Article 45 of PPWR started to apply on 12 August 2026. It is short, it is unambiguous on its face, and it is currently one of the most confused topics in packaging compliance - largely because a proposal to suspend part of it was live in Brussels until early summer and a great many businesses stopped reading at the headline.

The proposal did not pass. The obligation is in force. This post sets out what it requires, who it catches, and what the failed suspension actually would and would not have done.

What Article 45 requires

A producer that is not established in a given member state must appoint an authorised representative for extended producer responsibility in that member state, for the packaging it makes available there for the first time.

The representative is a natural or legal person established in that member state, appointed under a written mandate, who discharges the producer's EPR obligations locally: registering in the national producer register, reporting volumes, paying scheme fees and acting as the point of contact for the competent authority.

Two words in that sentence carry most of the weight. "Established" means established in the member state in question, not established in the EU. And "made available for the first time" is what determines which member states you owe an appointment in - it follows the commercial reality of where your goods first reach a user, not where your invoice is raised.

It is one appointment per member state

There is no single EU-wide appointment and no country-of-establishment shortcut. A producer selling into twelve member states where it is not established needs twelve appointments, twelve mandates and twelve national registrations.

This is a meaningful change from the position most non-EU sellers were in before. Several member states already required a local representative under national law, so businesses selling into Germany and France, for example, may already have appointments in place. Article 45 generalises that requirement across the union, which means the countries where you previously had no local obligation are exactly the countries where you now have new work.

It also means the appointment list is not static. Open a new market, and the obligation attaches to that market from the first shipment.

Who counts as a producer

The trap here is the assumption that "producer" means "manufacturer". It does not. Under EPR logic the producer is the party that first makes the packaging or packaged product available on the market of a member state under its own name or trademark - which typically means the brand owner, and in a distance-selling context frequently means a seller with no physical presence in the market at all.

The distance selling case is the one that catches people. A business selling directly to consumers in a member state through its own website or a marketplace is making packaging available in that member state, whether or not it holds stock there, and whether or not it has any entity there. The absence of a local establishment is the condition that triggers the appointment obligation, not a defence against it.

Fulfilment arrangements do not transfer the obligation either. Using a third-party logistics provider or a marketplace's fulfilment service does not make that provider the producer. Some marketplaces will discharge EPR obligations on a seller's behalf under their own arrangements, but that is a commercial service to be checked contractually and per country, not a general exemption.

The suspension proposal, and why it does not help you

This is the part that has generated the confusion. The Commission proposed, as part of its environmental omnibus package, suspending the application of Article 45(3) until 1 January 2035. That proposal came with a critical limitation that was frequently dropped in summary: it applied only to producers established in the EU. Non-EU producers were excluded from the relief from the outset.

The proposal then stalled. In June 2026 the Council reported that negotiations on the EPR representative suspension had been discontinued in the face of strong reservations from a large majority of member states.

So there are two ways to arrive at the same conclusion. If you are a non-EU producer, the suspension would never have covered you even had it passed. If you are an EU producer selling into other member states, the suspension that would have covered you did not advance. Either way, the obligation applied from 12 August 2026 and applies today.

A caveat worth stating plainly: this is a live file, and a discontinued negotiation is not a closed one. Proposals of this kind can be revived in a later package. That is a reason to keep watching it, not a reason to defer an obligation that is currently in force.

What the representative does not take away

Appointing a representative transfers the operational work. It does not transfer your underlying responsibility for the accuracy of what is filed. The representative reports the volumes you give it. If those volumes are wrong, the exposure is still yours, and the representative is the party that will come back to you when the competent authority asks a question.

This matters for how you choose one. The relevant questions are which member states they cover, whether they are registered and recognised in each, what data format they require and at what frequency, how they handle corrections to prior periods, and what happens to your registrations if you terminate the mandate. A representative that is cheap and slow to respond is a poor trade against a regulator deadline.

A practical sequence

For a business that has not started, the work is finite and can be ordered:

  • List every member state where you make packaging or packaged products available for the first time, including distance sales, and be honest about marketplace channels
  • Remove the member states where you have an establishment, and confirm what "establishment" means for your corporate structure rather than assuming
  • Check which of the remaining states you already have a local representative or registration in from pre-existing national requirements
  • Appoint for the gap, with a written mandate per member state
  • Confirm the national producer registration is completed and the registration number recorded, because the number is what appears on downstream declarations
  • Fix the reporting calendar, since deadlines and periods differ by scheme and are not aligned across the union

The data problem underneath

Appointing representatives is the easy half. The half that takes longer is being able to give each of them accurate volumes for their own market, in their own scheme's material categories, on their own schedule.

That is a data problem, not a legal one. It needs packaging weights held at component level, a reliable split of volumes by destination member state, and a mapping from your material records to each scheme's categories. Businesses that cannot produce a per-market volume split from their own systems end up either estimating - which is a liability their representative will pass straight back to them - or rebuilding the figures by hand every reporting period.

How Merchant Packaging supports this

Merchant Packaging holds packaging data once at component level and generates scheme-specific declarations per jurisdiction, in the material categories and formats each scheme requires. Volumes are attributed per market, so the figures handed to a representative in one member state are derived from the same underlying components as every other market's submission.

That consistency is what makes a multi-representative arrangement workable. Each representative receives the data for its own market, drawn from a single set of component records, so a correction made once flows into every subsequent declaration rather than needing to be chased through a dozen separate spreadsheets.