When Does “Polluter Pays” Become “Everyone Pays”?

What a Netflix documentary, a jewellery workbench and Europe’s new packaging rules made me question about the way we measure sustainability.

Last night I watched a documentary on Netflix and to be completely honest, it made me angry.

Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy examines the machinery behind modern consumption: the constant encouragement to buy more, replace more and want the next thing before the thing we already own has reached the end of its useful life.

Netflix describes the documentary as an exploration of the methods brands use to keep customers consuming, and the consequences our discarded purchases have for the world around us.

There were images and ideas in it that I found genuinely difficult to watch.

Mountains of discarded products, returns, outdated electronics and mountains of clothes. Objects that took raw materials, energy, labour, water and transport to create and sometimes apparently becoming waste remarkably quickly.

And while I was watching it, I kept thinking about something completely different; A little jewellery box.  More specifically, my jewellery boxes.

Because this week, on 12 August 2026, the European Union's new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, generally known as PPWR begins to apply.

And the contrast has been rattling around my head ever since.

From mountains of stuff to one small box

My working life looks rather different to the world portrayed in Buy Now; I work at a bench, I make jewellery in small quantities from precious materials.  Sometimes I make a piece only once.

I don't want the jewellery leaving my workshop to become obsolete next season. I want precisely the opposite, I want someone to wear it for years.  I want a ring to gather scratches and stories and I want necklaces to be repaired rather than replaced.

I really love the idea that something I make today could eventually belong to someone's daughter, son or granddaughter.

My own website describes the pieces I make as jewellery to be cherished for generations. My Made Once and bespoke pieces are intended to become modern heirlooms. That philosophy isn't something created for a sustainability campaign; it is fundamental to why I make jewellery in the first place.

I use recycled precious metals, responsibly sourced stones and thoughtfully sourced packaging because materials matter to me. My packaging uses FSC-certified, responsibly sourced materials.  (and to be clear, I don't claim to be perfect, I believe no one can do everything but everyone can do something!)

Does any of that mean my business should have no environmental responsibilities, of course not but it does make me wonder whether we need a more sophisticated conversation about what “polluter pays” actually means.

What PPWR is actually trying to do

Before going any further, there is something important I want to make clear - I am not opposed to PPWR.

Europe has a very real packaging problem.  In 2023, the EU generated 79.7 million tonnes of packaging waste which is almost 178kg for every person in the European Union.

Here in Ireland, we generated 1.19 million tonnes of packaging waste in 2024. The EPA says packaging waste generation has increased almost four times faster than recycling since 2016.

Something clearly has to change; PPWR is intended to reduce unnecessary packaging, increase recyclability and reuse, improve labelling and make businesses take greater responsibility for what happens to packaging after it enters the market. The European Commission says all packaging should be recyclable by 2030 and that unnecessary packaging and empty space should be reduced.

Those are objectives I support, in fact, many small sustainable businesses have been thinking about precisely these things for years.  Where I start to struggle is not with the environmental ambition, it is with proportionality.

Equal rules don't always create an equal burden

European packaging rules do contain concessions for micro-enterprises. That matters, and it would be unfair to suggest that legislators have ignored small businesses entirely. The Commission itself says micro-enterprises will face lighter rules in parts of the Regulation.

But selling across Europe introduces another layer, extended Producer Responsibility, EPR, essentially embodies the idea that businesses putting packaging onto a market should contribute to dealing with it when it becomes waste.

Again, perfectly reasonable in principle but responsibility can involve registration, reporting and compliance arrangements in the countries where products are sold. PPWR establishes national producer registers and extends a harmonised framework around producer responsibility. The Commission has itself acknowledged that EPR complexity across Member States can create barriers within the Single Market. It is already proposing simplification in this area.

And this is where economics becomes interesting; suppose a multinational sells ten million packaged products across Europe.  It has compliance teams, lawyers, packaging specialists, data systems, sustainability departments, logistics departments and people whose actual job is to understand legislation.

Now imagine an independent maker sending perhaps a handful of parcels to customers in several European countries, that maker may also be the designer, manufacturer, photographer, packer, website administrator, bookkeeper, marketer and customer-service department.

I know this because that is my world.  A €500 administrative cost does not mean the same thing to those two businesses; five hours of compliance work does not mean the same thing either. Equal obligation is not necessarily equal burden.

But there is an even bigger question

The more I thought about this, the more I realised my frustration isn't actually about cardboard boxes, it is about what our environmental rules measure.

PPWR is packaging legislation. It is not intended to measure the whole environmental impact of the product inside the package and perhaps that exposes something more important. 

Imagine two identical cardboard postal boxes; inside one is a product designed to be used briefly and replaced and inside the other is a handmade ring designed to be worn for fifty or one hundred and fifty years, repaired if necessary and perhaps eventually passed to another generation.

Packaging legislation quite reasonably looks at the box but sustainability policy, taken as a whole, surely has to look inside it too. 

• How much was produced, how long will it last?
• can it be repaired?
• was excess inventory deliberately created?
• are materials recoverable?
• does the business depend upon convincing customers that perfectly usable things are suddenly unfashionable or obsolete?
• Is waste an unfortunate consequence of the business model or is continual replacement effectively part of that model?

Those aren't questions PPWR alone can answer but the EU needs to answer them somewhere.

Two very different ideas of commerce

Watching Buy Now! made this particularly uncomfortable for me.

One economic model says:

Make more.

Sell more.

Replace faster.

Create another collection.

Create another upgrade.

Create another reason for yesterday's purchase to feel inadequate.

The other says:

Make less.

Choose materials carefully.

Repair what you can.

Avoid producing things nobody has asked for.

Make something worth keeping.

Those aren't simply different sizes of business.

They are almost opposite philosophies of consumption.

Yet when environmental regulation concentrates on an individual packaging unit, some of that difference disappears.

And that leads me to what I think is the real question:

Should environmental responsibility reflect not only the packaging a company puts into the world, but the amount of waste its entire business model is designed to generate?

The argument on the other side matters too

There is a perfectly reasonable response to everything I've just said.

Small quantities add up.

A million small businesses can create a very large environmental footprint.

Create too many exemptions and loopholes appear.

And if every business could simply declare itself “sustainable” and avoid responsibility, environmental law would quickly become meaningless.

I agree.

Nor do I think handmade should be granted some magical exemption from environmental scrutiny.

Something being made by hand does not automatically make it sustainable.

And something being produced by a large company does not automatically make it irresponsible.

Scale alone isn't the answer.

Impact is.

Perhaps what we need is regulation sophisticated enough to recognise both.

Polluter pays proportionately

Interestingly, some environmental systems already move in this direction.

Packaging EPR fees can take characteristics of the packaging into account, and the broader direction of European policy is towards better recyclability, less material and greater reuse.

I'd like us to go further with the principle.

Not:

Small businesses shouldn't pay.

But:

Businesses should be rewarded when they genuinely prevent waste.

If you use less material, that should matter.

If you produce to order rather than deliberately overproduce, that should matter.

If your product can be repaired, that should matter.

If it remains useful for decades, that should matter.

If you create something once rather than manufacture another ten thousand units because economies of scale make each one cheaper, that should matter.

And where there are unavoidable administrative requirements, surely the burden should be proportionate enough that compliance itself doesn't become a competitive advantage available primarily to businesses large enough to employ departments to handle it.

The European Commission has set an objective of reducing administrative burdens by 25% overall and 35% for SMEs by 2029. It has also recognised EPR complexity as a Single Market problem. So this isn't a concern that exists only in tiny workshops like mine.

Maybe we need to change the question

For decades, much of the environmental conversation around consumption has been about what happens after something becomes waste.

Which bin?

Can it be recycled?

Who pays for collection?

Those questions matter.

But perhaps the more interesting question comes earlier.

Why did we make so much of it in the first place?

Recycling ten disposable things is useful.

Making one thing that lasts may be better.

And that is the thought I have been unable to shake since watching Buy Now!.

Perhaps the future shouldn't simply be:

Recycle more.

Perhaps it should be:

Make less. Make better. Keep longer.

I will comply with environmental legislation because I believe businesses should take responsibility for what they put into the world.

But I also want to live in a Europe where environmental policy recognises businesses that are genuinely trying to put less into it.

Where prevention matters as much as processing.

Where longevity matters alongside recyclability.

And where the phrase “polluter pays” contains one very important idea:

proportionately.

Maybe I haven't reached the perfect answer.

But after watching Buy Now!, I think it is a conversation worth having.

What do you think?

Should environmental responsibility be based predominantly on what we package and sell or should the longevity, quantity and eventual fate of the products themselves matter too?

I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts.  Sorry for the very long rant but its been quite a week and I personally feel like this is a conversation worth having.  If you've read this far, Thank you!!  R x