EU Packaging Rules: The Irish Exemption That Does Not Travel With Your Parcel

Consider a workshop in Cavan that makes leather dog leads by hand. Two people, a bench, a laser engraver, and a website that takes orders from Germany, France and the Netherlands on a good week. This is a composite case, built from the pattern we keep seeing rather than one named business, but every detail of it is ordinary. Turnover well under a million. Packaging measured in kilos, not tonnes: a printed box, a strip of tissue, a padded envelope for the smaller orders.

For years the owner had one correct answer when anyone asked about packaging regulations. They were under the threshold. They had checked, they were right, and there was a note in a folder to prove it.

A month into the new EU packaging regime, that answer is still true in Ireland and useless everywhere else.

The Threshold Was Never an Export Threshold

Ireland's packaging rules sit in the European Union (Packaging) Regulations 2014, S.I. No. 282 of 2014. Regulation 3(3)(a) defines a "major producer" as a business that supplies more than 10 tonnes of packaging in a calendar year and has annual turnover of more than one million euro. Both limbs, not either. Miss one and you are not a major producer, which is why most small traders in this country have never joined Repak, which operates the only approved packaging compliance scheme in the State.

Read a little further and the drafting gets interesting. Regulation 3(3)(c) sets out what you count when you work out your tonnage, and it expressly excludes packaging used in supplying products "to persons outside of the State".

Sit with that for a second. Under Irish law, the parcels they post to Germany do not count towards the Irish threshold at all. The more they export, the further below the Irish line they sit.

That was never a loophole. It was a sensible division of labour: Ireland taxes the packaging that ends up in Irish bins, and the country where the box is actually opened deals with the box. The problem is that plenty of owners read it as a general exemption from packaging rules, full stop. It is not. It is an exemption from the Irish scheme, calculated on Irish sales, and it says nothing whatsoever about what Germany thinks of your padded envelope.

One more thing that catches people out. Even a business below the major producer test is not outside the 2014 Regulations entirely. Part II imposes primary obligations on all producers, including how packaging waste arising on your own premises is separated and sent for recovery. Smaller duties, but duties.

What Actually Changed on 12 August

The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, entered into force on 11 February 2025 and has applied since 12 August 2026. The European Commission's own packaging waste pages carry both dates, and the second one is the one that matters, because a Regulation is directly applicable. There is no transposing statutory instrument to wait for and no national discretion to soften the edges.

Two features of it land on small sellers hard.

The first is the producer register. Every business putting packaging on a market has to be registered in that market. Producers handling under ten tonnes a year get lighter reporting, and that concession is real, but it is a concession on paperwork volume. It is not an exemption from being on the register in the first place. The distinction sounds academic until a marketplace or a freight forwarder asks for a registration number you do not have.

The second is Article 45(3), and it is the one that turns an administrative nuisance into a business decision.

One Representative Per Country, With No European Shortcut

Article 45(3) says that a producer who makes packaging available in a Member State where it is not established must appoint, by written mandate, an authorised representative for extended producer responsibility in that Member State.

Not one for the European Union. One for each country.

Register in Ireland and you have covered Ireland. You have not covered France. There is no single European licence, no mutual recognition, no equivalent of the one-stop VAT shop that Irish sellers got used to. Each destination is its own registration, its own representative, its own fee schedule, its own annual report.

And because registration and representation are fixed costs per market rather than per parcel, the arithmetic falls on exactly the wrong shoulders. A business posting forty parcels a month into six countries carries the same six registrations as a business posting forty thousand. The compliance bill is identical. The revenue it is spread across is not.

This is not theoretical friction. In the days either side of the application date, trade coverage recorded sellers switching off EU shipping entirely rather than register in a spread of markets they served lightly. Nobody wrote a press release about it. The countries simply came off the checkout dropdown.

How This Quietly Costs You Money

The version of this that costs money is quiet and slow. You keep shipping, because nothing visibly breaks on 12 August. Then a marketplace integration asks for an EPR number during an onboarding check and your listings for that country pause. Or a scheme in a destination market writes to you with a registration demand and a reconstruction of what you should have been paying since August, and the first you hear of it is a letter in a language you do not read. Lost margin on orders you already shipped and delivered. That is the shape of it.

Selling pattern	Irish position	Position in the destination market
Ireland only, small volumes	Below the major producer test in S.I. 282/2014; Part II duties still apply	Not applicable
Occasional parcels into one or two EU states	Exports excluded from the Irish tonnage count	Registration and an authorised representative in each state
Regular shipping into several EU states	Still likely below the Irish test	The same duty repeated per market, at fixed cost
Selling through a marketplace that is the deemed producer	Unchanged	Largely carried by the marketplace, on its terms

The Argument in Brussels Is Not Over, and That Matters to Your Budget

I want to be careful here, because the honest position is messier than a headline.

In December 2025 the Commission proposed, as part of its Environmental Omnibus, suspending Article 45(3) until 1 January 2035. Had that landed, most of the problem described above would have evaporated for businesses established inside the European Union.

It did not land. On 24 June 2026 the Council discontinued negotiations on the two EPR files, with a large majority of Member States objecting to the suspension and a broader review of producer responsibility expected under the forthcoming Circular Economy Act. The Parliament is taking a narrower run at it: as EXPRA reported in late June, the rapporteur's draft would limit any suspension to micro and small enterprises, defined as up to 49 employees and up to ten million euro turnover, with a committee vote expected around 1 October 2026.

So a carve-out that would cover a two-person workshop is genuinely on the table. It is also nowhere near law, it has to survive trilogue, and the obligation is live in the meantime.

I have made the mistake of the opposite call before. Years ago I told customers to hold off on a change because a proposal looked certain to soften it, and it did not soften, and they paid for the delay. Waiting for Brussels is a position, not a plan. Take it deliberately if you take it.

What Your Website Cannot Fix

Your website cannot make you compliant. It can stop the next parcel going to a country you have not registered in, which is the useful half. It cannot do anything about the parcels already delivered. If you have been shipping into France since August, turning France off today closes the exposure going forward and leaves the existing period exactly where it was. That is the deal, and it is better to know it than to discover it.

For the same reason, do not treat a country switch as a substitute for advice. Repak handles the Irish side, the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment sets the Irish policy, and for any destination market where you have real volume, an hour with someone who does this for a living is cheaper than the reconstruction letter.

What the Workshop Actually Did

Nothing dramatic, and nothing that required a developer.

1. Pulled the numbers. Twelve months of orders exported to a spreadsheet, grouped by destination country. Two countries carried most of the export revenue. Five more accounted for a handful of orders each.
2. Cut the tail. Those five came off the checkout. Not permanently, and not with an apology banner, just removed from the shipping zones until they are worth registering for.
3. Registered where the volume is. Two markets, two authorised representatives, two sets of fees that are annoying rather than ruinous because there are two of them and not seven.
4. Wrote it down on the site. A short shipping and packaging page saying which countries the workshop ships to and carrying the registration details, so that the next onboarding check or customer query answers itself.
5. Diarised 1 October. If the micro and small enterprise carve-out advances, the five countries go back on.

Step two is the one worth dwelling on. Removing five countries from a WooCommerce shipping zone is a ten minute job for the person who owns the site, and the owner did it without ringing anybody. That is only true because the shop is hers. On a platform where the storefront rules belong to somebody else, that decision is a support ticket, a policy you did not write, and a wait.

Which is the whole argument for owning the thing you sell through. A site on Web60's €60 a year all-inclusive hosting gives you full WordPress and the shipping configuration that comes with it, so a regulatory change becomes an afternoon's work rather than a negotiation with a platform. The same logic applies to what your site must display about delivery charges under Irish law, and it is the same reason the rules for selling to customers in the UK and Northern Ireland are worth handling on your own pages rather than hoping a marketplace has them right.

Where a Marketplace Is Genuinely the Better Answer

This is the part where the honest answer is not Web60.

If you post a dozen parcels a year into two European countries, registering and appointing representatives in both is not proportionate. Fixed cost, negligible revenue, and a reporting obligation you will resent every year. For that pattern, selling those specific orders through a large marketplace that already carries deemed producer status in the destination market is the cheaper and saner route. You accept the commission and you accept that the customer relationship is not really yours, and in exchange somebody else's compliance team owns the registration.

That trade is defensible at low volume. It stops being defensible the moment the commission on that channel exceeds what the registrations would have cost, which for most growing sellers arrives sooner than expected. The point is to make the comparison on purpose instead of drifting into the marketplace because the alternative looked like paperwork.

Conclusion

The useful lesson is narrower than "new EU rules, panic accordingly."

It is that a threshold is always a threshold under a particular law, in a particular jurisdiction, calculated on particular sales. Ireland's 10 tonne and one million euro test is real, it still applies, and it was never doing the job many owners assumed it was doing. Your exports were outside the count because they were somebody else's problem, and now somebody else has asked you to sort it out.

So the question in front of you is not really about packaging. It is about which markets are worth the fixed cost of serving properly, and whether you are in a position to act on that answer this week or next quarter. Pull the twelve months of export orders, group them by country, and see how short the list of markets that genuinely earn their keep actually is. Most owners are surprised by how quickly it answers itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the PPWR apply to my business if I only sell within Ireland?

Yes, in the sense that the Regulation applies across the European Union and Ireland is not carved out of it. What changes for an Ireland-only seller is smaller, because you are dealing with one market and one scheme rather than several. The Irish major producer test in S.I. 282/2014, more than 10 tonnes of packaging and more than one million euro turnover, is what has historically determined whether you had to join Repak, and compliance advisers expect that national threshold to give way as the Regulation takes over. If you are close to either limb of that test, it is worth asking Repak directly where you stand rather than assuming last year's answer holds.

What is an authorised representative for extended producer responsibility?

It is a person or company you appoint by written mandate in a Member State where you are not established, who handles your registration, packaging data reporting and fee payments in that country on your behalf. Article 45(3) of the PPWR requires one in each such Member State. There is no European-wide version, so a representative in France does not cover Belgium.

I am under ten tonnes of packaging a year. Am I exempt?

No. Producers under ten tonnes get simplified reporting under the PPWR, which genuinely reduces the paperwork, but it does not remove the requirement to be registered as a producer in the markets you sell into. Lighter obligations and no obligations are different things, and the gap between them is where most of the trouble sits.

Do my exports count towards the Irish 10 tonne threshold?

No. Regulation 3(3)(c) of S.I. 282/2014 expressly excludes packaging used in supplying products to persons outside the State when you calculate the aggregate weight. That is why a business exporting heavily can sit well under the Irish test while carrying obligations in several other countries at the same time.

Could the rules still change before I spend money on registrations?

Possibly. The Commission proposed suspending the authorised representative requirement until 2035, the Council discontinued those negotiations on 24 June 2026, and the Parliament is pursuing a narrower suspension limited to micro and small enterprises, with a committee vote expected around 1 October 2026. None of that is law, and the obligation applies today. Registering in the one or two markets that carry most of your export revenue is a reasonable hedge; registering in seven markets you barely serve, ahead of a possible carve-out, is not.

Can I just stop shipping to the EU countries I am not registered in?

You can, and for low-volume destinations it is often the right call. Removing a country from your shipping zones closes the exposure from that point forward. It does not undo obligations for the period you were already shipping into that market, so if you have been sending regular orders somewhere since August, get advice on the back period rather than assuming the switch resolves it.

Sources

• European Commission, Packaging and packaging waste: rules, dates and implementation
• Irish Statute Book, European Union (Packaging) Regulations 2014 (S.I. No. 282 of 2014)
• EXPRA, Parliament takes a more targeted approach to the EPR authorised representative suspension
• Repak, Ireland's approved packaging compliance scheme