Are Europe’s new packaging rules creating a market for compliance automation?
I’ve been looking quite closely at the new EU packaging rules recently, and one thing keeps standing out to me:
Europe is trying to harmonise packaging regulation, but compliance still feels very fragmented in practice.
If you export packaged products into several EU countries, the regulation may be European, but the actual work can still involve different national registers, EPR schemes, reporting obligations, authorised representatives and local procedures.
So something that sounds simple — “I sell packaged goods into 5 EU countries” — can turn into a surprisingly complex compliance exercise.
And that made me wonder whether there is a bigger business opportunity here.
Not necessarily another consultancy charging companies to manually check every country, but tools that combine regulatory data, automation and AI to answer practical questions such as:
Where do I need to register?
Who is considered the producer in each market?
Which packaging needs to be declared?
What am I missing?
What needs to be reported, and when?
For SMEs, this could be especially relevant. Large groups can afford dedicated compliance teams, but smaller exporters often end up managing everything through spreadsheets, emails, consultants and different national portals.
It feels like one of those areas where regulation creates complexity, and complexity then creates a market for better infrastructure.
I don’t really see AI replacing legal or compliance experts here. The more realistic opportunity seems to be automating the repetitive 70–80% of the process and leaving the difficult cases to specialists.
Food, cosmetics, e-commerce, consumer goods and agricultural exports all seem like obvious areas where this could matter.
Curious to hear from people dealing with EPR or cross-border packaging compliance:
Do you think this will remain mainly a consultancy-driven market, or do you expect most of it to become software/automation over the next few years?
#PPWR #EPR #PackagingCompliance #EURegulation #ExportCompliance #RegTech #ComplianceAutomation #ArtificialIntelligence #EuropeanBusiness #SMEs