Brazil Decree 11.413 reverse logistics: three certificates packaging producers can use to prove targets

The legal stack: one law, four decrees and a set of portarias

Decree 11.413 is the middle layer of a system that has been built in steps since 2010. Exhibit 2 sets the layers out in date order. SPI tracks the decree as rule PR-BR-001 on the Brazil page of the SPI Regulation Tracker.

Decree 10.936 of 12 January 2022, which regulates the PNRS and revoked the earlier Decree 7.404 of 2010, sets the frame Decree 11.413 works inside. Its Article 18 says reverse logistics systems are implemented through sectoral agreements, regulations issued by the government, or commitment terms, and its Article 12 creates a National Reverse Logistics Program coordinated by the Ministry. Article 15 required every system to be integrated into SINIR within 180 days of publication and created the electronic waste transport manifest on which Decree 11.413’s final destination certificate later rests.

The information duty comes from the law itself, and it is what makes a certificate file worth keeping in order.

How Brazil Decree 11.413 reverse logistics proof works

The decree applies to public and private legal and natural persons with responsibilities in reverse logistics systems under Article 33 of the PNRS, and Article 3 lists ten aims. The first three are to improve physical and logistics infrastructure, to give scale to recycling, and to make reverse logistics and recycling systems work together; others give added value to the recycling chain, especially for waste pickers.

Voluntary does not mean optional compliance. A company outside a collective model must run its own individual system (Art. 24), backed by the same audited invoices and manifests (Art. 24 §1). What the decree makes voluntary is the instrument: a company can prove its target through its own audited results, or it can hold a certificate that a management entity issues under its statute (Art. 23).

Three actors carry the system. Management entities (entidades gestoras) structure and run collective systems, must be legal entities registered in SINIR (Art. 21) and issue the certificates (Art. 23). Accredited results auditors check the evidence (Arts. 28 and 29). The Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change monitors each system, sets uniform criteria, publishes results and accredits the auditors through a public call (Art. 27). Exhibit 3 turns the choice between certificates into five questions.

The CCRLR: credit for mass already recycled

The CCRLR is the workhorse. Article 5 II defines it as a document issued by the management entity that proves the return to the production cycle of a mass equal to the company’s obligation, and Article 7 lets manufacturers, importers, distributors and traders acquire it to prove their targets. Article 8 makes it a single document per company adhering to the collective model, founded on the final destination certificate and on the electronic invoices of sales of products or packaging shown to have returned to the manufacturer or recycler.

That last clause matters. The CCRLR is not a credit for collection or for money spent. It is a claim on mass that a recycler has bought and received, and the invoice chain is the proof. A tonne collected by a cooperative but never sold to a recycler, or sold between two wholesalers, supports no credit. The Ministry made the second point explicit in Communiqué 005 of 16 October 2024: middle-of-chain invoices between wholesalers are generally not accepted because they cannot guarantee traceability and could be counted twice, with a one-time exception for the 2023 report.

The same communiqué set the first operating rule for timing. Certificates could be issued only from April 2023, and certificates issued in 2024 did not count toward the 2023 report. For buyers that means the certificate’s issue date, not only the invoice date, has to fit the reporting year.

The CERE: rewarding structuring projects with waste pickers

The CERE certifies a company as the holder of a structuring project for recovering recyclable materials (Art. 5 III), and companies subject to reverse logistics that invest in such projects may ask the management entity to issue it (Art. 9). The bar is set in Article 9 §1, which counts a project as structuring only if it meets five conditions at once. Exhibit 4 lists them.

One flexibility is written in. Under Article 9 §2, structuring projects that receive material from the public separate collection system and operate in formal partnership with the municipalities responsible for urban cleaning may count quantitative targets regardless of the type of material recovered. SPI analysis: that is the only place in the decree where material type stops mattering, so a project built with a municipality can cover a glass or metal shortfall with paper or plastic; a CCRLR bought on the open market cannot do the same.

The Ministry treats the five tests strictly. Its 2024 and 2026 communiqués both state that only programs that meet Article 9 §1 count as structuring, and the March 2026 version adds that every management entity must carry out structuring actions aimed at waste pickers and describe them in its report. That duty applies whether or not the entity issues CERE certificates.

The future mass credit: booking the target in advance

The future mass credit lets a company claim its target in advance for recyclable mass that a new investment will recover (Art. 5 IV). Companies that implement a structuring reverse logistics system may ask for it (Art. 10), and the system must involve investment in new initiatives that produce real recovery and additional recovered mass in the medium term (Art. 11). The target behind it is set from three inputs in Article 12: packaging placed on the market by the partner companies in the previous year, a statistical projection of later volumes, and the general targets in the packaging reverse logistics rules. Implementation may last no more than five years (Art. 13).

The asset transfer rule is the feature most likely to surprise a finance team. Equipment bought under the project passes to the picker organisations, so the company books the recovery and the organisation keeps the balers, presses or trucks. SPI analysis: the future mass credit is therefore closer to a grant with a recovery claim attached than to a forward purchase of recycled tonnes, and it should be approved as such in capital budgets.

The invoice is the evidence

Everything above rests on Article 15. Electronic invoices issued by operators for the sale of recyclable material are accepted for issuing any of the three certificates once they are homologated, and homologation by the results auditor has two parts: confirming that the invoice is authentic, unique and does not conflict with others, and confirming that the final recipient received the declared mass, through a final destination certificate issued in SINIR’s waste transport manifest system (Art. 15 §1). The auditor, paid by the management entity, also audits invoice traceability and the actual return of mass to the manufacturer or recycler every year (Art. 15 §2).

The decree then sets an order of priority. Invoices should preferably come from sales by individual waste pickers and by picker cooperatives and associations (Art. 15 §5), and management entities must exhaust results from those organisations before using recycling credits from other logistics operators (Art. 15 §6). For packaging in general, Article 17 says invoices must come from pickers and their organisations, and its sole paragraph allows credits from other operators only once those are exhausted. Exhibit 6 shows who may issue an eligible invoice and to whom.

Behind the invoices sits a second data layer. Article 18 requires the management entity of a collective model to run an anonymised electronic information system of the black box type, capturing the quantities of products and packaging placed on the market and returned, confidentially and integrated with the SINIR manifest. That is what lets an entity issue a certificate per company without each company seeing its competitors’ tonnages.

The invoice window: why timing decides which tonnes count

Article 15 §4 accepts only invoices issued in the current or the immediately previous fiscal year. The Ministry applies the rule report by report.

Exhibit 7 applies the same rule to each report year since the decree took effect. Decree 12.688 copies the window for plastic packaging in its Article 8 §4.

SPI calculation: an invoice dated January 2025 can still back the 2026 report filed on 30 July 2027, about 30 months later. An invoice of December 2024 cannot, and has already expired. Each invoice can be used once, so a 2025 tonne already sold into a 2025 certificate is no longer available for 2026, which is why stock held by a management entity matters at year end.

The manifest layer is tightening on a fixed calendar. Under Article 31, companies had 12 months and pickers and their organisations 24 months to adopt the manifest tool, with proof by invoice alone until then and one extension allowed. The Ministry’s 2026 communiqué records that Portaria GM/MMA 1.037/2024 moved the company deadline from 14 April 2024 to 14 April 2025 and the picker deadline from 14 April 2025 to 14 April 2027. From that date, 163 days after this piece’s publication by SPI’s count, picker mass will also need a final destination certificate.

Results auditors and management entities

The results auditor is a private legal entity, accredited and supervised by the Ministry, that stands between the invoice and the certificate. Article 29 lists its duties, and Exhibit 8 sets them out. The decree also builds in a firewall: an auditor may not trade results or issue, buy or sell certificates, and a certificate issued in breach is void (Art. 29 §§1 and 2).

The Ministry has filled in the accreditation rules by portaria. Portaria GM/MMA 1.117/2024 sets criteria for results auditors and opened the first public call; according to a Mayer Brown summary of 9 August 2024, auditors must not be manufacturers, importers, distributors or traders linked to the system, and must not hold business relationships that give them an interest in their decisions. Portaria GM/MMA 1.102/2024 sets criteria for management entities of national packaging in general systems, including national scope; the Ministry’s 2026 communiqué says national coverage must reach every state within 36 months of that portaria. Portaria GM/MMA 1.561 of 2 January 2026 then amended both and fixed yearly windows: 1 to 31 March for management entities and 1 to 30 April for auditors, with no filings outside them, according to a FIEMG note.

The management entity’s duties are in Article 22: run the system, publish its results, run a communication plan, and file a results report with the Ministry by 30 July each year covering 1 January to 31 December of the previous year (Art. 22 IV). By the same date it must send the list of adhering companies, with their tax numbers and main activity, and proof that each met its target for the previous year (Art. 22 §4). The Ministry may cancel an entity’s SINIR registration for non-compliance, after a letter that lets it cure the irregularity (Art. 25 §§2 and 3), and late reports can suspend an entity’s accreditation under Annex V of Portaria 1.102/2024, according to the 2026 communiqué.

Brazil's 2024 results against the targets

The certificates prove a share of a national target, and that target has risen in steps. The Ministry applied 22% to the 2023 performance year and 30% to 2024 for packaging in general, aligned with the National Solid Waste Plan (Planares), according to its Communiqué 001/2024 as recorded in SPI’s Brazil note. For 2025 its March 2026 communiqué gave a national figure of 31.25%, by linear interpolation between 2024 and 2028, but the corrected version of 8 May 2026 says reports for 2025 will be approved or rejected on the 2024 values, with 31.25% only as a reference.

The 2024 figure comes from FIEMG’s 27 April 2026 summary of a Ministry communiqué on results, which describes the recovery level as still moderate against the aims of the PNRS. SPI has not yet confirmed the tonnages against the Ministry’s own text. For comparison, the Ministry reported 25% and 985.7 thousand tonnes for 2022; the two bases differ, so SPI does not read the change as growth in tonnes.

Targets are regional too. The national value is split across five regions, and the Ministry’s figures show how far the North and Northeast start below the Southeast (Exhibit 10).

SPI scenario: how many tonnes of proof a portfolio needs

The useful number for a company is not the rate but the tonnes, and the share of them that must come from picker organisations. Exhibit 11 applies the published rates to a portfolio of 10,000 tonnes of packaging in general placed on the market in the previous year.

The national picture in Exhibit 9 sets the scarcity. If placed-on-market tonnage held at the 2024 level, the national surplus over the requirement would fall from about 122,000 tonnes at 30% to about 83,000 tonnes at 31.25% and about 28,000 tonnes at 33%, by SPI’s calculation, and would turn into a gap of about 35,000 tonnes at 35%. SPI analysis: eligible tonnes become scarcer as rates rise, and the priority rule means the scarcest part is picker-sourced mass. A company that relies on CERE status, or on a management entity that does, should test whether picker partnerships of 12 months or more can grow as fast as its target.

The same arithmetic runs in a second currency-free direction. A company that reduces its packaging by 1,000 tonnes lowers next year’s proof need by 300 tonnes at the 30% value, because each year’s target is set on the previous year’s placed-on-market quantity. That is the link between design work and the certificate budget.

Where the proof can fail

Decree 11.413 sets no fines. The exposure sits with the underlying duty: Decree 10.936 added to Article 62 of Decree 6.514 of 2008 an infraction for failing to meet the obligations of a reverse logistics system (item XII) and another for failing to keep reverse logistics information up to date (item XV). Exhibit 12 shows the ranges.

The import bar came from a different policy track. Decree 12.451 of 6 May 2025 regulates the exceptions to the PNRS ban on importing solid waste: it limits imports to the transformation of strategic materials and minerals in industrial processes (Art. 3) and asks industry to prefer domestic waste that benefits picker cooperatives (Art. 7). Its Article 5 then closes the certificate route.

Decree 12.451 does not amend Decree 11.413; it bars a use of its certificates. SPI’s tracker record originally described it as an amendment, and the corrections file already rewords that.

The plastic decree builds on the certificates

Decree 12.688 of 21 October 2025, which creates the national plastic packaging system and its regional targets, is covered in Ledger 28. What matters here is how it uses Decree 11.413. It adopts the earlier decree’s definitions where they fit (Art. 3), accepts the CCRLR, the CERE and the future mass credit as proof for participants in the collective model (Art. 12), requires invoices to be homologated by a results auditor under Article 15 of Decree 11.413 (Art. 8 §1), keeps the same two-year invoice window (Art. 8 §4), and ties plastic results to invoices and manifests drawn first from picker organisations, citing Article 15 §6 of Decree 11.413 (Art. 16 §2). It also points cooperative service contracts to Decrees 11.413 and 11.414 (Art. 10 VI).

Decree 12.688 adds one rule the 2023 decree lacks. For mass from picker cooperatives and associations, it accepts entry invoices issued by recycling industries or by wholesale waste traders (Art. 8 §5), which helps organisations that cannot issue sales invoices themselves. SPI analysis: a brand with both plastic and other packaging now works to one evidence standard with two target sets, and Portaria 1.561/2026, as summarised by FIEMG, lists paper and board, metals and glass for the packaging in general accreditation rules without naming plastic. SPI has not yet confirmed why plastic is absent from that list.

The design differs from Asia’s. India’s plastic EPR certificates are generated on a central government portal, as SPI’s India piece sets out, and the Philippines relies on notarised diversion certificates per company and a third-party audit, as the Philippines EPR Act piece shows. Brazil sits between them: private management entities issue the certificates, but accredited auditors check every invoice against federal tax records. None of the three sets a per-tonne fee of the European kind priced in Ledger 04.