If you’re a tattoo artist selling prints of your paintings, drawings, books, T-shirts, original artwork or merchandise online and shipping them to other European countries, there’s a new regulation you need to know about.
From August 2026, the new European Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) comes into force, bringing with it significant consequences tied to Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). The underlying principle is reasonable: whoever puts packaging on the market should contribute to the cost of its collection and recycling. The problem arises when this principle is applied to very small businesses selling all across Europe.
Picture an Italian, German or non-EU tattoo artist who, over the course of a year, sells five prints in Germany, three in France and two in the Netherlands. Ten orders that might add up to just a few kilos of cardboard envelopes. Yet, depending on the country and the circumstances, those shipments can trigger EPR obligations in the country where the parcel arrives. And at the moment there is still no single, simplified EPR registration valid across the entire European Union. That’s why, in recent weeks, many artists, artisans and small e-commerce sellers have discovered they may face different registrations, declarations and administrative costs in each country. Some have already decided to stop shipping internationally altogether.
The outcome would be something of a paradox. Part of the reason why we created a European Single Market was so that an artist in Paris could sell a print to someone in Berlin or Amsterdam. No environmental regulation should end up making that economically feasible only for Amazon and the big multinationals. There are some positive signs. The European Commission has acknowledged the problem and is working on possible simplifications. It has also urged national authorities to take a proportionate approach to enforcement, allowing businesses to correct irregularities, before resorting to stricter measures.
That said, this doesn’t mean small businesses can simply ignore EPR. Our advice to artists is therefore simple: don’t panic, and don’t automatically stop selling in Europe. But do get informed. Check which countries you actually ship to, what packaging you use, and what the EPR obligations are in your main markets. And above all, keep an eye on how the regulation develops. Because the way these rules end up being applied could determine whether the European Single Market remains genuinely open to small independent artists too — or becomes far easier to navigate for the big players than for everyone else.
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