POLITICS

The EU Single Market Now Requires 27 Single Markets

Say goodbye to high-quality local produce from small companies. Europe spent decades removing borders so a small producer in one country could sell to a customer in another as easily as next door. Then it discovered packaging.

vlgr August 10, 2026 27 reads 2 min read

#EU #EUROPE

Under the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation - yes, that is a thing - cross-border packaging falls under the EPR system of the customer’s country. That makes you the “producer” there.

Ship a jar of mustard to Italy and congratulations: you are now a producer in Italy!

You register. Report packaging by material and weight. Pay the EPR fees. Keep records. Appoint an authorised representative. Pay 400-500€.

Then do the same for the next country.

Small producers get “simplified” reporting - Brussels-speak for “you still have to do it.”

Add filling in the forms, the contracts, the reporting systems, the local representatives, and the evening spent learning another country’s packaging rules because somebody in Thessaloniki ordered a jar of mustard.

Amazon will be fine.

The problem is the small producer the Single Market was supposedly built for: the Czech glassmaker, the Austrian pumpkin-seed-oil farm, the French beekeeper, the German wooden-toy workshop, the Italian porcini seller, the Polish maker of hand-painted buttons.

An Austrian workshop sells €700 of buttons to Sweden in a year.

They might start asking “Why the hell are we still shipping to Sweden?”

Sweden disappears from the checkout. Then Portugal. Then Finland.

Then every country that generates €900 in sales and €500 in compliance costs.

The customer simply gets a new message: We no longer ship to your country.

The EU rebuilds economic borders without the embarrassing optics of actually rebuilding borders.

The Commission has already admitted there is a problem. In December 2025 it proposed suspending the mandatory authorised-representative requirement for EU producers until 2035 because the rule creates disproportionate costs and administrative burdens, particularly for SMEs.

The proposal is still crawling through the institutions. The original rules start applying the day after tomorrow.

Twenty-seven countries remain inside the Single Market.

The increasingly relevant question is how many of them are still worth selling to.

Naturally, this is environmental policy. The official goal is less packaging waste, more recycling and a cleaner circular economy. Mostly by reducing trade.

Target achieved.

This is European integration at work. Thanks, EU, this is what we voted for!