PPWR Recycled Content Targets: The Percentages and What They Attach To

Article 7 requires plastic packaging placed on the market to contain minimum percentages of recycled plastic recovered from post-consumer plastic waste. From 1 January 2030 the minimums are: 30 percent for contact-sensitive packaging made mainly of PET; 10 percent for contact-sensitive plastic packaging other than PET; 30 percent for single-use plastic beverage bottles; and 35 percent for other plastic packaging. From 1 January 2040 they rise to 50, 25, 65 and 65 percent respectively.

The obligation attaches to the plastic part of packaging as placed, is calculated under a methodology the implementing acts will complete, and carries defined exclusions - plastic parts under 5 percent of a unit's total weight, and specific medical and pharmaceutical cases among them. Everything in this station flows from those sentences: how the calculation works, what counts as post-consumer, the special world of contact-sensitive supply, mass balance, certification, exemptions, sourcing, and the non-plastic materials the mandate does not cover.

Glass, metal and paper already recycle at high rates with mature cullet, scrap and fibre markets; their recycled content is an economic default rather than a regulatory problem. Plastic is the material whose recycling economics failed without intervention: collection without end-demand produced bales without buyers, and content mandates manufacture the demand that makes collection rational. Article 7 is therefore demand-side industrial policy written as a packaging duty. Its percentages are set where the legislator judged supply could be built - lowest where food-contact safety constrains feedstock hardest, highest where post-consumer streams are broadest.

Understanding that logic predicts the article's future: where supply demonstrably cannot form, the article's own review and derogation machinery is the pressure valve - and where it can, expect no mercy at the dates.

A recycled-content programme has four workstreams, and they belong to different departments. Categorisation: which of the four percentage families each plastic line falls in - a legal-technical reading done once, recorded per line. Calculation readiness: unit and plastic-part data in the component inventory, ready for the methodology's averaging rules. Supply: certified post-consumer feedstock contracted at volumes the percentages imply, in a market every competitor is simultaneously entering. Evidence: chain-of-custody certification and supplier documentation filed per line, refreshed on the certificates' own cycles.

The station's guides take the four in order of the questions businesses actually ask: how is it calculated, what counts, what about food contact, what about bottles, what about chemical recycling and mass balance, how is it certified, what is exempt, how do we buy it, what can we claim, what about other materials, and how do we face the 2040 step.

A worked range fixes the categories better than definitions. A drinks brand sells water in PET bottles (bottle category: 30 then 65), a food line in PET trays (contact-sensitive PET: 30 then 50), cleaning products in HDPE bottles (general plastic: 35 then 65), and caps and closures across all three (inside each unit's calculation, unless the 5 percent rule shelters a given part). Four procurement problems follow from one product catalogue, at three different scarcities and two different dates. The range review that treats 'recycled content' as one workstream will misprice all four; the review that splits by category, as this station does, prices each against its own supply reality.

That is the pillar's closing lesson: Article 7 looks like a single duty and behaves like four markets wearing one article number.

Close the pillar with the habit the whole station teaches: never quote a recycled-content figure without its four coordinates - category, basis (post-consumer share of the plastic part), evidence (the certificate chain), and date (the target step it is judged against). A figure with its coordinates is a compliance position. A figure without them is a slogan, and the regulation's next fifteen years are, in large part, the story of slogans being replaced by positions. The guides that follow exist to make that replacement mechanical.