Two Petitions, One Regulation: What the Commission's Reply Changes for a Small Business
Two Petitions, One Regulation: What the Commission's Reply Changes for a Small Business
Two campaigns have asked the European Commission to move on the packaging regulation, from opposite ends of the market. One was signed by chief executives of some of the largest food and drink companies in the world. The other was started by a self-employed artist in Slovakia and has gathered more than seventy-seven thousand verified signatures. Only the second drew a public reply: the Commission said it was looking into the matter and recommended that Member States refrain from issuing fines. The people who organised the petition were the first to point out that the statement is not legally binding.
That sentence decides what a small company has to do this week. A recommendation about fines is not a suspension of the rules — and, the part almost nobody has written down, fines are not the enforcement route that reaches a company with a thin paper trail in the first place.
What Happened, and in What Order
The micro-business petition, 6 August 2026
The campaign was launched on Change.org on 6 August 2026 by Jeanette Koňarčíková, an independent artist and micro-entrepreneur from Slovakia, under the title Stop destroying EU micro-businesses: Immediate moratorium on cross-border EPR fees. It asks for three things in its own words: an immediate enforcement embargo stopping extended-producer-responsibility fines and cross-border registration requirements; an EU-wide de minimis threshold exempting small-volume sellers; and a genuine one-stop shop, "so no sole trader ever has to register separately in 27 different member states". The page records that a formal petition on the same question was lodged with the European Parliament's PETI committee on 5 August, the day before the campaign opened. On 26 August 2026 the counter showed more than 77,000 verified signatures — a figure worth dating, because it moves daily.
The other petition, from the other end of the market
The comparison worth drawing is not simultaneous, and the dates matter. On 29 April 2026 a letter signed by chief executives of large food and drink companies — Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Mondelēz, Kraft Heinz and Heineken among the names reported — asked the EU institutions to delay parts of the regulation and reopen others, including the Article 5 restriction on PFAS in food-contact packaging, on the grounds that the measurement methods were not settled. It leaked in May, drew a counter-letter from more than 150 consumer and environmental organisations, and nothing was reopened: the regulation took general application on 12 August 2026 as scheduled. So the two demands sit four months apart, and what they share matters more than the timing. The same text produced two different complaints — one about a restriction that is hard to test, the other about a registration burden that does not scale down — and both describe a cost that barely changes whether you sell five units or five million. Fixed costs are regressive. Neither petition is making a moral argument, and neither are we.
What the Commission answered, 13 August 2026
The reply did not come as a decision, a delegated act or a formal communication. According to the petition's own update of 13 August 2026, published when the count stood at 55,000, the Commission responded in comments on social media, saying it was looking into the issue and recommending that Member States refrain from issuing fines. The organisers added the qualification themselves, and it is the right one: enforcement is run independently by each Member State, so the statement is not legally binding and national authorities are not required to follow it. It creates no right you can raise in front of a market-surveillance officer.
A Recommendation Is Not a Suspension
What is still owed
Three things get confused here: the obligation, the check, and the penalty. The recommendation is about the third; the first two are untouched. The regulation has been in general application since 12 August 2026 and the documentary duties run from that date. On the central one our referential is unambiguous, and it is the one regulatory statement in this article we vouch for outright: Article 39(2) provides that the EU declaration of conformity has the model structure set out in Annex VIII, contains the elements specified in the module in Annex VII, and is continuously updated. Our guide to the declaration of conformity covers the document field by field, and the Annex VII technical documentation guide covers the file underneath it.
Why "no fines" is not the sentence that protects you
Here is what changes how the news reads. Fines are not the first instrument the regulation reaches for, and for the failures a small company is most likely to have they are not the instrument at all. Article 62, titled "Formal non-compliance", sets out a graduated sequence: where a Member State becomes aware that the EU declaration of conformity has not been drawn up, or not drawn up correctly, or that the Annex VII technical documentation is unavailable, incomplete or wrong, it must first require the operator to put an end to the non-compliance. That is a correction order, not a fine.
Read the next paragraph of the same article, though. Where that kind of non-compliance persists, the Member State must take all appropriate measures to prohibit the packaging from being made available on the market, or ensure it is recalled or withdrawn. Administrative fines under Article 68 attach to a different family of failures — excessive packaging, banned formats, re-use and recycled content. The sanction that lands on a missing declaration is not money. It is the loss of the right to sell the pack, and a recommendation about fines does not reach that branch of Article 62. Worth knowing too: Article 68(1) gives Member States until 12 February 2027 to lay down their penalty rules at all. The enforcement architecture the recommendation refers to is, in most countries, still being built.
The commercial layer arrives sooner and answers to nobody's recommendation. Article 45 obliges online platform providers to obtain a producer's registration numbers before allowing it to use their services, and a distributor or a B2B customer can ask for the file whenever it likes, because its own depends on yours.
What is genuinely unsettled, said as such
The petition asks for a moratorium, a threshold and a single window. On the first, something real is on the table and it has not moved: the Commission's Environmental Omnibus proposal of 10 December 2025, COM(2025) 982 final, would suspend the application of Article 45(3) — the obligation to appoint an authorised representative for extended producer responsibility — until 1 January 2035, for producers already established in the EU selling into other Member States. It leaves producers established outside the Union untouched, and registration and reporting stay. It needs both the Parliament and the Council, and according to the European Parliament's legislative observatory, Council negotiations were discontinued after strong reservations from a large majority of Member States. To date, nothing is adopted.
On the other two demands there is less to report. A single EU registration portal does not exist. What the regulation provides is narrower and worth knowing precisely: Article 44(1) requires each national register to provide links to the other national registers, to make registration easier across Member States. Links between twenty-seven registers is not one window, and that difference is the whole subject of the petition.
The Carve-Outs That Do Exist, and the One That Does Not
"There is no small-business exemption" is repeated so often that it has become imprecise in the other direction. The regulation does carry micro-enterprise carve-outs, each defined by reference to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC as applicable on 11 February 2025, and two of them reach a cross-border seller often.
Article 21 can move the manufacturer's obligations off your desk. An importer or distributor that puts packaging on the market under its own name or trademark is treated as the manufacturer and takes on the Article 15 obligations — but where that importer or distributor is a micro-enterprise and the person supplying the packaging is located in the Union, the text makes the supplier the manufacturer for the purposes of Article 15. For a small private-label seller buying from an EU converter, that is the difference between holding the technical file yourself and being able to require it from a supplier who already has the data. Our guide for importers of non-EU packaging works through the cases. Article 29(13) drops the re-use targets below a volume line, for a calendar year in which an operator made not more than 1 000 kg of packaging available in a Member State and falls within the micro-enterprise definition — two conditions, both required.
Neither touches registration. Article 44(2) requires producers to register in each Member State where they make packaging or packaged products available for the first time, and Article 44(4) makes that a precondition rather than a formality: a producer must not make packaging available on a Member State's territory for the first time if it, or where applicable its authorised representative, is not registered there. There is no headcount and no turnover in that sentence — the exact point the petition is making. Our producer registration playbook holds the country-by-country mechanics.
Why a Small Company's Bill Follows Countries, Not Products
Our inbound queue says this better than any analysis. Over the last thirty days the most frequent request we received was not about recyclability, grades or design. It was about registration in multiple markets, and about who does it — eight independent enquiries in a month. One asked for approved registration numbers in twenty-two countries, for twenty product references. Another needed all twenty-seven Member States with fewer than five hundred packaging references. A third described itself as very small, selling around eight products, several sharing the same pack.
The workload in those cases is not proportional to the catalogue. It is proportional to the map. A company with eight products shipping to twenty countries meets more national regimes, registers, reporting formats and fee grids than one with four hundred references selling in a single country. The consequence follows without anyone having to argue for it: where the cost of complying in a market exceeds the revenue earned there, withdrawing is rational, and micro-businesses have been removing destinations from their shipping options since August. That is a description, not a recommendation — the alternative to withdrawing is complying, never ignoring. But the aggregate is worth naming: a single market that keeps getting smaller for its smallest participants.
Who Does What: the Line We Do Not Cross
The question we are asked most often is whether we register clients in the twenty-seven Member States. The answer is no — and the useful version of that answer is who does.
The authorised representative for extended producer responsibility is a third party appointed by written mandate. Article 45(3) requires a producer in the categories it names to appoint one in each Member State where it makes packaging available for the first time, other than the Member State where it is established, and lets Member States require the same of producers established in third countries. Article 44(3) allows a Member State to provide that the registration obligations be met by that representative on the producer's behalf. It is a mandate and a liability, and a software vendor cannot hold it. The producer responsibility organisation is the other third party, and Article 46 is its seat: producers may entrust it with carrying out their extended-producer-responsibility obligations on their behalf, and Member States may make that entrustment mandatory. The notified body is a third one again — Annex VIII keeps a field for it, filled in where applicable.
PPWR Connect is a software vendor. We are not an authorised representative for extended producer responsibility, we are not a producer responsibility organisation, and we are not a notified body. What we do is the part that stays with you whoever you appoint: holding the packaging file, producing the declaration from the unit data, keeping the evidence attached to the right version when the pack changes, and getting the figures out in the form the representative and the scheme ask for.
What a Small Company Can Do This Week
Map the countries before you count the catalogue. List the Member States where you actually make packaging available for the first time — not where you have customers, not where your website is readable. That list sizes everything else.
Build the file, starting with the declaration. This is the one duty in this article our referential confirms without qualification, and also the one you can discharge alone. The EU declaration of conformity follows the model structure of Annex VIII under Article 39(2), draws its elements from Annex VII, and is continuously updated — a living document tied to a version of the pack, not a PDF signed once. To see where your own exposure sits, the free readiness assessment maps your role and your markets against the obligations that reach you. For the calendar, our note on what applied from 12 August 2026 sets out what started when.
Put your situation where it is counted. If the burden described here is yours, the channels that register it are the European Parliament's petitions committee, the Commission's public feedback portal on legislative files, and your own members of the European Parliament — the routes the petition's organisers cite themselves. We are not asking you to sign anything and we take no position on the petition. Consultation records are read; anecdotes in comment threads are not.
What Actually Protects a Small Company
Two petitions arrived at the same text from opposite directions and made, in effect, the same observation: a rule with a fixed cost of compliance is easier to live with the larger you are. One got an answer. That answer recommends restraint on fines, binds no one, and does not reach the branch of Article 62 that takes a pack off the market rather than charging for it. Nothing about the obligation has changed since 12 August 2026, and nothing about the file you have to hold has changed either. The only thing that has ever protected a small company here is an ordinary, up-to-date packaging file — the declaration, the evidence behind it, and a clear-eyed list of the countries you actually sell into.