Comment by rickdeckard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rickdeckard | Hacker News Reader

As I keep reading about "no prior warning", "effective immediately", "nothing being planned ahead", etc.:

1. This regulation was SIGNED in Dec.2024 [0], the average lead-time for the final document is 13-17 MONTHS, so work on this regulation started in 2023.

2. The law went into effect in Feb.2025 and is only being ENFORCED from Aug.2026 [0]

3. The owner of this regulation is the Directorate-General for Environment (DG-ENV), which consists of members from many European Countries [1], closely working with local representatives those local government assigned to work in the EU.

This is not a blame on anyone in EU not knowing about this (!)

The point is that NOTHING was rushed here by the EU. Local representatives of the countries had PLENTY of time to contribute and influence the regulation, PLENTY of time to consult the public and local experts to work out the best local solution, PLENTY of time to prepare locally for the enforcement.

If there's a feeling that this wasn't done, then the pressure needs to be put on the LOCAL government.

It is too popular in local politics to frame the EU as an "external force" outside of anyone's influence of which the country is suffering from, while celebrating yourself for everything actually achieved by the Union of the European countries.

--> If citizens don't reject "Anti EU" sentiments and scapegoat-narratives from local governments and political parties, and demand the acknowledgement, participation and responsibility of procedures in the European Union, the pressure is not applied at the point where the problem can be resolved.

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=OJ:L_202...

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive...

Im about as Pro EU as they come, but the problem is that lobying local governments does not help in this case. Im from Germany, we have no issues getting registration in Germany done, however when we looked into it there was quite frankly no way of getting for example the polish registration done.

As citizen of Germany I cannot really lobby the local polish government, so we are basically barred from that market by EU Regulations.

We are now in some sort of weird limbo where there is some weird language from the EU comission that they discourage punishment until some issues are ironed out so a good portion of our market segment just ignores the rules.

The polish government is not relevant in your case. It was a regulation written and signed by the Union of all countries. Your local German government is your elected representative in the European Union.

They should have influenced the form of this regulation because its final form affects the business of (German) citizens in the (Polish) market and threatens the EU single-market for SMB.

Trying to be good faith here:

It was decided that the registration is left to the individual countries (which I personally agree with, at least I think I do). Now the deadline has come and passed and some of the individual countries have not provided easy ways of registering. At what point should which entity done what?

Should I as a SMB been keeping track of the registries for the individual countries and lobbied my government to apply pressure to the other governments to set up the registrations?

Should my representative have lobbied harder to take control away from the individual countries in the union so this issue could not arise? (Should I have done so as an SMB even though I on a personal level agree with the individual registries?)

Because, again, right now we have a law on the books with relatively harsh punishments but nonexistent enforcement, this benefits no one.

(Absolutely in good faith here as well, just angry at local governments not doing their job)

It was decided collectively(!) that a registration in the individual countries is the process to use. Against the original draft, in which the European Commission explicitly(!) proposed EU-wide packaging requirements due to concerns of fragmented processes.

The result is a nationalization of the packaging compliance for a producer, while the obligations for the product inside that packaging, the seller, the buyer, the payment transfer etc. are all already regulated on EU-level.

This should have been reviewed by the country members with local experts, in your case a duty of the German representatives in the EU, and ultimately opposed as bad solution for SMB (the very business that the government claims to support).

Now it is a enforced regulation. You can of course give feedback to the EU [0], but in my opinion the only meaningful (yet exhausting) move as a SMB is to put the pressure on your LOCAL government (directly and via the local chamber of commerce) that they frankly f#cked up in representing your interests, causing you a competitive disadvantage in the European single market.

We will need to extinguish every attempt to blame this on "the EU". Germany was THERE when this regulation was written, there were 14(!) sessions within the European Council and 5 sessions in the European Parliament on this topic throughout 2023 and 2024 [1]

The EU is very transparent on this process, e.g. in case of Germany you can look up that Delara Burkhardt of SPD was one of the rapporteurs of the process, but there is no noted contribution from German parliament to this regulation at all (but from Czech, Italy, Spain, Romania, Poland)

(Don't get me wrong, all the proposed steps above apply to me as well. We now need to create noise to rectify something that could have been easily avoided if elected representatives would also ... represent)

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2022_396#2023-07-19_O...

Thank you, I see my disconnect now, in my mind "the problem" was that there are no easily useable registries for other countries, when in fact "the problem" is that the regulation itself should have been looked at harder and probably be changed now that the neccesary public outcry is here.

In that case I'm pretty happy with the situation, our industry rep got in touch with the commission and they were receptive and provided guidance relatively quickly. Really not fair to blame on EU, if my local trade board can bug us about the placement of fire extinguishers they could also bug us about giving an input into industry-affecting legislation.

When a law like this comes into effect it should have 3-5 year transition period. It does not matter how long they deliberated, there is time when law goes into effect, and then the countdown to enforcement should start, but it must not be less than 3 years, preferably 5.

quite an arbitrary number, what's the objective foundation of this?

3-5 years is also longer than (most) election cycles in the local governments, so the representatives working on the regulation may not be in government anymore and are more busy fighting the aftermath of enforced regulation already decided in the PRIOR administration

Blatant lies about everything EU does have become pretty much a normal state of things on HackerNews and social media nowadays.

There are millions of dollars (and rubles) pumped into anti-EU propaganda that fuel this.

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