Good news from Brussels. As of August 12th, a new law called PPWR is in force — designed to save the planet from an excess of packaging. Noble goal. Shame nobody stopped to ask small businesses whether they'd survive the cure.

One rule for everyone, no exceptions for the little guys. Sounds great at a press conference. In practice, it means putting a potter with a single wheel in his garage and a logistics giant shipping half a million parcels a day at the same till and telling them: pay the same. Democratic. Blind. Works beautifully — on paper.

Want to send one box to a neighbouring EU country? Register again. Separately, in every single country. Germany has its own system, France has its own — twenty-seven versions of the same quest, each with its own end-of-level boss made entirely of paperwork.

Someone did the maths — no drama, just added up all twenty-seven invoices.

For a major platform, that same fee isn't an expense — it's a rounding error. Their budget line for it is smaller than the office coffee machine. One law. Two entirely different kinds of pain.

This isn't a hypothetical scare story — it's happening right now. German workshops have simply started crossing countries off their delivery list. One shop in the US stopped shipping to Europe altogether.

Here's the punchline: even the European Commission itself proposed scrapping this requirement for small businesses. The Council of the EU said no. A rare moment where the bureaucracy turned out to be more humane than the governments running it.

The law doesn't ban selling direct. It just makes it expensive enough that handing a cut to a platform — one that already has a whole floor of people for this exact headache — starts to look like the sensible option. Want to sell it yourself? Pay up. All of it. Upfront. Before you've sold a single thing.

So we found the one legal way out of this mess. Don't put anything inside the box.

The law's logic is almost embarrassingly simple: product exists → packaging exists → regulation applies. Which means if there's no product, there's technically nothing to regulate. Thanks for the loophole, dear authors of the regulation.

Introducing PPWR OFF. A completely empty box, with the message stamped on every side. The one parcel in the European Union that is officially free of registration, fees, and the full bureaucratic experience.

It leaves us empty — on purpose. The courier stickers show up on their own, along the way, so every box that reaches its recipient ends up one of a kind — carrying the exact route of the absurdity it survived. The European Parliament, customs inspectors, and sorting conveyor belts are all full co-authors of this piece. It's globalisation's own brushwork — the logistics system painting the pattern onto this canvas mid-transit.

PPWR OFF exists as a single run of forty boxes. Not a nice round number — the number of the regulation itself: Regulation (EU) 2025/40.

Forty, once. Each one numbered and stamped, nothing else travels with it — no certificate inside, no paperwork, nothing that would turn an empty box into packaging for something. When the fortieth ships, the edition closes. Permanently. The way a law is supposed to work, and rarely does.

Every workshop photograph on this page — leatherwork, weaving, wood carving, and more — is part of a larger set of forty. Full resolution, print-ready. Free to download and use: for your shop, your social media, or press coverage of the PPWR OFF project. Attribution appreciated, not required.