R.I.P. EU Single Market for Small and Medium Enterprises?

August 2026 - You may have already heard about the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (#PPWR) in the past days, which takes effect on August 12. What at first sounds like just another EU regulation on packaging is becoming a problem of existential proportions for small businesses. And it also makes ordering online from inside the EU a lot more expensive or even makes it impossible to get certain products in your country at all.

📦 Unboxing has never been so expensive

Imagine you run a small online store and someone from Hungary orders a book from you. Under the new rules, this single sale comes with additional obligations: registration in the respective member state, an authorized representative for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), reporting requirements, and fees. In one specific example, these costs can add up to around €1,800—just for shipping a single book.

🤔❓ And who’s thinking about small businesses?

99.8 percent of all businesses in the EU are SMEs. The European single market was actually supposed to be a huge opportunity for these very businesses: one market, 27 countries, and as little additional bureaucracy as possible. Instead, new national systems and requirements keep popping up, making cross-border trade unnecessarily complicated for small businesses. As a result, it’s ultimately easier to ship to countries outside Europe than to a neighboring country. For the really big companies, all of this was well-intentioned: for them, it’s financially “peanuts” anyway. But for small and medium-sized enterprises, this means—if not the very end—then certainly the end of the European Single Market.

Yet solutions at the European level could be offered here as well—just as with the EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office). Why not create a European platform through which companies can centrally fulfill their obligations, while member states retain their national systems for the time being? Until such a solution is up and running, everything could stay the same. Afterward, companies could choose between national registration and a European platform—supplemented by reasonable thresholds for small cross-border sales.

The EU itself says “Think Small First” and promises less red tape for SMEs with its simplification plans. So we should take them at their word.

🇪🇺 ‼️ Our solution: European Citizens’ Initiatives (almost) at the push of a button

That’s exactly why we’re building a list of 1 million EU citizens to launch European Citizens’ Initiatives together and put specific issues on the EU’s political agenda. With a million people on board, we wouldn’t have to start from scratch with every ECI and spend a year gathering signatures—instead, we could take action immediately. An initiative for a simpler European single market for small businesses could be one of the first ECIs.

👉 Sign up now and become part of the 1 million: We Are The 1 Million – support us now

The faster we reach one million, the faster we can take action!