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Open data · CC BY 4.0 · counted 21 September 2026
How many producers are registered in LUCID?
Nobody publishes the size of the German packaging register. The public register will tell you — if you ask it the right way.
1,991,939
producer registrations in LUCID, counted 21 September 2026. The register’s own freshness line at that moment read „Last update: 2026-09-21 01:10 AM“.
How it was counted
- The ZSVR public producer register at oeffentliche-register.verpackungsregister.org/Producer has a search form and a results grid. The grid’s pager states a total: „1 - 10 of N items“.
- Every LUCID registration number begins DE. Searching the Register number field for
DEtherefore matches every entry, and the pager reports the whole register. - To check that the pager total is real and not capped, the same search was repeated for
DE0throughDE9. Those ten sets are disjoint and exhaustive, so their sum must equal the total. It does. - A pager total only counts rows, so we checked that one row is one registration. We pulled every one of the 284 rows behind a single-postcode search and compared their register numbers: 284 rows, 284 distinct numbers, no repeats. The grid does not multiply a producer into several rows.
- As an independent sanity check on the order of magnitude, ZSVR announced in April 2024 that LUCID had passed one million registrations, up from 55,000 five years earlier. ZSVR counts the same unit we do — Registrierungen, not companies — and roughly a doubling in the two and a half years since fits that trajectory.
- Anyone can repeat this in a browser in under a minute. That is the point of publishing the method rather than only the number.
| Register-number prefix | Registrations |
|---|---|
DE0 | 0 |
DE1 | 396,935 |
DE2 | 397,860 |
DE3 | 399,036 |
DE4 | 397,912 |
DE5 | 398,443 |
DE6 | 1,753 |
DE7 | 0 |
DE8 | 0 |
DE9 | 0 |
| Sum of the ten | 1,991,939 |
Reported total for DE | 1,991,939 |
The two agree, so the pager total is not truncated.
What the number is not
- Registrations, not companies. In the 284-row postcode slice we read in full, 284 registrations carried 282 distinct company names, so a small number of companies hold more than one registration. Treat the headline as an upper bound on companies.
- It includes exits. A producer that has left the market stays in the register, with the exit date shown. VerpackDG § 6(4) deletes the published entry three years after the end of the year in which the registration ended, so the count carries up to four years of leavers.
- It includes leavers, measurably. In that same 284-row slice, 16 registrations already carried a registration end date — about one in eighteen. We have not measured that share register-wide, so do not scale it.
- It is a snapshot. The register states its own freshness at the top of the page, labelled „Last update“; the value we read is on the row above.
The split the register will not give you
- The obvious follow-up is how many of these producers are foreign, since that is the population the representative duty applies to. The public register will not answer it.
- The search form has a Country field. Filtering on it returns no results at all — not even for values the result rows themselves display, and not even combined with a postcode that returns hundreds of rows on its own.
- The data is there but it cannot be aggregated. Each row the register returns carries a
Countryvalue and anIsForeignProducerflag, and both are populated. The server simply refuses to filter on either: a query constrained toIsForeignProducercomes back empty against a search that otherwise reports the whole register. - That leaves only reading the rows. At the page size the register allows, a register-wide foreign count means around twenty thousand paged requests against a public service. We are not going to do that to somebody else’s server to produce a marketing statistic.
- The register number prefix does not help either:
DEis the register’s own prefix, not the producer’s country, so a Chinese and a German producer carry the same one. - So we do not publish a foreign-producer count. France can publish one because ADEME exposes the producer’s country as an open-data field; ZSVR exposes it per row but not in aggregate. If that changes, this page changes.
Sources
Every claim above comes from one of these. Primary law and the competent authority first; no provider marketing pages.
- ZSVR — one million LUCID registrations (9 April 2024) — read 2026-09-21
- VerpackDG § 6 — read 2026-09-21
About the authorRazvan Toma
Razvan Toma is the founder of EPR Germany Rep and of EPR France Rep, the French sister service. He reads the statutes and the regulator's own guidance directly, and publishes what they say — including when it means telling a visitor they do not need to buy anything.
Razvan on LinkedIn ↗Selling into Germany from abroad?
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