NEW EU SHIPPING INSANITY

You may not actually be aware of this, but as of the 12th August 2026 the EU commission introduced the PPWR and EPR packaging recycling rules, and in one single stroke comprehensively fucked the single market for small businesses and completely crippled EU customers ability to buy anything from outside their own country or from outside the EU at all, unless they buy it from a business large enough that having to pay tens of thousands of pounds/euros/dollars in pointless EU representation and recycling is just the price they can afford to pay to continue to trade.

Basically the PPWR rules state that all manufacturers and producers selling into the EU must be responsible for their packaging and must contribute to it being recycled. This in itself is probably something to be applauded if it was done properly, and we're sure most small businesses would not have a problem with paying a nominal fee for the tiny amounts of packaging they send to the EU. We certainly wouldn't...

The problem with this is that in their infinite wisdom rather than setting up one central agency to allow a small business to just pay for their recycling in one place, the EU commission has left it up to individual countries to apply their own rules and their own separate systems. This means that in order to ship to the EU we have to navigate a completely different registration and payment system for every single country we might ship to... and theres 27 of them.

This isn't even the bad bit...

The part that makes this impossible is that for some inexplicable reason sellers also have to pay for official recycling representation in every country they ship to starting from the first package they might send, irrespective of how much they might ship to a country. The cost of this can vary from £300 to £1000 per country, per year! Multiply that cost by 27 countries and you come up against a completely uneconomical 'pay to play' situation that is simply unworkable for any small business. In many cases the cost of representation would be far more than the total value of any sales we might make to a specific country in a year.

The most insane part of all this is that currently as the rules stand it also applies to EU sellers that sell to other EU countries, not just sellers from outside the EU. So a seller from France can no longer sell a 2 euro sticker on etsy to a customer in The Netherlands, without spending 100's of euros on an official Dutch representative first. The EU commission have effectively shut down the single market for small businesses who simply cannot afford this. Obviously huge businesses like Amazon or Temu have huge compliance departments to deal with this kind of stuff, along with vast EU based warehouses in dozens of countries and the costs of representation are just a tiny drop in the ocean of their profits, but small businesses who simply cannot pay the costs have effectively been shut out of selling to or within the EU.

It would appear that the EU commission have realised the massive scale of their fuck up and are attempting to rush though changes to the rules that will remove the requirement for representation for EU based sellers, but as far as we are aware thats not going to change anything for sellers in the rest of the world, so basically circuitbenders and hundreds of thousands of other sellers worldwide have been completely fucked over. We can't even modify equipment for EU customers as we have no way to ship it back without paying £100's, if not £1000's in representation just to return one package to one country! There are currently no exemptions for small businesses that might only ship a couple of kilograms of packaging to a country in a year, and they get treated exactly the same way and have to pay the same fees while navigating exactly the same bureaucracy as Amazon.

If anything changes we'll post an update, but as things stand we can no longer ship to the EU or modify any equipment for EU customers unless we can ship back to an address that isn't in the EU.

Sorry about that, but theres nothing we can do.

We're not even going to bother discussing the new 3 euro 'customs duty' and 2 euro 'handling fee' that the EU have introduced, that is chargeable per separate item line on the customs form. Buy 10 items for 1 euro each that are different enough that they need separate lines on the customs form, and you're paying a ludicrous 50 euro in customs fees for absolutely nothing, plus VAT on the cost of the items and shipping. Suddenly a 10 euro order with 5 euros shipping is costing you 68 euros or more!