Articles · 2026-09-18
How to check a supplier's EPR number
Germany's register is public and searchable, Spain publishes a list, and a missing Czech entry can be lawful. What you can verify, country by country.
A customer asks for your supplier's EPR number, or a buyer asks for yours, and the number arrives in an e-mail. Nothing in that e-mail proves the number exists. In some countries you can check it yourself in a minute; in others there is nothing to check, and in one country the company's absence from the register is entirely lawful. Here is what can actually be verified.
Can I check an EPR number online?
In some countries, yes. The registers are national, so there is no single European search: you check in the country whose number you were given. Where the register is public, you search by company name and read the entry. Where it is not, the number is a claim your supplier makes, and you handle it like any other claim — in writing, with a name and a date.
How do I check a German LUCID number?
Germany's producer register is public and searchable by company name. The result shows the registration number, the date of registration and the brand names the company registered. A LUCID number is the letters DE followed by 13 digits, so a number of another shape is not a LUCID number at all. Registration there is free and done online, which is worth knowing when a supplier says the registration is pending.
How do I check a Spanish producer?
Spain's environment ministry publishes the list of registered producers as a file, updated roughly once a month, and is building a web service so the check can be made automatically. That means a Spanish producer who registered last week may not yet appear in the file you downloaded — a gap in the publication, not a gap in the registration.
How do I check a Polish BDO number?
Poland's BDO register is public and free to search, with no account needed. Since a Polish BDO number must appear on invoices, you often have it already: the invoice and the register should agree, and a mismatch is the thing worth asking about.
Why is my Czech supplier missing from the register?
This is the one that misleads people. In Czechia, a producer whose contract with EKO-KOM covers ALL of its packaging is not entered in the Seznam osob at all — the scheme carries the entry. The absence of an entry there is not evidence of non-compliance; it is what the law says should happen. What you can ask for instead is the scheme contract. Who registers where, and what the register is called is set country by country.
What if the country has no register at all?
Then the number does not exist and cannot be produced. Latvia's environment authority states plainly that there is no packaging producer register, and Italy's RENAP is not yet live. A supplier who sends you a "registration number" for a country that has no register has sent you something else — a tax number, a scheme's client number, or a mistake. What an EPR number is, and what it is called in each country is the first thing to settle.
Does the PPWR make these registers public?
The regulation requires the list of registered producers to be publicly and freely accessible, so more of these searches should appear rather than fewer. Registration itself is a condition for making packaging available in a member state, not a formality afterwards — which is why a missing entry matters where a register exists.
What should I do with a number I cannot verify?
Ask for it in writing, with the name of the scheme or register it came from and the date. Keep the answer with the packaging line it belongs to, not in an inbox. A number you cannot check is not worthless — it is evidence of what the supplier told you, on a date, and that is exactly what an authority asks for when it asks how you knew.
What a spreadsheet cannot do here
A spreadsheet will hold the number. It will not hold who said it, when they said it, or which of your packaging lines it covers, and it will not tell you that the Czech supplier is right to be missing from the register.
What Tarafex does
Every country row in our EPR table carries the register, the authority, the source and the date it was checked, and where sources disagree, both are shown. Supplier answers are kept with the name of the person who answered and the date, next to the packaging they describe. Tarafex does not register you, is not your authorised representative and does not verify anyone on your behalf.
Sources: ZSVR, registration in LUCID and the public register; MITECO, list of registered producers; Ministry of Climate, the BDO register; Czech Act 477/2001, § 14(12); Regulation (EU) 2025/40, Articles 44 and 45. Checked 18 September 2026. This is information, not legal advice.