Europe's New Packaging Rules May Make Small Sellers Stop Shipping There

Khee Hoon Chan has a good piece at Rascal about the effect Europe's new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation is already having on small tabletop publishers. I don't think this is really a tabletop gaming story. It is a small-business story.

The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, or PPWR, began applying on August 12. The environmental goal is reasonable—if companies put packaging into a market, somebody should ultimately be responsible for the waste it creates. The problem is what that looks like when the "company" is one person in California mailing 30 packages a year to customers scattered across Europe.

Under PPWR, businesses selling packaged products directly to EU customers can become responsible for the packaging in the member state where it ends up, including businesses outside the EU. Extended producer responsibility still involves registration, reporting, fees, and national systems where packaging becomes waste. There are 27 of them. That changes the economics for small sellers.

Small tabletop publishers are going through sales records country by country and asking whether they sell enough in each place to justify remaining there. Some have already temporarily stopped EU shipping. One publisher told Rascal that EU customers represent about 10% of annual revenue—meaningful, but perhaps not enough to justify compliance. Another described the accumulating international regulatory burden as another reason making physical products is becoming difficult to justify at all.

That calculation will not be unique to role-playing games. An independent artist, a tiny record label, someone selling electronics kits, a woodworker, a Kickstarter fulfillment—these businesses may have customers across a dozen EU countries, but only a handful in each. For a large company, packaging compliance is another operating expense. For someone shipping five packages to Spain this year, it can make more sense to stop selling to Spain.

I don't think the answer is simply that environmental regulation is bad. Packaging waste is real, and making producers bear some of that cost is a defensible application of the polluter-pays principle. But regulation has its own economies of scale. A company selling a million units can distribute compliance across a million sales. A company selling ten units cannot.

Rascal quotes tabletop designer Josh Fox describing exactly this problem. His advice is effectively to keep the EU member states that generate enough sales to cover compliance and stop selling to the rest. That is rational—and a terrible outcome if it happens broadly. A regulation meant to make packaging more sustainable could unintentionally make international commerce practical only for companies large enough to maintain compliance operations.

One of the things I have always liked about the web is that it destroyed some of the old assumptions about who could have an international business. You don't need offices in Germany to have a customer in Germany. If selling one product into another country creates enough fixed administrative cost, the rational response is to geoblock that country at checkout. The customer sees "Sorry, we don't ship to your country." They never see the spreadsheet behind that sentence.

Small physical-product businesses are also not dealing with PPWR in isolation. Rascal points to the EU's General Product Safety Regulation, changes to de minimis treatment, tariffs, customs, and increasingly complicated international fulfillment. Each may have a reasonable justification separately; businesses experience them together. Large companies hire compliance specialists. Small companies turn off international shipping.

PPWR does contain provisions intended to reduce burdens on micro-enterprises in some circumstances, but those exemptions are not universal. A person running a tiny shop should not need specialized regulatory counsel to discover whether mailing a board game to Belgium requires registration. There ought to be a proportional path—compliance for 50 parcels roughly proportional to 50 parcels.

Publishers aren't necessarily changing their packaging—they're changing where they are willing to have customers. We should be careful rebuilding borders out of paperwork. Read Khee Hoon Chan's full report at Rascal.

Read the European Commission's PPWR guidance.