Tomorrow, August 12, 2026, the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation — Regulation (EU) 2025/40 — starts to apply across all 27 member states, replacing the 1994 packaging directive. The part that reaches your account: it requires a producer to appoint an authorised representative for packaging extended producer responsibility (EPR) in every member state where it first makes packaging available and is not established. Sell into France, Italy and Spain from a German or a US entity and that is three appointments, not one. Amazon’s stated lever, on its own public EPR page, is deactivating your non-compliant listings — or complying on your behalf.

What changed

  • The date is official and it is tomorrow. The European Commission’s packaging waste page states that Regulation (EU) 2025/40 entered into force on 11 February 2025 and applies generally from 12 August 2026, and that Directive 94/62/EC is generally repealed on the same date. This is a regulation, not a directive — it binds directly in every member state with no national transposition step in between.
  • One authorised representative per member state, not one for the EU. Article 45 requires a producer that is not established in the member state where it first makes packaging available on that market to designate an authorised representative there, in writing, to carry its EPR registration, reporting and fees. There is no single-window option. The obligation is described the same way by Coolset, citing Article 45 of Regulation (EU) 2025/40, and by the National Law Review, which summarises Article 45(3) as requiring an authorised representative in each member state where packaging is first made available other than the one where the producer is established.
  • Germany’s official register confirms the switch from voluntary to mandatory. The ZSVR’s official guidance on what changes from 12 August says foreign producers selling directly to German end consumers must now appoint an authorised representative — previously voluntary, mandatory from that date — and that the representative “assumes responsibility on behalf of the company under obligation for fulfilling all extended producer responsibility obligations in Germany.”
  • The proposed relief is a proposal, not law. The Commission’s Environmental Omnibus proposal, COM/2025/982 final of 10 December 2025, would suspend the authorised-representative requirement until 1 January 2035. Per the National Law Review, that proposal “is now submitted to the European Parliament and Council of the EU for negotiation and adoption” — it has not been adopted. Published accounts also disagree on how far it would cover producers established outside the EU. Plan around the regulation as it stands on August 12; treat any relief as something that might arrive later, for someone else.
  • What Amazon says it will do. Amazon’s public EPR compliance page: “If you’re found to be non-compliant, Amazon may need to deactivate your non-compliant listings — or comply with regulations on your behalf.” The same page confirms that for packaging in Germany the number Amazon wants is your 13-digit LUCID registration number, submitted through its compliance portal.

What it means for a private-label seller

The dangerous outcome is the second half of Amazon’s sentence, not the first. Deactivation announces itself — listings go down, sales go to zero, you find out that afternoon. Amazon complying on your behalf announces nothing. You keep selling, the units keep shipping, and the cost lands in a fee line you probably do not reconcile line-by-line in Sellerboard. A seller can run an entire quarter without noticing that their EU margin quietly moved, because nothing broke.

“We registered in Germany” is the most common wrong answer. A LUCID number covers Germany. It does not cover France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands or Poland, and Pan-EU FBA placing your inventory in a Czech or Polish fulfilment centre does not register you anywhere. The question is not where your entity sits or where your stock sits — it is which member states your packaging reaches consumers in.

The advertising consequence nobody warns you about. If listings go down in one marketplace in late August, your EU account-level numbers move for a reason that has nothing to do with your bidding. A shared budget redistributes toward the marketplaces still live, blended ACOS shifts, and the report looks exactly like a targeting problem. Before you touch a bid in the back half of August, check listing status by marketplace. Diagnosing a compliance outage as a PPC problem is how sellers spend two weeks optimising a campaign that was never broken.

The trade-off, which the people selling representation will not name. An authorised representative is a recurring cost, per country, per year, on top of the EPR fees themselves. If Italy is 2% of your EU revenue, registering there may cost more than the marketplace returns. Turning a small marketplace off is a legitimate answer, and sometimes the correct one. Run the arithmetic per country before you buy five of anything.

What this does not tell you. It does not tell you the fee schedules, which vary by country and by packaging weight and material. It does not tell you how fast Amazon actually enforces — the policy language is public, the enforcement calendar is not. And it does not tell you whether a later suspension arrives; if one does, it will not refund what you spent complying in the meantime.

What to do about it

  1. List the member states where your packaging reaches a consumer — from FBA, from FBM, from Pan-EU redistribution. Not where you are registered. Not where your entity sits.
  2. Against that list, check two things per country: do you hold a packaging EPR registration number there, and — if you are not established there — have you appointed an authorised representative.
  3. Open the EPR section of Seller Central and see which countries show a valid number and which are blank. The blanks are your work list, ranked by revenue.
  4. Price representation against revenue for the small marketplaces before you register in all of them. Exiting a 2% marketplace is cheaper than complying in it.
  5. Put a calendar note for late August: if EU ACOS or sales move, check listing status by marketplace before you change a single bid.

Sources

Figures we could not corroborate to our sourcing standard are not in this post. Several vendor pages quote registration lead times, Pay-on-Behalf surcharge levels and an Amazon “internal enforcement date” for August 12; none of those trace to an official page or to two independent sources, so they are cut rather than published with a caveat.