Europe Just Deleted Leather From Its Deforestation Law. The Boxes You Buy Empty Are Still In It.

Last checked 21 September 2026. This is general information about product-scope rules, not legal advice. Annex I is amended by delegated act and has now been amended twice; check your own CN codes against the current consolidated text before you act, and note that national enforcement authorities differ in how they read the packaging carve-out.

Three days ago, a rule you were probably being sold stopped applying to you

On 17 September 2026 the Official Journal published Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/2102 of 13 July 2026, amending Regulation (EU) 2023/1115 — the EU Deforestation Regulation — "as regards the list of relevant commodities and relevant products". Article 2 says it "shall enter into force on the day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union." That was 18 September 2026.

What it did, in the part that matters to anyone who sells eyewear:

• Cattle hides, skins and leather — ex 4101, ex 4104, ex 4107 — are deleted from Annex I. Leather is out of the deforestation regulation.
• Other articles of vulcanised rubber — ex 4016 — are deleted, along with conveyor and transmission belts under ex 4010. Rubber temple tips and nose pads are out.
• Soya beans for sowing are deleted; the seats entry is narrowed to named wooden-seat codes.
• A list of additions — soluble coffee, frozen cattle tongues, a long run of palm-oil oleochemicals — applies only from 30 December 2027.

This was covered as a fashion and tanning story. It is one. But it also quietly answers a question a lot of optical retailers have been paying consultants to answer since spring: is my leather spectacle case a deforestation-regulated product?

No. And it wasn't before, either — for a different reason. That distinction is the whole post.

Your case and your frames were never in scope. Two separate reasons.

Annex I of the EUDR is a table of CN codes, not a list of industries. Before 18 September, its cattle row ran through chapter 41 — raw hides, tanned leather, further-prepared leather. It stopped there. Chapter 42 — the finished articles of leather, including CN 4202, which is the heading that literally names "spectacle cases" — never appeared in Annex I at all.

So a leather spectacle case was outside the regulation on the day it came into force, is outside it now, and was outside it during every month someone was selling you due-diligence software for it. What changed on 18 September is one step further back: the tannery's leather is now out too, which means your supplier no longer has to hand you anything.

The same applies to frames. CN 9003 — spectacle frames and mountings — does not appear in Annex I, in any version. A wooden frame is not a regulated wood product under this regulation; the wood row runs across chapter 44, chapters 47 and 48 as amended, and a set of named chapter 94 furniture codes. It does not reach into chapter 90. We state that as a negative finding from reading the annex, not as an absolute: look up your own codes, because a bamboo-and-acetate frame that your broker classifies somewhere unexpected is a different conversation.

And then there is the part that is still in scope, and it is the part nobody is checking

The same delegated act that took leather out rewrote the pulp and paper entry. Here is the amended wording, and it rewards a slow read:

"ex 48 Paper and Paperboard: Articles of paper pulp, of paper or of paperboard … (not including single use packing material and packing containers used exclusively to support, protect or carry another product made available on the market or exported and presented with that product) (not including packing material and packing containers clearly suitable for repetitive use used exclusively to support, protect or carry another product made available on the market or exported and presented with that product from the moment they are used for such purpose and onwards) (not including items of correspondence and marketing and information materials exclusively accompanying another product made available on the market or exported, or supplied for marketing or information purposes free of charge)"

Read what that does and does not say.

The carton you ship a pair of glasses in is out of scope. It is single-use packing material, it carries another product, and it is presented with that product. Same for the mailer, the tissue, the lens-cloth sleeve. Your care card, your prescription leaflet, your printed catalogue and the marketing insert are out too, under the third bracket.

The same cartons, bought empty, are in scope. The carve-out is written around a box that is doing its job. A pallet of flat-packed folding cartons arriving at your fulfilment centre is not supporting, protecting or carrying anything. It is a chapter 48 article of paperboard, placed on the EU market as a product in its own right. That transaction is inside the regulation.

And the reusable limb is sharper still: reusable packing containers are excluded "from the moment they are used for such purpose and onwards" — which means the drafters explicitly contemplated that a reusable box is a relevant product right up until the first time it holds something, and not before.

So who actually owes a duty, and when

Under Regulation (EU) 2025/2650 of 19 December 2025, which amended the EUDR's obligations and reset its calendar:

• 30 December 2026 — large and medium operators, traders and the new category of downstream operators.
• 30 June 2027 — micro and small enterprises. (The Commission's own note describes narrower treatment for products that were already covered by the old Timber Regulation, so a micro business handling those may face the earlier date. Check your own position rather than assuming the later one.)
• Downstream operators and traders no longer file their own due diligence statement. They collect and keep the reference numbers of the statements filed upstream.

For a typical EU optical retailer, the practical shape is this. If you buy your packaging from an EU converter, the due diligence sits with whoever first placed that paperboard on the market, and your job is to get and keep the DDS reference number — which means asking for it in the purchase order now rather than in late December. If you import your own packaging directly from outside the EU — a lot of brands do, because printed boxes are cheaper that way — you are the operator, and the duty is yours, not your printer's.

That second case is the one that catches people, and it catches them at the border: from 30 December 2026 the reference number has to exist before customs clears the goods. This is the same operational trap as the customs changes we wrote about in the end of the €150 exemption — a compliance artefact that has to be created upstream of a shipment nobody thinks of as regulated.

The line is drawn by what the object is doing, not what it is made of

Regular readers will recognise the shape. The same cardboard is in scope or out of scope depending on whether it is carrying your glasses. The same paperboard rectangle is a regulated product on a pallet and an unregulated one in a shipping bag.

We have now hit this in four regimes. It is the reason the packaging regulation's treatment of a spectacle case is genuinely unsettled — a case that ships with the glasses reads like packaging, a case sold on its own reads like a product. It is the reason a producer's frame guarantee stops qualifying for the EU's new GARAN label the moment you glaze the frame, because the good you sold became the finished pair. Under the EUDR the trigger is the same: what the object is doing at the moment it is placed on the market.

Which produces one genuinely awkward case for this industry, and we are not going to pretend it is resolved.

What we are deliberately not asserting

A paperboard spectacle case is not obviously either thing. Handed over with the glasses, it reads as single-use packing material "presented with that product" and falls in the carve-out. Sold on its own shelf as a £12 accessory, it is an article of paperboard placed on the market in its own right and the carve-out does not touch it. The same SKU can be both in the same week. We found no guidance addressing that case. The conservative position costs you one reference number from your supplier; the other error is placing a regulated product on the EU market with no due diligence behind it. We are not hardening this in either direction and neither should anyone quoting us.

We are not asserting that the leather deletion is settled policy. Earthsight and Mighty Earth have both called it a loophole and the leather sector has welcomed it; a delegated act can be amended by another delegated act, and this annex has now moved twice. It is the most likely sentence in this post to age.

And we are not making a claim about the United States. The American counterpart question is the Lacey Act declaration, whose Phase VII took effect on 1 December 2024 and which APHIS describes as covering "all remaining plant product Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) codes that are not 100-percent composite materials" — with handbags among the examples APHIS itself names. Whether HTS 9003 or 4202 sit on that list is a question for the Federal Register code list and your customs broker. We have not verified it and we are not going to assert it, because a wrong answer here is an entry-summary problem, not a blog problem.

What to actually do this quarter

1. Stop paying for EUDR work on leather cases and rubber components. As of 18 September they are outside Annex I. If a supplier portal is still demanding geolocation data for your case leather, it is running on the old annex.
2. Find out who imports your packaging. This is a five-minute question to your operations lead and it determines whether you are an operator or a trader. It is the single highest-value thing on this list.
3. If you buy in the EU: add "supply the EUDR due diligence statement reference number" to the packaging purchase order now. Not in December.
4. If you import packaging yourself: you have about a hundred days. You need geolocation of the plot of origin and a due diligence statement in the EU information system before the goods clear.
5. Decide how you sell spectacle cases — bundled or standalone — and write down which, because that decision now has a regulatory consequence it did not have last month.
6. Do not put "deforestation-free" on anything because a product left Annex I. From 27 September an unsubstantiated environmental claim is a banned commercial practice in the EU under the rules in our piece on the Empowering Consumers Directive, and a claim about recyclability on the case itself has its own American problem. Scope relief is not a marketing claim.

The short version: Europe just took the material your cases are made of out of its deforestation law, and left the boxes you buy by the pallet in it. Almost every optical retailer has been worrying about the first and ignoring the second.

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Sources: Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/2102 of 13 July 2026, published in the Official Journal on 17 September 2026, in force 18 September 2026 (EUR-Lex); Regulation (EU) 2023/1115, Annex I as amended; Regulation (EU) 2025/2650 of 19 December 2025; European Commission, Access2Markets, on the postponement and the downstream-operator category; USDA APHIS on Lacey Act Phase VII.