PPWR vs the Old Packaging Directive: What Actually Changed

Three things changed fundamentally. The legal form: a regulation now sets the core rules directly in every member state, ending thirty years of national transposition differences on design and composition. The design regime: the directive's broad essential requirements are replaced by graded, measurable rules - recyclability grades, recycled-content percentages, an empty-space cap. And the paperwork: packaging now carries a conformity system - technical documentation and a declaration of conformity - of the kind other regulated products have always had.

What did not change is also worth saying plainly: member states still run collection, recycling targets and producer registers, and penalties are still national. The regulation harmonises the product rules, not the whole system.

Under the directive, Brussels set the frame and each member state wrote its own packaging law - Germany's Verpackungsgesetz, France's AGEC provisions and twenty-five others, similar in outline and different in every detail that cost money. Under the regulation, the design, composition, labelling and conformity rules are the regulation's own text. National law keeps the parts the regulation leaves to it: registers, fee mechanics in part, enforcement and sanctions. A business that learned to ask 'what does each country require?' must now ask two questions: 'what does the regulation require?' and then 'what does each country still administer?'

The directive asked that packaging be recoverable, minimised and under a heavy-metals ceiling, and left the demonstration largely to self-assessment against harmonised standards. The regulation replaces that with numbers: recyclability expressed as grade A, B or C against design-for-recycling criteria; recycled-content percentages for plastic packaging by category; a 50 percent empty-space ratio for grouped, transport and e-commerce packaging; reuse percentages for transport packaging. Each number has an assessment method and, through eco-modulated EPR fees, a price. Design decisions that used to be defended qualitatively will now be scored.

The declaration of conformity is the change most businesses will feel first. For packaging placed from August 2026, a technical file must stand behind it - materials, suppliers, assessments, test evidence where relevant - kept for five years for single-use packaging and ten for reusable. The directive era's light-touch presumption of conformity is replaced by a file an inspector can ask for. Businesses with product-compliance systems for other regulations will recognise the shape; businesses that treated packaging as unregulated will need to build it.

The transition question every warehouse asks is what happens to packaging produced under the directive and still in the chain when the regulation starts to apply. The regulation's application turns on placing on the market: packaging placed before 12 August 2026 was placed under the old law, and the new conformity machinery is not retroactive to it. Packaging placed from that date - including stock manufactured earlier but first made available after it - meets the new rules.

The practical consequence is a date line through the warehouse, not through the factory. Businesses that can evidence when stock was first made available hold a defensible position; businesses that cannot will find the argument decided by invoices and delivery notes rather than by intention. Record the placing dates for slow-moving lines now, while the paper trail is warm.

Not everything was rebuilt. The heavy-metals ceiling of 100 mg/kg for the sum of lead, cadmium, mercury and hexavalent chromium is the directive's limit, carried into Article 5 unchanged. The member-state recycling targets continue the directive's trajectory - 65 percent of all packaging waste recycled by 2025 and 70 percent by 2030, with per-material targets beneath them. EPR itself, the principle that the producer funds end-of-life, is the directive's architecture extended and hardened, not invented in 2024.

Files built honestly under the old regime - substance testing against the metals ceiling, material data per SKU, supplier declarations - remain the foundation of the Annex VII technical file. The work is extension and formalisation, not demolition. Businesses that kept good records under a light-touch law are, for once, being paid back for it.