If you sell hand tools, planters, tarpaulins, workwear or garden structures to French customers — from your own webshop or through a marketplace — you fall into France's EPR stream for articles de bricolage et de jardin: the ABJ filière. It is an odd one even by French standards. It is split across four eco-organismes rather than one, its 2026 barème charges per tonne of product rather than per piece or per unit, and one of its scope boundaries — the one with electronics, for powered tools — is genuinely unresolved in the published documents.
This guide walks through who is obligated, how the per-tonne grid prices a product, which categories belong to which eco-organisme, and where the honest uncertainties are. The tariff figures below come from Ecomaison's official deck, Articles de Bricolage et Jardin — Présentation du nouveau barème applicable au 1er janvier 2026, whose grid we transcribed in two independent passes with identical results.
Who counts as the producer
As in every French filière, the obligated "producer" is whoever places the product on the French market — and for cross-border e-commerce that is the foreign seller. A German brand shipping secateurs to Lyon, a UK marketplace seller of tool belts, a US webshop sending plant pots to Paris: each is the producer for ABJ purposes, not their factory and not a French retailer they don't have.
And since 10 July 2026, producers not established in France must appoint a French mandataire — a representative established in France who takes over the REP obligations by written mandate. The rule is horizontal across filières, ABJ included; we covered it in our guide to France's mandataire requirement.
Four eco-organismes, and which one is yours
ADEME's public register of REP filières — which we verified in August 2026 — lists four approved eco-organismes for ABJ: EcoDDS, Ecologic, Ecomaison and Valobat. That is not a free choice among competitors the way packaging is. Ecomaison's 2026 barème deck shows the filière carved into four product categories, each with its home:
- Category 1 — painter's tools (outillages du peintre) → EcoDDS.
- Category 2 — thermal motorised machines and appliances → Ecologic.
- Category 3 — DIY material (matériel de bricolage) → Ecomaison.
- Category 4 — garden products and materials → Ecomaison.
Valobat additionally holds an approval for the filière in ADEME's register. The tariff grid below is Ecomaison's and covers categories 3 and 4 only. A paint roller or a petrol mower is priced elsewhere — applying these rates to them would be wrong by up to a factor of 30 depending on the row.
How the 2026 barème charges: by the tonne
Every other consumer filière we have covered prices by count: toys pay per piece from a weight-band grid, electronics pay per unit by equipment code. ABJ is different: the contribution is € HT per tonne of product placed on the market. The rate is chosen by two axes: which of twelve product families the article belongs to (six DIY, six garden), and which of eight material columns describes its composition — from monomaterial inert or ceramic (>95%), through majority metal or certified wood (>50%), monomaterial biosourced or plastic (>95%), majority biosourced/plastics/textiles, to "mix of materials or assembly of more than 3 materials". Not every cell of that 12 × 8 matrix exists: the published grid has 84 tariff cells, and a missing cell means no tariff exists for that combination — a tarpaulin has no metal rate — not that the combination is free.
Representative 2026 rates, verbatim from the grid, in € HT per tonne:
- Hand tools and their accessories (a family that exists on both the DIY and garden sides, priced identically, as is personal protective equipment): majority metal €22, majority certified wood €74, monomaterial biosourced €87, monomaterial plastic €270, mixed materials €460.
- Large non-electric/non-thermal objects and machines, work-at-height tools, outdoor equipment, and non-masonry outdoor structures (four families sharing one row): majority metal €10 — the cheapest cell in the grid — certified wood €14, monomaterial inert or ceramic €15, plastic €65, mixed €135.
- Buckets, troughs and containers / flower pots: inert, ceramic or metal €22, certified wood €35, monomaterial plastic €187, mixed €395.
- Tarpaulins, covers, films and nets: only the soft-material columns exist — biosourced €87, plastic €270, majority textiles or mixed €460. No inert, ceramic, metal or wood cell at all.
The spread runs from €10 to €460 per tonne — one euro cent per kilo up to 46 cents per kilo, a 46× range driven almost entirely by material. The arithmetic itself is friendly: a 1.5 kg majority-metal garden spade at €22 per tonne contributes about 3.3 euro cents per unit sold. But notice what the formula needs: the product's weight. Per-tonne billing makes unit mass a first-class data requirement, not nice-to-have metadata — and in our experience most e-commerce catalogues hold shipping and packaging weights, not product weights.
Eco-modulation and the spare-parts bonus
The barème carries a single-digit eco-modulation flag — 0 without, 1 with — fed by three criteria: recyclability, sustainable management, and making spare parts available. The spare-parts incentive changed mechanics on 1 January 2025: it is no longer a cash-back premium but a 10% bonus applied directly within the eco-participation. And the material columns themselves encode a recyclability ladder — the deck orders it from cheap to dear, with >95% metal at the bottom and all-materials assemblies at the top. If you can honestly move a product from "mixed" to a majority-material column, the grid rewards it several times over.
The unresolved edge: where do electric tools go?
Here we owe you the same honesty we keep in our own compliance notes, where this boundary is flagged as uncertain — not resolved. The puzzle: Ecomaison's category diagram has no box for an electric machine. Category 2 covers thermal motorised machines; category 3 explicitly says non-electric/thermal. Meanwhile Ecologic's 2026 household WEEE barème has an entire section — "Bricolage, jardinage, électricité & domotique" — pricing hedge trimmers, robot mowers, walk-behind and ride-on mowers, and drills and drivers as electronics. An electric drill has an Ecologic tariff line and no row in the ABJ grid. All of that points one way: electric power tools land in the DEEE filière, priced by Ecologic.
But — and this is the part most guides would quietly skip — the ABJ documents never actually say so. The toy and sports-articles filières each publish an exclusion list that names the WEEE scheme in a sentence; ABJ's deck only offers a diagram in which an electric machine does not appear, and its exclusions page even refers to "un ABJ électrique" as a thing that exists. A diagram where a product doesn't appear is not the same as a sentence that removes it. Until Ecomaison answers the question directly, we treat the ABJ–WEEE overlap as open: when a product carries both an ABJ classification and an Ecologic code, Pack Declare keeps it counted in both estimates and surfaces the question, because silently dropping it from ABJ on an inference would risk under-declaring — the one failure mode compliance tooling should never choose for you.
What else leaves the filière
Ecomaison's exclusions page (a note of the filière's coordination body, dated 3 July 2025) hands several product types elsewhere, and knowing them stops you over-reporting:
- Swimming pools → the building-products filière (PMCB) — except paddling pools, which are toys.
- Masonry installations → PMCB.
- Hardware (quincaillerie) → PMCB or the furniture filière, depending on the item.
- Decorative ornaments — sculptures, statues, fountains → outside every REP. A garden statue owes nothing to anyone, and that is an answer, not a gap.
- Drill bits and discs made exclusively for an electric tool → outside both the WEEE and ABJ schemes (consumables are not electronics). The same bit sold for electric, thermal and hand tools alike is in ABJ, in its matching family — the answer turns on what the product is designed for.
Our guide to France's EPR filières maps the whole landscape if you sell across categories.
Packaging — and batteries — stack on top
The box, the mailer, the film around the tarpaulin: none of that is covered by an ABJ declaration. Household packaging is its own filière with its own eco-organismes and per-material tariffs, and it applies on top of whichever product filière your goods fall into. And the moment your catalogue includes cordless tools, their battery packs make you a producer in France's batteries filière as well — alongside, not instead of, the equipment declaration. A foreign DIY seller with a mixed catalogue should expect two French registrations as the floor and three or four as the normal case.
IDU numbers and marketplace verification
Each filière registration yields an IDU (identifiant unique) issued via ADEME's SYDEREP system — one per filière. Administrative penalties reach €30,000 per missing unique identifier, per filière, but the faster enforcement is commercial: French law makes marketplaces co-responsible for verifying that third-party sellers hold valid IDUs, and a platform that would otherwise become the producer itself responds by blocking listings. If tools and garden goods are your category, expect to be asked for an ABJ IDU, not just a packaging one.
What to do
- Sort your catalogue by category and eco-organisme. Painter's tools → EcoDDS. Thermal machines → Ecologic. Other DIY and garden articles → Ecomaison's categories 3 and 4. Electric power tools → almost certainly DEEE — and treat that boundary with the care it deserves.
- Capture product weight per SKU. Not shipping weight, not packaging weight: the mass of the product itself. The barème is per tonne, so without it there is no price.
- Record the dominant material — and whether a wood product's sourcing is certified. The gap between columns is the whole cost story: €22 against €460 for the same tonne of hand tools.
- Register, get your IDU — and if you are not established in France, appoint your mandataire first.
- Keep per-unit sales to France by product, so tonnes placed on the market are an export rather than an archaeology project.
How Pack Declare helps
Pack Declare has seeded all 84 published 2026 ABJ tariff cells from Ecomaison's barème — transcribed from the official deck in two independent passes with identical results, and every one of them currently flagged as needing verification, because it was read from a rendered slide rather than a structured file and we do not present a figure as settled until it has been checked against the source it can be checked against. Our internal cell codes are deliberately prefixed so nobody mistakes them for Ecomaison's own declaration codes, which the deck does not publish: they are enough to estimate, and honestly not enough to declare. Classify a product into its family and material once, give us its unit weight, and we price your real French sales into a per-period estimate — reporting the electric-tool overlap instead of silently resolving it, returning "no tariff exists" for combinations the grid does not price rather than charging a neighbouring cell, and keeping the packaging filière's numbers alongside. Where the source is ambiguous, we say so.
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Frequently asked questions
Which eco-organismes handle DIY and garden EPR in France?
ADEME’s register lists four: EcoDDS, Ecologic, Ecomaison and Valobat. The filière is carved by category: painter’s tools go to EcoDDS, thermal motorised machines to Ecologic, and the DIY and garden categories — hand tools, containers, tarpaulins, outdoor equipment and structures — to Ecomaison, whose 2026 grid covers those two categories only.
How does the 2026 ABJ barème charge?
Per tonne of product placed on the French market, excluding VAT, chosen by product family (twelve families) and material composition (eight columns). The published grid has 84 cells, running from €10 per tonne for majority-metal large objects and outdoor equipment to €460 per tonne for mixed-material hand tools, protective equipment and covers.
Do I need product weights to comply with ABJ?
Yes. A per-tonne tariff cannot be applied without the mass of the product itself — shipping or packaging weight is not a substitute. This is the main data gap for e-commerce sellers, whose catalogues usually hold parcel weights rather than product weights.
Are electric power tools in the ABJ filière or WEEE?
The published documents do not fully resolve it, and we say so. An electric machine fits none of Ecomaison’s four ABJ category boxes, and Ecologic’s 2026 WEEE barème prices drills, hedge trimmers and mowers under its own DIY-and-garden section — so an electric tool with an Ecologic code lands in DEEE. But unlike the toy and sports filières, ABJ’s documents never name the WEEE scheme in an exclusion sentence, so we treat the overlap as open and report it rather than silently dropping the product from either side.
What DIY and garden products are excluded from ABJ?
Pools go to the building-products filière (paddling pools to toys), masonry installations to building products, hardware to building products or furniture, and decorative ornaments — sculptures, statues, fountains — sit outside every REP entirely. Drill bits made exclusively for electric tools fall outside both WEEE and ABJ; the same bit sold for hand, thermal and electric tools alike is in ABJ.
Does certified wood reduce the ABJ eco-contribution?
Substantially. Majority certified wood is its own column: €74 per tonne for hand tools against €270 for monomaterial plastic and €460 for mixed materials in the same family, and €14 against €65 and €135 for large objects and outdoor equipment. Since 1 January 2025 there is also a 10% bonus, applied within the eco-participation, for making spare parts available.
Do foreign sellers need a mandataire for ABJ?
Yes, if not established in France. Since 10 July 2026 the mandataire obligation is horizontal across French filières, ABJ included. A foreign seller shipping tools or garden goods directly to French households is the producer and must appoint a representative established in France by written mandate.
Do I still declare packaging if I declare ABJ?
Yes. Household packaging is its own filière with its own tariffs and always applies on top. Cordless tools add the batteries filière for their packs as well, so a mixed DIY catalogue commonly means three or four French registrations.
Related reading: France's new mandataire rule for foreign sellers · The complete guide to France's EPR filières · France's DEEE filière and Ecologic's 2026 barème