A customer orders a pair of shoes from an online store in Germany. The shoes belong to the seller, but they are stored in a third-party warehouse. The 3PL buys the cardboard box, adds the tape and filler, packs the order and hands it to the carrier.

Who is responsible for that packaging?

The obvious answer seems to be the warehouse. After all, it bought the box and physically created the parcel.

Under the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, the answer can be very different.

PPWR separates roles that businesses often casually group together under the word “producer”. The company responsible for ensuring that packaging complies with technical and sustainability requirements is not necessarily the same company responsible for extended producer responsibility, registration, reporting and financing packaging waste management.

And the fact that a 3PL touches the box last does not automatically move all of those obligations onto the 3PL.

The first trap is the word “producer”

In normal business language, a packaging producer sounds like the company that manufactures cardboard boxes.

PPWR uses the terminology differently.

A manufacturer is responsible for the conformity of the packaging itself. A producer, in the EPR sense, is the economic operator responsible for extended producer responsibility in the Member State where the packaging is expected to become waste. Those two roles can belong to different companies.

That distinction becomes particularly important in e-commerce because the packaging around an order may involve several businesses before it reaches the consumer.

The seller owns the product. A packaging supplier sells empty cartons. A fulfillment company packs the order. A carrier moves it. The customer eventually throws the packaging away.

Simply asking “who bought the box?” is therefore not enough.

E-commerce packaging has its own logic

PPWR treats packaging used to ship products sold online as e-commerce packaging, which falls within the wider category of transport packaging. That includes not only the outer shipping box or bag but potentially components such as tape, labels and filler material.

For transport packaging, the European Commission’s 2026 guidance looks at several factors when identifying the responsible producer.

One is whether the packaging already existed as complete packaging before the fulfillment operation. A finished cardboard shipping box is different from separate materials that only become complete packaging when they are assembled.

Branding can matter too. Where transport packaging carries the name or trademark of a particular business, the company behind that branding can become central to the producer analysis. If the packaging is neutral and already complete when supplied, responsibility may instead sit further upstream with the packaging manufacturer, importer or distributor, depending on the circumstances.

So two parcels leaving the same 3PL on the same afternoon can potentially have different compliance structures.

One client may use branded shipping cartons designed specifically for its business. Another may use standard neutral boxes purchased by the fulfillment centre. The physical packing process can look almost identical while the legal allocation of responsibility is not.

Cross-border selling adds another layer

The destination matters because EPR is territorial.

PPWR seeks to identify the producer in the Member State where the packaging is first made available and is expected to become waste. In cross-border distance selling, a company selling directly to consumers in another Member State can itself become the producer for that destination market.

That is one of the reasons packaging EPR can become unexpectedly complicated for an e-commerce company expanding across Europe.

A seller may have one warehouse, one packaging specification and one fulfillment contract, yet sell into several countries where separate producer registrations, reporting arrangements or EPR structures may need to be considered.

Moving fulfillment to a local warehouse does not necessarily remove those questions. Neither does outsourcing packing to a 3PL.

The commercial model, the packaging itself, where it is first made available and where the end customer is located can all influence the answer.

The 3PL still has obligations even when it is not the producer

There is another important PPWR change that makes the relationship between seller and fulfillment provider much more significant.

A fulfillment service provider cannot simply ignore whether its client is meeting packaging obligations.

Where the 3PL is not itself the relevant manufacturer of the shipment packaging, PPWR requires fulfillment providers to obtain information about the producer’s registration and EPR compliance and make reasonable efforts to assess whether that information is reliable and complete.

If the information appears missing, inaccurate or outdated, the fulfillment provider must ask the producer to correct it. If the problem is not resolved, the provider can be required to suspend the relevant fulfillment services.

That changes the relationship.

Packaging compliance is no longer something that can comfortably sit in a distant legal folder while the warehouse continues shipping regardless. The fulfillment provider itself becomes part of the compliance control chain.

For e-commerce sellers, this means the conversation with a 3PL increasingly needs to include questions that barely appeared in fulfillment tenders a few years ago.

What packaging is used? Who supplies it? Is it branded? Who holds the packaging data? Who reports the volumes? In which markets is the seller considered the producer? And can the fulfillment operation actually provide reliable information about the materials it uses?

Those are operational questions as much as legal ones.

Outsourcing fulfillment does not mean outsourcing responsibility

This is probably the most useful takeaway for an e-commerce business.

A company can outsource storage, packing, carrier management and returns. It cannot safely assume that every regulatory obligation connected with those activities transfers with the warehouse contract.

Sometimes responsibility will sit with the seller. In another packaging configuration it may sit with a packaging supplier, importer or another operator. A 3PL may also acquire specific responsibilities depending on what it manufactures, assembles, brands or places on the market.

The answer has to be established from the actual setup.

That is also why UNIQ does not treat packaging compliance as an isolated legal issue when designing a multi-country fulfillment model. If a client uses several warehouses, we need to understand how packaging is sourced and used at those locations and what information the client will need for its own obligations. Where the structure raises questions around EPR, VAT, customs, registrations or the wider legal setup, specialist support can be brought into the project rather than leaving the client to guess where logistics ends and compliance begins.

The PPWR has made one thing increasingly difficult: pretending that the cardboard box is somebody else’s problem.

The warehouse may pack it. The seller may pay for it. A packaging company may manufacture it. The consumer may throw it away.

Determining who is legally responsible requires looking at the chain between all four.