Transitional Rules and Existing Stock Under the PPWR

The PPWR has no warehouse amnesty and needs none, because its duties attach to placing on the market. Packaging placed before an obligation's start date was placed under the law of its day and is not retrospectively caught by that obligation; packaging first made available after the date meets the new rule, whenever it was manufactured. There is no general sell-through period written into the regulation beyond that act-based line - the line itself does the work a sell-through clause would do.

Everything practical follows from keeping the line visible: per batch, per consignment, the date goods were first made available, evidenced by the ordinary paper of trade.

Every transition sorts stock into three piles. Placed stock: already supplied onward - invoiced, delivered, listed. It belongs to the old law for the obligation in question, and its holder's remaining duties are the standing ones (traceability on request, honest information). Unplaced own stock: manufactured or imported but not yet supplied. It will be placed under the new law whenever it moves, so it must be brought up to the new standard before it can move - relabelled, refiled, or in design cases, redirected to channels where it remains lawful. Goods in production or on order: specifications can still change, and the transition question for them is contractual - whose cost is a mid-order rule change?

Most transition pain is pile confusion: unplaced stock accounted for as if placed, or contract terms silent on pile three. A one-page stock census against each major date - 2028 labels, 2030 design - resolves most of it.

Placing is evidenced by supply documents: invoices, delivery notes, warehouse release records, marketplace listing and first-sale dates. Production records prove making, not placing, and are the wrong evidence for the argument that matters. Businesses with batch-level traceability hold this naturally; businesses running pooled, unbatched stock should expect hard conversations at the first audit after each date and should introduce batch discipline before the 2028 labelling date, when the question becomes visible on the pack itself.

For imported stock, the placing event is the importer's first making available in the Union; customs clearance dates and first-supply dates are different paper, and the second is the operative one. Keep both, labelled as what they are.

Supply contracts that straddle a major date should say four things: which party bears the cost of bringing unplaced stock to the new standard; what happens to stock that cannot be brought up (return, redirection, destruction - costed in advance, not negotiated in a crisis); which party holds the placing evidence; and how specification changes triggered by delegated acts are instructed and priced. Contracts written in the directive era are commonly silent on all four, which is why the transition programme in a well-run business starts with its top twenty supply agreements, not its packaging designs.

One more transition runs in parallel: national packaging measures that the regulation displaces or constrains end on the regulation's logic, but national systems it preserves - registers, schemes, deposit arrangements in redesign - transition on national calendars. A business can therefore be fully transitioned at Union level and mid-transition in two member states at once. The member-state station carries those national clocks as dated snapshots; the Union clock in this station is the frame they hang in.

Two identical pallets of printed film sit in a converter's warehouse in July 2028, ahead of the harmonised labelling date. The first is invoiced and delivered to a filler in the first week of August, before the duty date: placed under the old labelling position, lawfully, and the filler packs and sells it through without a label offence. The second ships in the third week of August: placed after the date, it must carry the harmonised marks, and the converter - not the calendar - bears the overprint or write-down decision the contract should have priced in May.

Nothing about the film differs. Everything about its paperwork does. That is the whole doctrine of transitions in this regulation, and why the desk keeps repeating the placing-evidence habit until it sounds tedious: at every date line for fifteen years, the same two-pallet problem will recur in some warehouse, and it will be settled by documents, not intentions.