In almost every EU country, EPR compliance for an online seller follows a simple pattern: one country, one packaging scheme, one declaration. Register once, report your packaging weights by material, pay the invoice. Germany works that way. So do Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, give or take local quirks.
France does not. French EPR — REP, for responsabilité élargie du producteur — is organised by product stream, not by country. Each stream is a filière: its own approved eco-organisme(s), its own registration number, its own tariff grid, its own reporting calendar. A single e-commerce order — a cordless gadget, the battery inside it, the box it ships in — can touch three filières at once, which means three registrations and three separate declarations. Sellers who assume their CITEO packaging registration covers "France" are usually covering one filière out of three or four.
What a filière actually is
A filière REP is a legally defined product category with its own producer-responsibility scheme. For each one, the French state approves one or more eco-organismes — the private bodies that collect eco-contributions and organise collection and recycling. Registering with an eco-organisme gets you an IDU (identifiant unique), the unique identifier recorded in ADEME's SYDEREP register. Crucially, the IDU is per filière: a packaging IDU says nothing about textiles or electronics.
ADEME's official list currently counts 19 filières: household packaging & graphic papers; professional packaging; electrical and electronic equipment; batteries; furniture; textiles, linen and footwear; DIY and garden articles; sports and leisure articles; toys; building products; single-use sanitary textiles; chemical products; tyres; lubricating oils; unused medicines; sharps medical devices; tobacco products; recreational boats; and vehicles.
Nobody sells into all 19. Most e-commerce sellers fall into one to four — and the point of this guide is to help you work out which ones, because each filière you miss is a separate exposure.
The five filières that matter for cross-border e-commerce
1. Household packaging & graphic papers (EMPAP)
The one everyone touches: if you ship anything to French households, your packaging is in scope. The approved eco-organismes are CITEO, Adelphe and Léko, and fees follow the packaging's material composition and weight. Note two things sellers often miss. First, ADEME treats household packaging and graphic papers as one filière — printed catalogues and paper ride along with your boxes. Second, packaging for professional customers is a separate filière (EPRO), reported as deferred to 1 January 2027. We cover the packaging stream in detail in our CITEO guide.
2. Textiles, linen and footwear (TLC)
One eco-organisme: Refashion. The fee structure is unlike packaging entirely: it is charged per piece, and the rate depends on the product line crossed with the rayon — broadly, who the item is for (men, women, children) and, for footwear, the size. The 2026 grid runs to roughly 100 product lines. Under the detailed 2026 tariff, a men's T-shirt is priced at €0.0396 per piece; sellers below 5,000 pieces a year may use a simplified flat rate instead, but at €0.5799 per piece for clothing that is roughly fifteen times the T-shirt rate — the penalty for not classifying is built into the scheme. Refashion's invoice also adds a €30 administrative charge and an ADEME levy. We break the whole grid down in our Refashion deep dive.
3. Electrical and electronic equipment (EEE / DEEE)
Anything dependent on electric current — a plug, a circuit, an embedded battery — falls here. Approved eco-organismes: Ecologic, ecosystem, and SOREN for photovoltaic panels. Fees are charged per unit, by equipment category — and the category grids are granular: Ecologic's 2026 household tariff covers 118 equipment types across 314 tariff codes, and about two thirds of those codes are selected by a measured band — weight, litres of capacity, or screen inches. Declaring electronics in France means knowing not just that a product is electrical, but which line of the grid it sits on. We break the whole grid down in our DEEE deep dive.
4. Batteries (BAT)
Batteries owe their own eco-contribution whether sold standalone or embedded in a product. The eco-organismes are Batribox and ecosystem (plus Recycler Mon Véhicule for a vehicle-battery category). Fees are driven by battery category and weight — and the category matters more than the chemistry: in Batribox's 2026 grid, the same chemistry can be priced around fourteen times higher in one category than another, and one category is billed per unit rather than per kilo. The weight that counts is the battery's, not the product's: a 2 kg cordless drill with a 320 g battery pack declares 0.32 kg. Declare the drill's weight and you overpay several times over without any total looking wrong. The full picture is in our battery filière deep dive.
One honesty note: this filière's landscape moved recently — Screlec became Batribox in January 2025, and Corepile was absorbed by ecosystem in 2025. A lot of guidance online still names organismes that no longer exist. Check dates on anything you read, including tariff PDFs.
5. Furniture (EA)
Éléments d'ameublement covers furniture and bedding, with Ecomaison on the household side, Valdelia for the professional segment, and Valobat also approved. This is the most complex tariff structure of the five: the fee is a function of several variables at once — weight, dimensions, volume and materials. Ecomaison publishes a product-code and tariff generator precisely because the grid cannot be summarised in a table. If you sell furniture into France, budget real time for classification.
The next tier: toys, sport & leisure, DIY
Three more filières catch a lot of general e-commerce catalogues: toys (JOUET, run by Ecomaison — see our Ecomaison toy EPR guide), sports and leisure articles (ASL, run by Ecologic — see our ASL deep dive) and DIY and garden articles (ABJ, split across ECODDS, Ecologic, Ecomaison and Valobat depending on the article — see our ABJ deep dive). If your shop sells "a bit of everything", these three are where surprise obligations usually surface — and, as the next section shows, where the boundaries with electronics get interesting.
The charging logic differs yet again down here. Ecologic's 2026 ASL barème charges per unit — one amount per tariff code, the code chosen by a band, almost always the product's weight, except bicycles, which band by price. And Ecomaison's 2026 ABJ grid for DIY and garden articles charges per tonne of product, the rate set by the product family crossed with its dominant material. Different units, same catch: both need the product's weight — a field most e-commerce catalogues do not hold.
One product, several filières: how the overlaps work
The overlaps are not an edge case; they are the normal condition of an e-commerce order. The rules worth knowing:
- Packaging always stacks. Whatever filière your product falls into, its packaging is declared separately under EMPAP. A dress is TLC plus packaging; a lamp is EEE plus packaging. Always two at minimum.
- Embedded batteries stack too. A product with a battery inside owes under EEE and under BAT — both, by design, to different organismes on different grids. The cordless-gadget-in-a-box order from the introduction really is three declarations.
- Electricity moves products between filières. An electric toy is not JOUET — Ecomaison's toy scope explicitly excludes toys that fall under the DEEE scheme, and Ecologic prices electric toys in its own grid. Likewise, e-bikes and electric scooters are EEE, not sports articles: the ASL filière covers non-motorised cycles and personal mobility. But the exclusion applies to the motorised article itself, not its accessories — a helmet is ASL even if its owner rides an e-bike.
- Some boundaries are genuinely unresolved. Electric DIY machines are the clearest example: Ecologic's EEE grid prices drills, hedge trimmers and robot mowers, while the ABJ documentation describes its own categories as thermal or non-electrical — yet never states the exclusion outright. When the documents leave a gap, the safe direction is to keep declaring rather than silently drop an obligation: under-declaration is the failure mode enforcement targets.
- And some products fall into no filière at all. A decorative garden statue owes nothing to anyone. "Out of scope" is a legitimate answer — just make sure it is a verified answer, not a hopeful one.
The IDU: one number per filière, and marketplaces check
Here is why the filière structure has teeth. Article L. 541-10-9 of the French Environmental Code makes marketplaces — Amazon, Cdiscount, ManoMano, Fnac — co-responsible for verifying that every third-party seller holds a valid IDU for the relevant filières. If the seller doesn't, the platform itself becomes the producer, and platforms resolve that kind of liability the way they always do: by blocking listings. On top of that sits an administrative fine of up to €30,000 per missing IDU, per filière.
Read that carefully: a seller active in three filières who has only registered for packaging is not "mostly compliant" — they are carrying two separate exposures, each with its own fine and its own delisting risk. And this is aimed squarely at cross-border sellers: our analysis of ADEME's public producer register found roughly 69% of registrations belong to companies not domiciled in France.
Not established in France? You also need a mandataire
Since 10 July 2026, Law n° 2026-602 requires every producer not established in France — EU or not — to appoint a French mandataire by written mandate, and the obligation is horizontal across the filières. It deserves its own article, and it has one: France's new mandataire rule, explained. The short version: the filière mapping in this guide tells you what must be declared; the mandataire rule governs who is allowed to stand behind those declarations if you have no French entity.
What to actually do
- Map your catalogue to filières. Product by product, not shop by shop: what the item is determines the filière, and remember the stacking rules — packaging always, batteries when embedded, EEE whenever there is a plug or a circuit.
- Check your registrations against that map. An existing CITEO IDU covers exactly one filière. List the IDUs you hold, list the filières you touch, and treat every gap as urgent — marketplaces are checking numbers, not intentions.
- Get the numbers right, per filière. Each scheme wants different data: pieces by product line and rayon for textiles, units by equipment category (often by size band) for electronics, battery kilos by category, packaging weights by material. None of it can be derived from a revenue report; it has to come from your catalogue and sales data.
- Watch the calendars separately. Each eco-organisme runs its own declaration schedule. Four filières means four calendars, not one French deadline.
This is exactly the problem Pack Declare is built for: we map your products to the French filières, compute the figures each eco-organisme expects from your real Shopify, WooCommerce or Amazon sales data — using official published tariffs, flagged when a rate is not yet verified — and keep the registrations and deadlines in one place. France stops being nineteen mysteries and becomes a checklist.
Check which French filières apply to you — free →
Already using Pack Declare? The estimate for your own catalogue is in the app.
Frequently asked questions
How many EPR filières does France have?
Roughly nineteen. French EPR — REP, for responsabilité élargie du producteur — is organised by product stream rather than by country, and each stream is a filière with its own approved eco-organismes, its own registration number, its own tariff grid and its own reporting calendar.
What is a filière REP?
A legally defined product category with its own producer-responsibility scheme. For each one the French state approves one or more eco-organismes, the private bodies that collect eco-contributions and organise collection and recycling. Registering with one yields an IDU recorded in ADEME’s SYDEREP register.
Does my CITEO packaging registration cover all my French EPR obligations?
No. The IDU is issued per filière, so a packaging registration says nothing about textiles, electronics or toys. Sellers who assume CITEO covers France are usually covering one filière out of the three or four their catalogue actually touches.
Can one product fall under several filières at once?
Routinely. Packaging always stacks on top of whatever product filière applies, so a dress is textiles plus packaging. Embedded batteries stack too: a product with a battery inside owes under both the electricals and the batteries filières, to different organismes on different grids.
Which French filières matter most for cross-border e-commerce?
Five carry most of the volume: household packaging and graphic papers, textiles and footwear, electrical and electronic equipment, batteries, and furniture. Toys, sport and leisure articles, and DIY and garden goods form the next tier for sellers in those categories.
Why is an electric toy not declared under the toy filière?
Because electricity moves products between filières. Ecomaison’s toy scope explicitly excludes toys falling under the WEEE scheme, and Ecologic prices electric toys in its own grid. The same logic makes e-bikes and electric scooters electricals rather than sports articles.
What is an IDU and why do marketplaces ask for it?
The identifiant unique is the registration number recorded in ADEME’s SYDEREP register, issued per filière. French law makes marketplaces co-responsible for verifying that third-party sellers hold a valid IDU for the filières their products touch — otherwise the platform becomes the producer itself.
Can a product fall under no French filière at all?
Yes. A decorative garden statue owes nothing to anyone. Out of scope is a legitimate answer — but it should be a verified answer rather than a hopeful one, because under-declaration is the failure mode French enforcement targets.
Related reading: France's new mandataire rule for foreign sellers · Refashion textile fees, line by line · CITEO and French packaging EPR for online sellers