I don't know if this EU regulation will work or not (most likely not), but I can share how it is done in China (where package volume is orders of magnitude higher).
China identifies "choke points" most packages pass: large platforms and logistics companies. Yes, Chinese e-commerce is more centralized on Alibaba/JD/PDD etc, but there are actually much more logistics companies in China than in EU.
They also do not introduce these regulations "from tomorrow" (well, sometimes they do, but it's a different topic). E.g. the non-degradable plastic regulation was issued in 2020 to come in effect in 2025. This gives time to prepare and implement (unlike EU border controls mess...)
So now if something is shipped in non-degradable plastic, the logistics company is fined along with the sender. This is much more scalable and easy to implement. Logistics companies might rise their prices a bit in light of expanded work scope, but it would be peanuts compared to every individual seller.
Could EU just ask DHL/Hermes/whatever to charge an additional €1 "for recycling"? Yes, but...
But of course EU is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the electorate, so nothing is really planned ahead.
>Could EU just ask DHL/Hermes/whatever to charge an additional €1 "for recycling"? Yes, but...
Within EU we already pay ~€3 for packages from China. And in Austria we will soon pay additional ~€2 for every delivered package. And 20% VAT.
Edit:
I am pretty sure at least some part of these already contribute towards recycling.
The goal here is likely not just to get more funding for recycling, but rather to use materials that can be recycled in the first place. Which you cannot achieve simply by charging businesses or consumers more.
> Within EU we already pay ~€3 for packages from China
Yes, the point is, pay +€1 for packages from EU to EU to finance all this PPWR circus.
DHL charges 1 eur for recycling, which it pockets since the envelope or box with thr product went to the consumer... who throws it away to the segregated garbage bin - for which every consumer also pays.
> for which every consumer also pays.
Idk, at least in Germany paper and (plastic) recycling is free. I only have to pay for organic trash and trash to be burned.
This has nothing to do with EPR. The €3 for packages from China is a fixed processing fee on top of potential tariffs.
They got rid of the de minimis €150 limit for tariffs and added fees on top.
There was also €25 VAT de minimis limit but that’s also no longer the case since some time.
Important nuance here is that the €3 for packages from China is a temporary solution and will eventually (2028?) be replaced by a more permanent system which _might_ work out more favourable for electronics.
Having said that, the customs duty will go to the EU budget so there's now a direct incentive for the EU to maintain or perhaps even increase this.
It should be much higher.
The amount of shit that gets shipped from China to Europe (world) is fucking ludicrous, and people should be taxed heavily for the stupid shit they often don't need.
Unfortunately, if you want to fix electronics more often than not China is the only place you can buy spare parts. I don't think buying spare parts to devices counts as "stupid shit".
If you were to interpret the comment you’re responding to charitably, you’d understand that electronics components are a minuscule minority of all of Chinese exports.
Sure! I understand that everyone buying stuff on Temu and Shein is horrific. At the same time, me paying $$$ for ordering electrical components from China is rough for me. And also, I find it mind-blowing and ridiculous that Ali offered free shipping for small orders for so long whereas if I'd buy local I need to pay up for shipping, and if I'd start a small business in the Netherlands, shipping to the rest of the EU for small parcels is prohibitively expensive, not even taking into account PPWR
Yup and those parts often cost literal cents making the €3,60 per item a ridiculously high fee. All while we're protecting the environment by repairing things.
the fee goes per product category, not per item...
Right, so tell me where in Europe can I buy replacement parts for random electronics when I need them? Often very specific ICs, last time it was a cassette deck pinch roller, etc.
Preferably somewhere where it’s cheaper than the value of the thing being repaired.
Yes, and that's a whole different problem, which in itself does not equal stupid shit.
The reason the price for parcels from China is going up in Europe is not shipping chips or component, it's from shipping stupid fucking shit people do not need, from e.g Temu and copied goods such as clothing, shoes and what not.
The toll offices in the airports are being drowned in cheap crap. Shut it down by making people pay more for the shit they buy. That will of course hurt everyone else, but that is how it works.
Clothing, famously less important on Maslow's hierarchy of needs than semiconductors.
Not everything is unnecessary and a lot of it will be bought anyway but now through EU resellers that charge a lot more for the same shit.
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You're replying to a comment that proposes a market-based solution. Shipping has externalities. Those externalities should be included in the cost of shipping. Then the market will make the right decision.
Every time I see somebody make an argument about "externalities" it's never actually backed up with any fact-based analysis about the magnitude of them. It's always exclusively vibes-based, "this thing you like is too cheap, it should be prohibitively expensive to make up for the thing I just thought of"
How do you expect people to discuss them across the scale of a whole economy without giant spreadsheets? Externalities are a well understood economic concept whose study goes back a century.
https://www.acton.org/node/6427
I'm not saying externalities don't exist, I'm saying that basically every time somebody makes an argument relying on the concept, there's no attempt to quantify the externalized cost, it's just a vibe. Just go upthread, the argument is just "the stuff you're buying is crap that I don't think you really need, therefore it should be more expensive, however much more it takes for you to stop buying it".
The economic concept implies that we're going to have an evidence-based discussion about how we're tracking specific dollar cost amounts of pollution or something, and then in practice that essentially never happens and it's just "I've decided you don't really need that thing you want"
Well, if some bureaucratic governing body provides decisions based on some opaque system, and forces these upon market participants - usually that is regarded just the opposite of market-based solutions in economics. Those decisions do have zero chance of internalizing external costs, but most likely will just add an other layer of externality and move the process even more into the field of non-market based coordination mechanisms.
> They also do not introduce these regulations "from tomorrow"
This wasn't introduced "from tomorrow", people had 1 year and a half to prepare for this (at least) or to protest this. See some comments below how individual countries actually messed this up.
> But of course EU is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the electorate, so nothing is really planned ahead.
> I don't know if this EU regulation will work or not (most likely not)
It's good that you take the time to just make assumptions about how the EU is bad based on your knowledge on how it operates...
"people had 1 year to protest this" this is terminal stage subjugation to bureaucrats
How long should we have to wait to hear objections to a rule before we can implement it?
Don’t wait for objections to an obviously dumb rule at all. Save us all the trouble and don’t implement it?
Who gets the veto over the democratic process? You?
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The stupid rules were imposed by member countries, and not by the EU. There are several countries, like Italy, Hungary who were not imposed that stupid rules, because EU didn't force anybody to have this level of stupidity in these rules. There is a reason why the article mentions only Germany, Austria, et al, they are the idiots, and not everybody or the EU... Also, nobody forced these countries to have incompatible systems. They chose this.
So no, it's not EU's ruling, but their idiot member states. As usual. And of course, everybody points to the usual scapegoat, regardless of the truth. And probably the truth is, that those specific member states wanted this mess.
We did
Simply put, the Eurocrats can't hear us all from up there.
It's yet another EU regulation that requires a rep for each EU country or you're not allowed to do business. EU single market is a bad joke at this point.
People here REALLY love to complain about the EU.
Do you understand what the EU even is?
Imagine trying to create a single set of laws to apply to all of the countries in North and South America at the same time. Just try to imagine it, because that's about as close an analogy as you're going to get. Now re-evaluate your criticism in that light, and understand that comparing a single state to a collection of 27 states is more or less a non-sequitur.
They weren't asking for a "single set of laws". "Single market" however is a pre-existing concept recognized as "one of the EU's greatest achievements" [1], and lacking regulations in providing said market is what their critique was about.
[1] https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/single-market_en
> "one of the EU's greatest achievements"
And it is! People here are always complaining about the EU as if it's a single state, even though it's very clearly in the process of becoming one. It's a long road, we're not sure if we're going to make it all the way to the finish line (but I suspect we will), and we're going to have some happy little (and big) mistakes along the way. But for now it's imperfect, and it might be imperfect for a very long time to come. It's still a lot better than not having it, and we're actively working on improving it.
> People here are always complaining about the EU as if it's a single state, even though it's very clearly in the process of becoming one.
Rather: if you look at what the EU is doing, it is rather a huge advertisement that the EU should not become one.
Ok Vladimir, back to Moscow with you.
Nah, it should either become one, or dissolve, but this half baked shit definitely isn’t it. I’m sure it’s good for the bureaucrats though.
> Nah, it should either become one, or dissolve, but this half baked shit definitely isn’t it.
Since the current situation is shit, and one EU national state will be shit, too, this only leaves one option. :-) So let's dissolve the EU before even more billions are wasted in this futile project.
I'm trying to think of a single metric by which the EU hasn't been a massive success.
> I'm trying to think of a single metric by which the EU hasn't been a massive success.
- Number pages of lunatic regulations
- Money gone into the EU
- Not a metric, but fitting very different philosophies of how to handle the domestic currency under one umbrella (ECU, Euro) has lead to massive tensions between the involved countries and their populations in particular when the Euro crisis hiy (e.g. in German "Pleitegriechen" [bust Greeks], PIIGS (pigs) countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain)). If there wasn't a common currency, each country would have solved this problem on its own terms. Now there is hate that continues up to today, and these countries (including their citizens!) can be used as scapegoats.
If you dont have a real single market, what is EU? just easier to cross the borders?
Don't forget the two government buildings and sessions, for absolutely no fucking reason, because why not? Let's add even more bureaucracy to the mix!
It's better to be an EU MEP and do absolutely fuck all tbh.
Yes, well, the point here was that we are going backwards.
> People here are always complaining about the EU as if it's a single state, even though it's very clearly in the process of becoming one.
I think that attempts at making the E.U. a state are doomed to fail. There are too many differences between countries, including customs, language, legal systems, etc. The United States of America works because all states largely inherited or adopted the British social contract. You can't replicate this in Europe. The E.U. should have never been more than a free trade agreement. The currency union was a big, fat mistake that amplified the Great Recession in many of the poorer E.U. states.
> Imagine trying to create a single set of laws to apply to all of the countries in North and South America at the same time.
I actually think it would be quite a bit easier than it is to create the EU. There's a lot more broad cultural homogeneity between the countries in the Americas than there is within Europe. Even on the topic of language you've got the vast majority of all peoples speaking some combination of Spanish, English, and Portuguese. And Latin America has a bit more limited geopolitical concerns than Europe does which makes managing some tensions easier than it might otherwise be.
But I'm not sure why you are considering "it's hard to create the EU" to be a defense against complaints or criticism related to the EU itself. Maybe it's hard and it won't work and the criticism is reflecting that and others are pointing out that it's a flawed task to begin with for some number of reasons. For my own part I think it has been a fascinating topic and a remarkable accomplishment of statesmanship to even get the EU to this stage, albeit like anything there are some very valid drawbacks.
> There's a lot more broad cultural homogeneity between the countries in the Americas than there is within Europe
No, not really. Unless you believe the Hollywood view that everything south of the US border has a Sepia filter
Intra-Canada commerce is a PITA in itself
Do you think Mexico looks in the eyes of half the central American countries? (Mexico being North America, yes I know)
Yes, yes really. No I don't believe there's some color filter south of the border - that's your baggage/perception of Mexico/Central America.
> Do you think Mexico looks in the eyes of half the central American countries?
Did you mean How do I think Mexico looks in the eyes of half the Central American countries? If so I'd say it's nuanced and many people in those countries have their own views and their own various problems to solve, just like folks in France have a different view on immigration than, say, Switzerland, or how Germany and France can't agree on a fighter jet project and are looking at different industrial policies, or how Spain has a lot less interest in Ukraine than Latvia does.
Of course South America is incredibly culturally diverse, but I think it's a lot more homogenous than Europe is not just in terms of policy but culturally too. But hey if you disagree, sure make your case if you'd like. I'm just discussing the topic based on my own perceptions. The EU has something like 27 official languages and an Americas block would likely have 3 or so - that itself is the kind of thing that makes integration a lot easier.
It's amusing to see a European cite the linguistic result of European colonialism (assuming your three languages are Spanish, English, French - or maybe Portuguese) - and the destruction of thousands of spoken languages - as an argument for the cultural homogeneity of North and South America that they are unwilling to apply to their own continent.
I'm not European (not that this matters anyway) - and the three languages I mentioned were Spanish, English, and Portuguese just because those are the primary languages spoken across the hemisphere.
In Europe a lot of people speak English as a second language but by and large many member states speak predominantly more languages - Spanish in Spain, Portuguese in Portugal, French in France, Italian in Italy (there's 4 different major language groups right there) and when you add in economy size, prominence on the global stage, geopolitical interests, history, and more it seems to me, in my opinion of course, it's a bit more difficult to wrangle, say, Germany and France together who have collectively killed millions of each others citizens versus, idk, Mexico and Colombia who are certainly distinct and have their own rich national and regional cultures (just like the United States even) but speak the same language and, in my view, get a long a little bit better.
I'm not arguing that there isn't a vibrancy in culture or that these countries are entirely homogenous. I'm arguing it would be easier to wrangle them together in a bloc of sorts than it was to get (and keep) the EU together.
For what it's worth a lot of cultural differences are becoming increasingly (unfortunately) minor differences at best because of globalization and the Internet and other communication technologies.
> and the destruction of thousands of spoken languages
Eh thousands of languages were destroyed by war and destitute and colonialization of various sorts throughout history. I'm not going to put a random assortment of them on a pedestal to get angry about just because they happened to be more recent (400 years ago). But anyway isn't China currently destroying spoken languages in places like Tibet and Xinjiang?
Sorry for assuming you were European in expressing what I see as ironic. Perhaps itself ironic as a mistake. My bad.
I think Europe and the Americas are differently heterogeneous and differently homogeneous. Certainly the Europeans have made more practical strides in building a coalition across their members than, say, South America or Central America. The reality is that Europe demonstrates a higher degree of solidarity between states than these other places. So it's strange to me to argue the opposite.
But if I understand, your assertion is that the Mayans, the islanders of the Caribbean, the people of Peru, or the Amazonians are less culturally different from one another than the citizens of, say, Greece and Norway? I'm not sure I buy it personally .. but I can see your argument.
> prominence on the global stage,
not...really a solid argument for how well they would combine, but clearly a major contributor to how how much you know about them.
And FYI those languages didn't disappear 400 years ago. They are spoken today. Guatemala alone recognizes 25 current spoken languages - Spanish and 24 languages that are completely unrelated to any European language.
> For what it's worth a lot of cultural differences are becoming increasingly (unfortunately) minor differences at best because of globalization and the Internet and other communication technologies.
Good news! Many of these languages are still spoken today because these people still live in societies without the internet and other communication technologies! They don't even speak Spanish, their national official language, because they don't know anyone who speaks Spanish.
You don't have to know history, but try knowing a little bit more about current politics and geography before the sweeping statements?
> not...really a solid argument for how well they would combine,
It makes it easier. As a hypothetical you can imagine a pre-EU European continent for example, empire, colonies, and more. It would be much more difficult to get those countries to form a bloc because of the number of interests and where they conflict across the globe.
Now take a set of countries that do not have broad geopolitical considerations or have fewer - those countries simply have less to argue about and less complex arrangements to worry about. No colony, no overseas empire, no war.
It seems intuitive to me it’s much easier to get those countries to agree to various political arrangements and then we can mix in other considerations.
> And FYI those languages didn't disappear 400 years ago. They are spoken today. Guatemala alone recognizes 25 current spoken languages - Spanish and 24 languages that are completely unrelated to any European language.
I didn’t say they were gone - the person I was replying to said they were destroyed by Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. Separately, yes those languages are spoken, isn’t there some 180 languages spoken in New York? But you would still characterize the United States as an English speaking country. Just like no matter how many languages were spoken in Brazil it’s still a Portuguese speaking country.
Please stop wasting time with random comments like this. Not only do I generally not care but they are bad practices per the site guidelines.“It’s hard to do X under conditions C” is a good explanation for why “X is crappy” but it seems like a poor reason to re-evaluate “X is crappy”. For a small business owner, larger markets with lower barriers to entry are better than smaller markets with fragmented standards.
An explanation for why some markets are smaller and fragmented is interesting academically but it doesn’t change that it’s not worth participating in.
America does it with 50 states
I know that this is a popular point-of-view in the US, but your states and legislative processes are all very homogeneous in comparison. You guys mostly speak the same language, you have the same cultural touch points, you have a shared history, shared media, and mostly centralized power.
Your country looks more like Germany (and if you know your history, that's no coincidence) than it looks like the EU.
I think, at this point, most people in Europe broadly have the same language as their second language.
> Overall proficiency: According to data from the European Union, over 43% of the total EU population speaks English as a second language, making it the most widely spoken non-native tongue across all 24 non-Anglophone countries in the bloc.
Bombastic side eye
That analogy would hold only if inter-state commerce was the responsibility of the states rather than the federal government.
> America does it with 50 states
And Germany has 16 federal states.
In theory, true. In practice, state independence has been dead for the better part of a century.
The 10th amendment has been eviscerated by the courts. By a strict reading of its relatively simple language, most of what the federal government does is unconstitutional.
Today, USA is unabbreviated as the “United States of America”, but the country was founded as the “United States for Anerica”.
As such, I am strongly in favor of returning to our former glory by stripping the federal government of most of its power and transferring it to the states.
I am also wise enough to know that will never happen without a long and bloody revolution, and I am okay with that given the lived reality that has defined my life.
We live in tyranny. You may not feel the rolling boil of the water that surrounds you, my fellow Americans, but make no mistake: your goose is cooked.
> but the country was founded as the “United States for Anerica”.
This is simply incorrect, it has been the United States of America since the Declaration itself where it states: > We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled,
> state independence has been dead for the better part of a century.
Can you please put a date on when you think this happened and what were the turning event(s)?
Because you could mean a lot of different points over decades. And what and when you think was the turning point is pretty significant.
An easy to overlook affair called the United States Civil War kicked off the trend.
The interstate highway system that is economically critical for most states, and gets repaired/maintained with federal dollars.
Anytime there is a spat, the federal government dangles those highway dollars to get their way.
> country was founded as the “United States for Anerica”.
Do you have actual sources for that?
(Funny thing, I googled the phrase in quotes, did not realize the misspelling, and was a bit frustrated that the only result was this comment on HN...)
LOL just last week I was looking at an original copy of the US Constitution at the National Archives and that is most definitely not what it said.
Given what the states use their current power to do, I'm pretty fine with it so long as the party I'm like is in control of the federal government. If the last ten or so years of politics have taught us anything it's good to be on top with the tyrants, I guess.
Add in the function of the senate and the ongoing public perception of it, and as/if the senate is neutered by populist parties (MAGA/DSA) as they intend to also do with the courts, the argument that the states are sovereign (and they are by definition and constitutional agreement) becomes more and more practically useless, unfortunately (in some ways).
I'm not anti-federal government or anything but clearly we can see that there are issues in how the federal government has become so powerful and yet we're beholden to these two big-tent political parties leaving folks across the various states unhappy with decrees from Washington. Don't like Donald Trump's power over you? Maybe the federal government shouldn't have that power then?
And EU does it with VAT-OSS scheme which was also separate in each country before. There's just no will to do this with EPR because there's too much money and lobbying power in the recycling cartel.
The funny thing is that when the EU introduced these new VAT rules then it screwed over small and microbusinesses as well. It took them years to implement a minimum threshold for VAT (which every reasonable country has, but somehow EU rules did not).
The EU laws apply to every State in the same way and do not have to be rewritten to be transposed, especially for ex-nihilo new taxes like this one.
I mean that's what the PPWR directive is already? It's a single set of laws that applies to all member states. They just didn't write any interop so every country has its own system and registration.
If it was just single registration for EU and paying for each kg of plastic or electronics to member states (like you do with VAT already via VAT-OSS) then it wouldn't be such a big deal.
Even if you didn't have any agreement with recycling companies in each member state and you had to pay the highest per-kg fees it would still be manageable for small sellers.
Meanwhile if you want to sell a single circuit board you're looking at several thousand euro in registration fees and several months for processing just to sell legally to 4-5 countries in EU.
This is comical the liberal in their perpetual confused state: "they are doing their very best!", "you couldn't do it better yourself!". The EU primary function is to serve capital interests to protect neoliberalism across the EU at all cost. It's the perpetual shock doctrine, thatcher politics for all, there is no alternative, dead-end, end-of-history, its what you would get when you put the IMF in charge of a continent. Literally everything is falling apart, the fascists scapegoat irrelevant migrants for the mouth breathing median-voter/peasant while the liberals are haplessly groveling at their imperial masters and censure Spain for being an unruly vassal.
You would not have the Euro if the IMF was in charge nor the many failures to have a single capital market. The EU, and politics that created it is much more complex than you think.
Oh please the ECB, EU Commission and the IMF are staffed by the same kinds of people with identical ideology, they are practically the same institution that work together all the time to shiv periphery nations. They never encountered a problem they didn't want to solve with more austerity.
Yeah, obviously we wouldn't try to do that. Our laws, cultures, and priorities are wildly different. By this lens, the main problem seems to be that the eu expanded too much and grew too large to actually have a coherent purpose.
> eu expanded too much and grew too large to actually have a coherent purpose.
Anybody seriously thinking that seems completely oblivious to how central EU is to the economies and every day lives of member states. There is a lot to criticise about EU but without it, the Europeans lives would be much worse and their economies would be nothing to speak of. It is very sad that populists managed to popularize the image of the bloated unnecessary monster. Even otherwise intellectually capable folks.
How is "single purpose plastic wrapping" a cultural priority? Or how is an agency to collect the fees something that needs recreating?
They manage to do it for 50 states in the US just fine. It isn’t exactly rocket science. It’s just that individual countries in Europe all feel like unique little snowflakes.
I mean you're just looking at this from the wrong lens.
nobody in an EU member state thinks of themselves as a "state" in the EU, they're a country but in the EU
nobody would want the US kind of federalism. not to mention there isn't a single majority language aside from English for those that know it well enough
States in the US are little vassals of the federal government. "Freedumb" indeed.
It'd be interesting to see the US try a real federation, but recent evidence suggests that's beyond its capabilities.
That’s the most uninformed view I’ve read about this in a VERY long time.
The US / Trump doesn’t even manage to renegotiate a trade agreement with Canada, although you speak the same language and your cultural proximity is about 95% - so maybe it’s time to get off your high horse buddy
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Erm I've been talking about this for 4 years now. So I'm not sure how it can "come out of nowhere" unless you're paying 0 attention to really important regulation in your field.
There will be a post in 9 months from software companies crying about the PLD and CRA because their leaders were asleep at the wheel for the last half decade.
"in your field"? All small businesses and solo enterpreneurs that I know who are hit by this are not "in this field". Their field is making jewelry or knitted toys or something similar. Now many are just not planning to ship EU wide just because it's too high risk for them.
> All small businesses and solo enterpreneurs that I know who are hit by this are not "in this field". Their field is making jewelry or knitted toys or something similar.
Are they shipping within EU? Then they literally are in the field of shipping within the EU.
Thats a stretch of the term "field". Are they also in the field of making money and the field of working within European law?
Yes, of course. They need to be aware of regulations in all aspects of their business (manufacturing electronics, shipping, consumer warranty, and taxation seem applicable).
Per downthread, this whole crisis arises because of Chinese companies shipping to Europe. The EU Directives are definitely visible in advance, none of this is dropped on people.
Even then, being allowed to ship and package in Germany may as well be valid for other EU countries? I mean, you register in a single country (ideally where your business is) and then the other countries can just accept your packaging bureaucracy?
I think this directive was from Feb 2025? Is 1 year enough for everyone to register in 25 different packaging regulation bodies, appoint representatives, etc etc?..
I also fail to see how this will stop Chinese companies from shipping to Europe. No Chinese company will register in this farce.
> Is 1 year enough for everyone to register in 25 different packaging regulation bodies, appoint representatives, etc etc?..
Also, are those bodies ready for the volume of applicants? They certainly weren't when MDR came in.
> No Chinese company will register in this farce.
What makes you so sure? It really depends on enforcement but your Chinese company sure isn't going to just drop Europe as a market.
Exactly. I don't see how EU can enforce it against China, when most of the goods are imported from China. Or any other non-EU country, for that matter.
> this whole crisis arises because of
hmm that is not systems thinking there.. there are more layers than that!
Or have the sellers of the packaging pay the fee. So the maker can buy pre-paid packaging.
Can you imagine an (Android) app store model? You know when you buy packaging that it's verified. Complies with regulations. Companies submit packaging for review that's cheap, fast, tax-supported, and EU-wide. Doesn't have to be like the FDA. So that reusables could become a thing, I'd be fine honestly with extra charges for most branded packaging. This butts up against freedom of expression I suppose but come on the single-use plastics problem is real. But as described what sounds exactly backwards is the EU model. Radiohead sang, "If I were king you'd be backed up against the wall" but I'd sing, "Send your goods in any verified packaging!"
The article ist about a Platform which only facilitates the sale but actual sending is done by the original maker, so that doesn't seem to match.
Platform is one choke point, logistics companies (e.g. DHL) is another. In EU logistics would be the easier one. Let them handle all the PPWR circus, charge a little more from the seller.
> Could EU just ask DHL/Hermes/whatever to charge an additional €1 "for recycling"? Yes, but...
The biggest problem in Europe is the obsession with taxes. Tax on recycling, tax on AI, tax on this, tax on that. So people who want to make money and keep it without having to fight absurd amounts of regulation and red tape just go elsewhere.
But of course EU/WEST is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the (lobbying companies), so nothing is really planned ahead…
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