, Eurochambres and SMEunited) examined 26 impact assessments and found that only five distinguished the impact a policy would have on micro-enterprises separately; in the majority, micro-enterprises are folded into the broader "SME" group. The Commission's own Better Regulation toolbox concedes the point: a one-size-fits-all approach to SMEs has not proved effective, because the impact on a micro-enterprise is likely to differ substantially from the impact on a medium-sized one.

One honest qualification: the PPWR file was not among those 26, the benchmark covers an earlier cycle, and the PPWR proposal dates from 30 November 2022, too late to be included. So this review does not assess the PPWR directly. What it shows is a documented, systemic pattern, the routine failure to treat micro-enterprises separately, into which the PPWR's own assessment fits precisely, as points 1 to 5 demonstrate.

7 - Legal and factual elements: There is one point here with genuine legal weight, not just political force: the principle of proportionality. Under the EU Treaties (Article 5(4) TEU), any EU measure must be suitable for achieving its objective and must not go beyond what is necessary to achieve it. A fixed administrative burden imposed identically regardless of company size, where that same fixed cost is trivial for a large firm but can exceed the entire value of the waste a micro-enterprise generates, raises a serious proportionality question: whether the measure, as applied to the smallest, goes beyond what is necessary for its environmental aim.

One honest qualification, so the argument survives scrutiny: proportionality is hard to win before the Court of Justice, which grants the EU legislator wide discretion in regulatory choices of this kind and only rarely strikes measures down for disproportionality. This is therefore not a claim that the PPWR is unlawful, it is not. It is the point that the burden on micro-enterprises was never tested for proportionality in the way the EU's own rules require, and that a targeted exemption for the smallest is the proportionate correction the assessment never made.

8 - Legal and factual elements: The free movement of goods is not a detail of EU law but one of its founding principles, written into the Treaties (Articles 34–36 TFEU). To protect it in the digital market, the EU passed Regulation (EU) 2018/302, which bans unjustified geo-blocking, in other words blocking or limiting a customer's access to cross-border online purchases based on their nationality, residence or place of establishment. Its stated purpose was to let goods and customers move across internal borders without discrimination.

The PPWR pulls the other way. In practice it re-erects a border around every Member State. Not a physical one, but an administrative one: to sell into a country, a micro-seller must first register for that country's EPR scheme and pay its fees. On marketplaces the mechanism is blunt: no registration for a country, no shipping to it. So the smallest seller stands between two pieces of EU law pointing in opposite directions: one designed to guarantee that a customer in another Member State can buy from them, the other making that sale conditional on clearing an administrative hurdle in every single country.

One honest qualification, because the argument must survive scrutiny: Regulation (EU) 2018/302 does not force any trader to sell into, or physically deliver to, every Member State, it expressly leaves a trader free not to deliver goods to a customer in another country. So this is not a clean case of one law breaking another. The point is sharper than that: the EU built one framework to tear down internal borders for small online sellers, and another that rebuilds them as administrative barriers, and it never reconciled the two. The contradiction sits unresolved inside its own body of law.

9 - Legal and factual elements: The EU did not lack a rule requiring it to look at the smallest before legislating, it has one, and did not apply it in substance. Under the Small Business Act for Europe and the Commission's own Better Regulation Guidelines, the "Think Small First" principle and the mandatory SME Test require the Commission to assess, in advance and concretely, how a proposed measure will affect small and micro enterprises, and to consider lighter regimes or exemptions for them where the burden is disproportionate.

In the PPWR file, that machinery was formally present but substantively empty for the smallest cross-border sellers. As points 1 to 5 show: the burden on micro-enterprises was never quantified (points 1, 4); the warnings raised in consultation were recorded but not turned into measured costs (point 3); and in the very annex that lists who is affected, micro-enterprises do not appear at all (point 5). A test that is run on paper but never measures the group it exists to protect has not been applied in the sense its own rules intend. The Parliament's proposal to focus relief on micro and small enterprises is simply the correction the SME Test should have produced in the first place.

10 - Legal and factual elements: Step back, and a single thread runs through all of it. The EU demands from the smallest businesses a standard of perfect, detailed compliance (register in every country, appoint a representative, track every fraction of packaging, meet every deadline) while it did not hold itself to its own standard when it wrote the rule for them.

Its own review board rejected the impact assessment the first time (point 1). Its own consultation warned that the administrative cost could exceed the waste cost for small businesses (point 3). It found the resources to calculate €10.3 billion for labelling, but not one figure for the burden on a three-person business (point 4). In the very section listing who the law affects, micro-enterprises are not named at all (point 5). Its own SME Test and "Think Small First" principle required it to measure that burden in advance, and it did not (point 9).

There is a parallel worth stating plainly. Before a physical intervention in the environment, EU law requires a concrete, prior assessment of the harm: specific, quantified, attributable. For a legislative intervention that can push the smallest enterprises out of cross-border trade, the equivalent obligation existed on paper and was not met in substance. This is not an argument that the EU broke the law, it did not. It is the point that the EU asks of the smallest a diligence it did not practise itself when measuring what this rule would do to them.
And the fix is narrow, not radical: measure the burden that was never measured, but was warned about and recorded, and lift it from the micro-enterprises.

A FURTHER POINT

There is a real contradiction at the heart of this, and it is worth stating plainly. Europe builds its strength on unity. This is not a slogan invented for this argument, it is a principle the Union's own leadership actively affirms. In an official European Council communication on its social media channel (@eucouncil on Instagram), Council President António Costa made the case for European unity as the source of Europe's strength, in the context of common security and defence. On that, he is right, and it is worth supporting: where unity gives strength, in security, in defence, in common procurement, in standing together before the world, the Union should indeed act as one.

But when it comes to a cardboard box that a small maker ships to a customer across a border, that unity suddenly disappears. Instead of one market and one system, the packaging law creates twenty-seven separate registrations, twenty-seven national paperwork systems, twenty-seven separate costs, and that weight falls hardest on the smallest, who can least carry it.

So here is the contradiction in its simplest form: Europe unites where it must be strong, and fragments exactly where unity would most help the ones who need it. The single market was a promise that goods and people would cross Europe's internal borders without obstacles. For the smallest businesses, this law quietly puts those borders back up, not only as a customs tariff, but as paperwork.

None of this is an argument against Europe, or against unity, nor against President Costa's point, which is sound. It is the opposite. It is an argument that Europe should be, in this, what its own leaders say it should be everywhere else, and what it already knows how to be: one.

ON ANOTHER NOTE: THE PACKAGING PARADOX, THE LAW FIGHTS THE VERY PROTECTION FRAGILE GOODS NEED

The regulation pulls a small maker of fragile products in two directions at once, and both can't be satisfied. Under Article 24 of Regulation (EU) 2025/40, e-commerce, transport and grouped packaging must keep the "empty space ratio" to a maximum of 50%, the minimisation principle applying from 12 August 2026, and the hard 50% cap from 1 January 2030. Crucially, empty space is measured by volume, and the protective filling material (foam, air cushions, paper, inserts, etc.) counts as empty space. Switching to a "greener" filler doesn't help: by volume, it is still counted the same.

For someone shipping plaster moulds, ceramics, or anything breakable, this collides head-on with physics. To survive transport, a fragile item needs a protective layer around it, that is what stops it arriving in pieces. But that very layer is what the rule counts against you. So the law pushes a small maker to reduce exactly the material that keeps fragile goods intact. There is, for now, an acknowledged flexibility for fragile items, but the method for calculating the ratio is not even finalised: the Commission is due to adopt it only by 12 February 2028. So businesses are told to comply with a rule whose measurement doesn't yet exist.

The regulation also pushes toward reuse of packaging. In principle, one might imagine the person receiving the parcel would re-use the box. In practice, for cross-border postal sales, that idea rarely survives contact with reality. The packaging travels one way and never returns to the sender, so the maker cannot reuse it. And whether the recipient can, depend on a chain of "what ifs": whether the box dimensions suit what they might send, which is unlikely, because the empty-space rule pushes every box to be cut tightly around one specific product, which makes it less usable for anything else; whether it survived the journey intact rather than crushed, dented or weakened, as fragile-goods packaging is designed to absorb impact and is often spent after one use; whether it arrived clean; and whether they are willing to reuse a box carrying someone else's brand and logo.

There is a deeper point underneath all this. A small seller already optimises packaging, not because a law tells them to, but because their survival depends on it. Every extra gram of packaging is extra shipping cost, paid on every single parcel. No one ships a light product in a heavy, rigid, reinforced box just so it might be reused someday, because that added weight raises the shipping price and prices them out of the market. Right-sizing, light-weighting, using the minimum packaging that still protects the goods, small cross-border sellers have been doing this for years, out of pure economic necessity, long before any regulation asked them to. So for them, this law does not change the underlying behaviour it claims to encourage. They were already minimising. What the regulation adds is not better practice, it is cost and paperwork layered on top of practice that already existed.

So the two aims sit in direct tension. "Minimise the empty space" tells the maker to cut each box tightly to its product. "Design for reuse" needs packaging that is generic and robust enough to serve many products many times. A box shaped precisely to hold one plaster mould, stripped of protective space, is the opposite of a box that anyone can reuse for anything. The law asks for both at once, and for the smallest makers of fragile goods, it delivers neither, while adding the cost and the paperwork all the same.

THE SOLUTION WE AIM FOR

There is a constructive way out of this, and the EU does not need to invent it, because it has already built the same mechanism twice, in other fields.

When a small seller ships across the EU, the problem is not paying for waste, it is having to register, report and pay separately in every single country, each with its own system, its own rates, its own paperwork. The obvious answer is a single EU point of registration and payment: you register once, you report once, you pay once, and the money is distributed to the national schemes according to each country's own rates. The environmental purpose is fully preserved, every country still gets its fee for the waste generated on its territory, while the twenty-seven-fold administrative burden disappears.

This is not a utopian idea. The EU already runs exactly this model in two places. For VAT, the One Stop Shop (OSS) lets a business declare and pay VAT for its sales across the whole EU through a single national portal; the tax is then routed to each Member State at that state's own rate. The problem OSS solves (different national rates, money owed to different countries) is precisely the problem of packaging EPR.

The same logic runs through European healthcare. With the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC), established under Regulation (EC) No 883/2004, a citizen carries one card from their home country and receives care anywhere in the EU at local rates; behind the scenes, the home country's institution reimburses the treating country according to that country's tariffs. In 2023 alone this system processed around 2.3 million cross-border reimbursement claims worth some €1.3 billion, twenty-seven different national systems, different costs in each, reconciled centrally without the patient ever navigating twenty-seven bureaucracies.

So when it is said that packaging EPR cannot be centralised because each country has its own scheme and its own rates, the answer is already on the table: the EU has solved that exact problem, at scale, for both taxation and healthcare. A single registration-and-payment point for packaging, ideally built into the forthcoming Circular Economy Act, where the EU has itself signalled a horizontal review of EPR obligations, would keep every environmental obligation intact while removing the one thing that actually crushes the smallest sellers: not the fee, but the twenty-seven-fold paperwork behind it.

Yours sincerely,

Sincerely, supporter/member of Eu-MEA.