PPWR: the EU packaging rules now in force for Amazon sellers

Until August 2026 most sellers held two packaging registrations, Germany and France, because those were the two Amazon actively verified. The rest of the EU sat in a grey zone nobody enforced.

Since 12 August 2026, under the PPWR (Regulation (EU) 2025/40), online marketplaces must verify seller EPR registration, and Amazon now checks a packaging registration in every EU country where you sell or hold stock. It was a hard date, not a phased rollout.

There is no single EU-wide registration. Each country issues its own number, and a missing one means the listing is deactivated in that country, or you are enrolled into Amazon Pay on Behalf and charged for it. Pan-EU sellers are caught most often, because stock is placed in countries they never chose to sell in: check your inventory placement, not your marketplace list.

Registration lead times are long and vary widely by country, and in several cases they exceed the deadline that has already passed. If you are late, register anyway and keep the dated proof that you started: an unfinished registration you can evidence is a very different conversation with an authority than no registration at all.

Harmonised requirements on recyclability, recycled content, labelling and minimisation of packaging, applied as a regulation across all member states rather than transposed differently per country.

It tightens the data you need about your packaging and raises the chance of design changes.

Inventory your packaging data, confirm your EPR registrations per country are in order, and watch for category-specific obligations that keep phasing in after the application date.