Authorised Representatives Under the PPWR: Two Mandates, Not One

The PPWR provides for authorised representatives in two separate systems. A conformity authorised representative, established in the Union and appointed in writing by a manufacturer, performs defined tasks from the manufacturer's mandate: holding the technical documentation and declaration available for authorities, cooperating on corrective action, being the address an authority writes to. An EPR authorised representative, appointed by a producer who distance-sells into a member state where it is not established (or who chooses to act through one), carries the registration, reporting and fee-facing duties in that state.

Same title, different jobs, different appointing logic. A business can need both, either, or neither, and a mandate written for one does not cover the other.

The conformity representative's mandate is administrative by design: keep the declaration and technical documentation available for the retention period, provide information to authorities on request, cooperate in eliminating risks from packaging the principal placed. What the mandate cannot transfer is the manufacturer's core responsibility - designing in conformity, carrying out the assessment, drawing up the declaration remain the manufacturer's, and a mandate purporting to move them is void against the regulation's allocation. Non-EU manufacturers use this mandate to give their EU placing an accountable address; importers still verify, and the existence of a representative does not dilute the importer's own duties where the importer is the operator placing.

The EPR representative exists because registration is national and sellers are not. A distance seller shipping to consumers in a member state where it has no establishment appoints a representative there to register, report and answer for the fees. The appointment must be in writing, the representative acts in the producer's name, and the producer remains the producer - the representative is its local machinery, not a substitute principal. Marketplace verification increasingly tests this mandate's existence, which makes it the one most small exporters meet first.

Practical notes: one representative per state is the working unit; group appointments across states are a procurement convenience, not a legal merger. Fees and liability allocation belong in the mandate contract, expressly - the regulation allocates the duty, the contract must allocate the cost of performing it and the consequences of performing it late.

Due diligence on a representative mirrors its function: for conformity, document-handling competence and response discipline; for EPR, register standing, reporting reliability and financial pass-through hygiene, because your fees travel through their accounts. In both cases the mandate document should name the tasks, the packaging and states covered, the information flows and the exit - what happens to documents and register entries when the mandate ends. Authorities will write to the address you appointed; appoint one that answers.

Appointing a representative never appoints away the principal's responsibility. The manufacturer remains answerable for conformity; the producer remains answerable for registration and fees. The representative answers for the performance of its mandate - documents held, deadlines met, correspondence answered - under its contract and, for the tasks the regulation names, in its own right toward authorities. Principals should therefore resist two opposite errors: treating the appointment as insurance ('our representative handles compliance'), and treating it as a mere postbox with no duties worth contracting carefully. It is a working mandate with defined tasks, and it should be bought, documented and audited like one - including a periodic test that the documents the representative holds are the current versions, which is the failure mode audits actually find.

A distance seller active in twelve states holds twelve EPR positions, potentially with twelve representatives, twelve reporting calendars and twelve fee arrangements. The administrative answer is a single register of mandates - state, representative, register number, reporting cycle, next deadline - owned by one person and reviewed monthly, because representative failures surface as the producer's deregistration and marketplace suspension, not as the representative's problem. Sellers above a handful of states usually consolidate representatives with a multi-state provider; the register discipline matters more, not less, after consolidation, because a single provider failure then spans every market at once.