The complaint in that article is that "instead of creating a single European system, the PPWR preserves a fragmented national model. A business selling directly to customers across the EU must register and fulfil its obligations separately in every Member State where its packaging becomes waste. For large companies, this is part of the cost of doing business; for micro-businesses selling only a handful of products into each country, the cost and administrative burden can be wildly disproportionate to the amount of packaging involved."

That is not the EU passing bad laws that members are forced to adopt, it's every member state individually deciding that they don't care about microbusinesses that can't even afford the registration fee for their national packaging waste disposal system.

Generally, the EU is a platform for coordination and negotiation between member state governments. So the danger for Icelanders wouldn't be that the Icelandic government is overpowered by the rest of the EU, but that they voluntarily sign up to a deal that benefits some constituencies at the expense of others, and that can't be changed easily anymore because it's now part of an international agreement. That the referendum was rejected is also an indication that Icelanders don't trust their government to negotiate on their behalf.

But that's exactly how it is supposed to work. Primacy of EU law, currency, monetary policy, borders, trade, defence (under way), etc. It is not micromanagement, it is the aim to transfer sovereignty to a federal EU.

There is no way to sugarcoat it. It is no longer the 70s or even 90s when you could claim that this wasn't the situation and aim. So whether people are in favour or opposed to that it has the merit of being clear.

In the EU Iceland would lose sovereignty because the EU is going federal, and the people of Iceland would lose sovereignty, too as a consequence. You are trying to clutch at straws because you are insisting on denying a fact that is not even controversial. I understand that you think it is worth it but not you should deny it is the case.

Iceland is in the EEA (and indeed that's already a loss of sovereignty) not in the EU and a key reason is indeed to maintain sovereignty on key issues and industries (especially fishing, which is excluded from EEA), which they would lose by joining. So again it is very unclear to me what they would gain by joining.

Why would they lose sovereignty? You haven't established that at all.

If we read Rousseau's Social Contract, we see that the sovereign is the people, not the executive power at their service.

The people wouldn't stop being the sovereign just because they change the administrative details of executing their sovereign will.

You haven't made a successful case to counter this point, instead you've gone to attacking me personally with loaded language ("clutching at straws") to defend your insularism.

Sovereignty, noun: the power of a country to control its own government. [Cambridge]

A country, EU member, Euro, Schengen, etc. does not control its foreign trade, has no currency, does not control its monetary policy, does not control its borders (Iceland is a remore island so possibly less of a practical issue and indeed they are in Schengen), does not control its laws. That's the way it is. This includes the people as citizens of that country.

I think you are trying to say that they are still "sovereign" at EU level but obviously that's fallaciously ignoring the whole actual issue of national sovereignty vs. the EU, which isn't just a "change of administrative details", obviously...

Interestingly, with your argument they could equally join the US and as long as they have full voting rights they would still be "sovereign", which I don't think many would agree they would be because the whole point is obviously being sovereign as Iceland and Icelandic, not as citizens of whatever other country.

That's the issue with discussing the EU within Europe at this point, it has become a religion and it is not possible to discuss religion with religious people.