A seller shipping 4,200 kg of rigid recyclable plastic packaging to French households each year is 33 days past PPWR Article 45 verification and already owes EUR 6,760.39 in back-declaration - EUR 14,880.39 of total exposure before anyone writes a fine. That is the whole arithmetic.
Citeo, the producer responsibility organisation for French household packaging, republishes a tariff every year. For 2026 the household levels are EUR 20 a tonne for glass, EUR 258 for paper and cardboard, EUR 770 for rigid recyclable plastic, and EUR 1,400 for rigid plastic that is hard to recycle. 4,200 kg is 4.2 tonnes, so at EUR 770 the yearly fee is EUR 3,234. The trouble starts one line further down.
Registration is not forward-looking: register late and you declare what you already placed on the market. Two full years of undeclared selling plus the days accrued since 12 August 2026 turn EUR 3,234 a year into EUR 6,760.39 owed on the day you finally sign up. The fee did not grow. The bill did, because it was always accruing and nobody invoiced it.
12 August 2026 is the date that changed the mood. That is when PPWR Article 45 marketplace verification began: online platforms have to check producer registration before letting a listing trade. Amazon.de ran this play in 2022, blocking German sellers with no LUCID number; the mechanism now lands EU-wide on one date. So the count of days since 12 August is not a compliance curiosity. It is the number of days your listing has been live and suspendable at the platform's convenience.
Then there is the waiting. Registers are quoting two to eight weeks. At six weeks, a seller starting today has a unique identification number on 2026-10-26 at the earliest, and EUR 5,800 a month of French revenue means EUR 8,120 sits inside that window. Add the back-declaration and you get EUR 14,880.39.
Change one input and the shape of the problem changes completely. A seller moving 9,000 kg of non-recyclable multi-layer plastic pays EUR 18,900 for the year, because the 2026 schedule adds a penalty on top of the EUR 1,400 tariff - EUR 6,300 of penalty in that case. Three undeclared years and a November date push back-declaration to EUR 60,997.81 and total exposure to EUR 87,504.47. Meanwhile a small paper-and-cardboard shop at 1,600 kg with no undeclared years owes EUR 37.32 in back-declaration and EUR 412.80 for the year. Same law, same tool, two orders of magnitude apart.
That spread is why a general chatbot is a bad place to ask. Citeo republishes the tariff and its eco-modulation bonus and penalty annually, and a model answers with whichever year it absorbed, usually without naming it. Nor will it count days against 12 August 2026 for your date, or catch that the bonus for mono-material recyclable PET with recycled content applies to plastics only - worth EUR 485.10 off the same 4,200 kg.
France Packaging EPR 2026 is a browser extension and a free web page running the same calculation: pick the material, type the weight, your French monthly revenue, the quoted lead time and your undeclared years. Seven figures come back, tariff band included, so you can check it against your own Citeo paperwork.
All of that is free and unlimited - four tariff bands, both eco-modulation directions, the day count, the back-declaration, the revenue at risk. Nothing blurs, nothing locks after N runs. The USD 60 key adds .csv export of the lines you priced and alarms for the next declaration window. Seller-service firms quote roughly EUR 150 to EUR 1,000 per country per year just to hold one registration and file for it.
Free in your browser (the same rules): https://getreadystack.com/tools/france-packaging-epr-2026
Licence ($60, once, 7-day refund): https://buy.polar.sh/polar_cl_neK3hxLuNpyF67IdK6m74RkyHY2SWb0a0yioT07uRUF
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