Posted by l-one-lone 10 hours ago
Another small business owner reported their experience in this Reddit thread, looks really bad: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1vrz88a/comment/p4i...
I’m as pro-EU as one can get but that’s a mistake we should solve asap
How would we even sack the leadership?
That's just an excuse then. Register with whatever local authority in your country handles these things and in the unlikely event you get a grumpy letter just send them a copy of your registration documents.
In fact, if you sell 10 hobby prototype boards to other hobbyists, you probably have a higher risk of getting hit by a bus on the way to the post office than you do of being fined.
Because there's a handful of companies (lectronz, seeedstudio, ebay, etc) that have the full shipment lists. So the compliance agencies don't have to go after individual business records one business at a time; they can go to probably fewer than 10 businesses and find the suggested mass rule breaking with a sql join.
See also the national tax agencies with NACE codes (euro version of NAICS).
The big corporations also don't want people to run small business, because they remove themselves from the job market and cannot be hired / exploited. So they lobby EU FOR regulations that ensure people cannot run business.
The politicians are protecting the working class from corporations destroying society for profit. Lets not kid ourselves that the EU isn't endlessly praised for "having a backbone". Universal chargers, removable batteries, open app stores, AI data protections...
The thing is that people generally don't understand that everything in the world is tradeoffs rather than the media/internet portrayal of the world being good vs evil.
The same "protections" also means that the E.U. has no major AI player at all. It seems like all the E.U. can do is tax and regulate what is invented and produced elsewhere.
So? Will major AI players introduce universal healthcare in US? Or is it coming along with AGI which is why it should be the most important to every citizen? Or maybe EU citizens should all band together and stop being lazy and go to having 0 mandatory vacation days?
Reminds of me very old USSR joke which was basically "we have rockets in space, and don't have sausages in stores".
Shouldn't any wealth creation viewed positively due to tax, not to mention value to consumers/society?
Or is the view that people on average produce more value when employed by a large corporation?
Of course if you are a person that ships 20 packages you don't register a company to do so, nobody will, you just sell them privately (and the exception to sell things privately is quite high, in my country you can do it up to 5000 euros AT YEAR, after that you need to declare the income in your tax declaration but still you don't need to register a company if it's not your main income).
≤ £1m turnover: no packaging EPR obligation, regardless of packaging volume.
£1m turnover + >25 tonnes of packaging: small producer obligations.
£2m turnover + >50 tonnes: large producer obligations.
The EU has been removing de minimis thresholds because 'China' can easily 'exploit' them. They're kind of right, but it's obviously an insanely stupid situation when someone selling something as a hobby, or just starting up on their own gets dragged into this.
""" For a one-person workshop, the result has been pretty brutal.
[...]
The numbers simply do not work for a micro-business like mine. Even in France and Germany, I send only around 1 to 2 kg of cardboard per year. In some other EU countries, I may send less than 100 g in an entire year. Paying annual compliance costs for one or two parcels makes no economic sense.
[...]
I have therefore decided to maintain EU shipping only to: FRANCE GERMANY """
https://pcengines.ch/recycle.htm
"... there are separate registration and recycling schemes for each of the 28+ EU member jurisdictions (and even a few of their provinces). What part of COMMON MARKET was so hard to understand for EU lawmakers ?
Since there is no single registration available, and separate registration would involve mindboggling complexity, bureaucracy and costs, we do not sell to EU end users until the EU gets their act together. Please order from EU based distributors, or as a business customer.
Business customers are expected to meet their obligations by registering in the EU countries they sell in. "
That was already ages ago when I did some sofware for them. 2007 ish if I'm to trust my Linkedin.
it is not sensible at all because businesses and individuals who dispose of that packaging already pay for the privilege.
Germany was just a small market for us so we stopped shipping there.
I assume it's better and more clear these days and this probably makes it kinda easier in the long run. However it's a perfect example on how such things don't work if not done properly.
It swings to one side, overreaching and overcomplicating things, and then back to the other side where restrictions are loosened or removed.
Anybody remembers the EU platform for dispute resolution? It's gone after 10 years because nobody used it.
PPWR in 10 years will probably be something like: Sign up for a recycling system in your country and pay for the packaging you've brought into the market. Also have icons on the packaging so people know how to recycle them. (Except in France, they'll surely require some crazy stuff as always.)
If your perspective is "I may sell 10 boards this year, maybe", your target is some local/national maker-faire, not a EU marketplace.
I think makers with such limited productions will just fly under the radar (if you sell so little, it's likely you probably won't need to incorporate or declare taxes in a lot of EU countries). If they sell 100s of products across EU, they probably have at least one over-worked accountant taking care of existing compliance stuff.