Extended Producer Responsibility under the PPWR

This is general information about Regulation (EU) 2025/40, not legal advice. The national registers, schemes and representative rules named here were checked against each country’s law on 29 September 2026. Confirm anything you act on with qualified counsel or an accredited body.

What EPR means

Extended producer responsibility makes the producer financially (and sometimes operationally) responsible for the end-of-life management of the packaging they put on the market, collection, sorting and recycling. Regulation (EU) 2025/40, Art. 45, sets the PPWR framework for packaging EPR, building on the existing national producer-responsibility systems.

Register per market, not once for the EU

EPR is administered nationally. You register with the packaging producer register (Art. 44) in each member state where you make packaging available, and meet that state's reporting and fee obligations under the extended-producer-responsibility framework (Art. 45). There is no single EU-wide registration today; the EU is working toward more consolidated arrangements, but for now a business selling into, say, Germany, France and Spain registers in each. In practice the national registers are transitioning from each country's existing packaging-EPR systems, so the register, the producer-responsibility organisation and the fee schedule you deal with are the national ones already in place rather than a new EU register.

Deadlines and fees are set nationally and change, so confirm the current position for each market before you rely on it. The EPR by country pages set out each state’s register, scheme, representative rule and small-quantity position.

Eco-modulated fees

Under Art. 45, EPR fees are eco-modulated, adjusted according to the packaging's environmental performance, in particular its recyclability. Better-designed, more recyclable packaging attracts lower fees; poorly recyclable packaging attracts higher ones. This is the financial link between your recyclability grade (Art. 6) and your ongoing EPR cost, and a direct reason to design up the grade scale.

Selling direct into a state where you are not established: the authorised representative

From 12 August 2026, Art. 45(3) requires a producer that makes packaging available directly to end users in a member state where it is not established to appoint an authorised representative for EPR in that state, to carry out its producer obligations there. That catches an EU business shipping to consumers in another member state as much as a seller based outside the EU. A supplier to resellers who pass the goods on unchanged is not the producer in that market and is not caught; the reseller is.

The second sentence of Art. 45(3) leaves each member state to decide whether to require a representative from producers established outside the EU more generally. France and Spain go further than the EU rule and require one from every producer not established there, EU or non-EU (France: Art. L541-10-9-1 Code de l’environnement; Spain: Art. 17.2 Real Decreto 1055/2022). Germany requires a producer caught by Art. 45(3) to appoint a German-established representative by written, German-language authorisation before first supply (s5(2) and (4) VerpackDG), and Austria has required one from distance sellers with no Austrian establishment selling to private consumers since 1 January 2023 (s16a Verpackungsverordnung 2014). A proposal to suspend Art. 45(3) until 2035, COM(2025) 982, stalled when the Council ended negotiations on it in April 2026 and left it out of its 24 June 2026 mandate, so the requirement applies now.

The EPR representative is a separate appointment from the product authorised representative under Art. 17 and from any product-safety representative. Online marketplaces also have duties to check that the third-party producers selling through them are properly registered.

What to do

• List every member state you place packaging in, that is your registration map.
• Register with each national system and set up reporting; registration typically takes time, so start early.
• Appoint an authorised representative in each state where you supply end users directly and are not established, and in France and Spain wherever you are the producer and not established there.
• Track your recyclability grade, it drives your eco-modulated fee.

Frequently asked questions