EUDR from December 30, 2026: why cardboard becomes your newest paperwork headache

There is an EU regulation you probably don't have on your radar, but it's going to hit your bookkeeping from December 30, 2026. The EU Deforestation Regulation, EUDR for short. Where PPWR is about circular packaging, EUDR is about one thing: guaranteeing that no product on the European market has contributed to deforestation or forest degradation after December 31, 2020.

Sounds logical. Sounds far away from your webshop. Until you read that cardboard, paper, wooden pallets, and even the label paper underneath, all fall under it.

What does EUDR cover

EUDR covers seven raw materials that have historically been major drivers of deforestation: wood, soy, palm, coffee, cocoa, rubber and beef. Plus all products made from them. For your packaging, this means anything with wood fibre, so cardboard, paper tape, paper void fill, and wooden pallets, requires a due diligence statement. For every batch.

The rule was originally introduced on December 30, 2024. Under market pressure, Brussels postponed the deadline to December 30, 2025 for large companies and June 30, 2026 for SMEs. That's now further postponed, with the latest proposal landing on December 30, 2026 for medium and large companies and June 30, 2027 for small ones. The cabinet has not formally finalised this softening, but somewhere in 2026 or 2027 you're going to feel it.

What you have to do

For every wood-fibre-containing packaging you procure, you need a Due Diligence Statement. It must contain:

The plot where the wood was harvested, with geo-coordinates at plot level. Which supplier sits in the chain. Proof that the plot has not been deforested after December 31, 2020. And a per-shipment risk assessment. That statement must be uploaded to the EU TRACES system, and refreshed at every new procurement.

For one supplier this is doable. If your packaging supplier has their chain transparent, you adopt their DDS. But anyone with multiple suppliers, or with intermediaries in the chain, faces a sea of paperwork. And non-compliance fines bite: up to 4 percent of annual EU turnover.

What happens if you stick with cardboard

Three things, in this order.

One, higher procurement price. Your packaging supplier needs to map the complete supply chain. That costs money and those costs get passed through. Expect 5 to 15 percent price hikes in the first two years.

Two, more complex procurement. For each new supplier you'll want to see a DDS track record before signing. That extends procurement cycles and excludes small suppliers without compliance capacity.

Three, audit risk. Customs will spot-check shipments where the DDS doesn't add up. That costs delivery time and can escalate to returns or fines.

How stone paper sidesteps the regulation

Stone paper is made of calcium carbonate, which is ground quarry residue, plus a bit of recycled HDPE plastic as binder. No wood, no fibre, no tree. With that, stone paper falls outside the scope of EUDR. No DDS needed, no TRACES upload, no plot-level chain analysis.

In practice that means:

No extra paperwork per shipment. You buy your Stonepackers and that's it. No annual recheck of plot coordinates. Your compliance officer gets one less line on his list.

No price hike from EUDR compliance. Stone paper production costs are not affected by forest due diligence because there's no forest in it.

But the same or better environmental performance. Stone paper produces 67 percent less CO2 than classical paper in production and uses 0 litres of water. Plus a Stonepacker is reused up to 25 times, which drives the per-shipment impact down even further.

The elephant in the room

Nobody is saying all cardboard is bad. FSC-certified cardboard from European sustainably managed forests is a fine material, and EUDR is precisely meant to reward that kind of management. But for webshops shipping hundreds of packages per day, the administrative load of EUDR compliance is a real cost. Plus the fact that even FSC doesn't solve all forest issues; for every cubic metre of cardboard, somewhere a tree grows back slower.

The choice isn't cardboard-or-not. The choice is: how much of my packaging mix do I want outside EUDR scope, and how much administrative overhead do I accept for the rest.

What we recommend

Start with your primary shipping packaging. Box or envelope, that's the largest volume in your mix and where the biggest compliance load sits. Make that tree-free. Keep FSC cardboard for secondary packaging, labels and internal use, where the impact is smaller.

Request a Stonepacker sample before September. That gives you time to test the flow before the EUDR deadline really kicks in. We ship samples for free within three business days, and our co-founder Roel responds personally.

EUDR isn't a problem that disappears with a spreadsheet. It's a new baseline. The question is whether you make it a bottleneck or a sales argument next year.