The PPWR moved packaging duties off Member States and onto one named company per pack

Legal form: from 27 transpositions to one text

A directive binds Member States as to the result and leaves them the form and method. Directive 94/62/EC said so in its own terms: Article 22(1) required Member States to bring into force the national laws needed to comply before 30 June 1996 (EUR-Lex consolidated text). The companies that made, filled and sold packaging never read the Directive as their legal duty; they read Germany’s packaging ordinance and later its Packaging Act, France’s decree, Spain’s packaging law, and so on.

The Directive also protected the single market with one short article. Article 18 of the consolidated Directive reads: “Member States shall not impede the placing on the market of their territory of packaging which satisfies the provisions of this Directive.” In practice that protection depended on each Member State’s transposition. Recital 1 of Regulation (EU) 2025/40 puts the case in one line: “Fragmented rules and vague requirements cause uncertainty and additional cost to economic operators.”

The Regulation’s answer is direct application. It entered into force on 11 February 2025 and has applied since 12 August 2026 (Legislative Observatory summary). Article 4(2) bars Member States from prohibiting, restricting or impeding compliant packaging on sustainability, labelling or information grounds, according to the SPI depth record for PR-EU-001, which draws on the Commission’s guidance. National room remains only where the text leaves it, for example Article 70(4), which lets Member States keep restrictions on the Annex V point 2 and 3 formats until 1 January 2030.

What stays national matters as much as what moves. Member States still designate competent authorities (Article 40), run producer registers and EPR schemes (Articles 44 to 47) and set penalties (Article 68). Germany, for example, replaced its Packaging Act with the VerpackDG from 12 August 2026 to align national law with the Regulation (PR-DE-001); the SPI Ledger on Germany’s packaging law in 2026 covers what that act requires.

Essential requirements become article-by-article obligations

The Directive’s product rules were short. Article 9(1) allowed packaging on the market only if it complied with all the essential requirements of the Directive, including Annex II (EUR-Lex consolidated text). Annex II had three points: manufacturing and composition (minimum weight and volume, design for reuse or recovery, limits on noxious substances), the reusable nature of packaging, and its recoverable nature, split into material recycling, energy recovery, composting and biodegradability. Article 11 added a heavy metals cap of 100 ppm for lead, cadmium, mercury and hexavalent chromium combined, reached in steps of 600, 250 and 100 ppm.

The Regulation takes that ground and writes each element as its own article with a test, a method and a date (Exhibit 3). The Commission’s guidance notes that the new Article 6(1) on recyclability is similar to Annex II point 3(a) of the Directive, but not the same, and that manufacturers follow the Directive’s requirements until Article 6(2)(a) applies.

Three things change in the nature of the duty, not only its location. The first is measurability. Annex II asked that weight and volume be kept to the minimum adequate amount for safety, hygiene and acceptance, a qualitative test that harmonised standard EN 13428:2004 turned into a documented procedure. The Regulation adds numbers: a 50% empty space cap for grouped, transport and e-commerce packaging in Article 24, and A to C recyclability grades under Article 6.

The second is the start date. Under the Directive, every essential requirement applied from the same date, three years after entry into force. Under the Regulation, PFAS limits in food-contact packaging have applied since 12 August 2026, the harmonised label no earlier than 12 August 2028, and minimisation, empty space and the Annex V format restrictions from about 1 January 2030 (SPI depth record PR-EU-001, citing the Commission’s guidance).

The third is that some duties have no Directive ancestor at all. Exhibit 4 lists them. A brand owner’s gap analysis that only maps old requirements onto new articles will miss them.

The Directive’s Member State targets did not vanish. Recital 151 of the Regulation says that the recycling targets added by Directive (EU) 2018/852, and the rules for calculating them, should be retained. The 2025 and 2030 rates, 65% and 70% of all packaging waste by weight, now sit in Article 52, and Article 43 adds per-person waste prevention targets of 5%, 10% and 15% against 2018 for 2030, 2035 and 2040. The SPI Ledger on PPWR waste prevention targets covers what those mean for brands.

Who is obliged: the manufacturer and the producer

The Directive never said which company had to comply. Article 3(11) defined economic operators only as a list: suppliers of packaging materials, packaging producers and converters, fillers and users, importers, traders and distributors, and authorities and statutory organisations (EUR-Lex consolidated text). It defined neither a manufacturer nor a producer; the word producer appears only in the definition of packaging, as the start of the chain that runs from the producer to the user or consumer. National laws filled the gap in their own ways, which is one reason a pack could have a different obligated company in each country.

The Regulation separates two roles that national EPR law often merged (Exhibit 5). The manufacturer carries product compliance: design, documentation and labels. The producer carries extended producer responsibility in each Member State: registration, reporting and fees.

The manufacturer test turns on the brand. Article 3(1)(13)(a), as quoted in the Commission’s guidance, makes the manufacturer the person that has packaging or a packaged product designed or manufactured under its own name or trademark, whether or not any other trademark is visible on the pack or product. Point (b) carves out micro-enterprises: if the brand owner is a micro-enterprise and its packaging supplier is located in the same Member State, the supplier is the manufacturer. A micro-enterprise has fewer than 10 employees and turnover or a balance sheet total of no more than EUR 2 million (SPI depth record PR-EU-001).

The Commission draws a firm conclusion from that wording, in section 2 of its guidance of 10 June 2026: “The wording of the definition of manufacturer indicates that there is always only one manufacturer in a supply chain within the meaning of the PPWR.” The same notice adds that the manufacturer is the sole economic operator bearing legal responsibility for compliance with the sustainability and labelling requirements, whoever drafted the declaration.

The producer is fixed country by country. The guidance says that to decide where EPR obligations apply, it is necessary to check where the packaging is first made available on the territory of a Member State, and that the producer pays the EPR fee in the Member State where the packaging is expected to become waste. One company can therefore be the single EU manufacturer of a pack and the producer in several markets. The SPI Ledger on the authorised representative rule for non-EU exporters covers the cross-border producer cases in detail.

A framework: six supply-chain positions

The two definitions combine into a small number of positions. SPI groups them into six, drawn from Article 3(1) points (13), (15) and (17) as quoted in the Commission’s guidance and from the German register authority’s reading (Exhibit 6). Each position tells a brand owner or converter which file it owns and which it only supports.

Position 3 needs care. A converter is the manufacturer only of packaging that it places on the market under its own name or trademark. Once a brand owner fills that packaging and sells the product under its own brand, the brand owner is the manufacturer of the packaged product. SPI has not yet confirmed how the Commission treats the hand-over between an empty stock pack and the filled product; the guidance’s one-manufacturer reading points to the brand owner for the finished pack.

Conformity and documentation: from presumption to a signed file

Under the Directive, proof of conformity was a presumption. Article 9(2) required Member States to presume compliance for packaging made to harmonised standards whose references were published in the Official Journal, or to recognised national standards where no harmonised standard existed. The Directive asked for no EU declaration of conformity and no technical file; whatever evidence a company held was a national or commercial matter.

The Regulation imports the product-law model familiar from other EU single market rules. Article 15(2), in the unofficial German text, requires the manufacturer to carry out the conformity assessment under Article 38, or have it carried out, and to prepare the technical documentation listed in Annex VII before placing packaging on the market, then draw up an EU declaration under Article 39. The Commission’s guidance confirms that the assessment can be carried out by the manufacturer or by someone else on its behalf, for example a laboratory or a certification scheme, and that the declaration must be drafted by the manufacturer or its authorised representative.

Standards have not disappeared. The Commission’s guidance says the Directive’s regime and EN 13430:2004 govern recyclability until Article 6(2)(a) applies, and that, under Article 70(1)(b), the existing minimisation requirements and their compliance standard, EN 13428:2004, stay in effect until the end of 2029. The Regulation’s own presumption of conformity, for harmonised standards and common specifications, sits in Articles 36 and 37. SPI analysis: existing EN 13428 and EN 13430 files are the first evidence for the new declaration, not a stack to archive.

Scenario: how many files a portfolio holds

The retention rule turns documentation into a stock that grows until it reaches a steady level. Every new or changed pack version needs its own assessment under Article 15(4), and each file stays on record for 5 or 10 years. SPI modelled three portfolios (Exhibit 8). Launch and change rates and the reusable share are SPI assumptions; the retention periods are from Article 15(3).

Two features of the result matter. Reusable packaging carries double weight: in the high case it is a fifth of new versions but a third of the files held, by SPI’s calculation. And the stock takes 5 years to fill for single-use packs and 10 for reusable ones, so the first years understate the load. Under the Directive, the same portfolio carried no EU-level file count at all.

Which regime governs each requirement, year by year

Because the Directive’s essential requirements are being retired one at a time, a single pack can be governed by the Directive on one requirement and the Regulation on another for several years. Exhibit 9 sets out the position SPI reads from the Commission’s guidance and Article 70(1).

The material code row carries a detail that is easy to miss. Article 70(2) repeals Decision 97/129/EC, which set the numeric and letter codes printed on packs under Article 8(2) of the Directive, from 12 August 2028. Article 70(1)(a) keeps Article 8(2) alive until 30 months after the implementing act under Article 12(6) of the Regulation enters into force. SPI has not yet confirmed how those two dates interact if the label act is late; the SPI Ledger on PPWR labelling tracks that act.

Re-mapping the legal references

Article 70(5) of the Regulation, in the unofficial German text, says that references to the repealed Directive are to be read as references to the Regulation according to the correlation table in Annex XIII. SPI has not yet read Annex XIII against the Official Journal. Exhibit 10 is SPI’s working map from article titles, for specification and contract clean-up, and it should be checked against Annex XIII before it replaces any reference.

The old references sit in more places than most teams expect: supplier specifications that cite Annex II of Directive 94/62/EC, heavy metals statements that cite Article 11, food-contact declarations that bundle packaging compliance, and customer contracts that warrant compliance with a named national transposing law. SPI analysis: a warranty of compliance with a law that has been replaced, such as Germany’s former Packaging Act, may no longer describe the buyer’s real risk, which is a breach of the Regulation by the manufacturer of record.

The national layer that remains

Direct application does not remove national law; it narrows its job. Exhibit 11 sets out what Member States still decide.

The repeal timeline

DG ENV states that the Directive was generally repealed on 12 August 2026 and that some provisions continue to apply after that date. Article 70(1), in the unofficial German text, names them in four points: (a) Article 8(2) on material identification, until 30 months after the Article 12(6) implementing act enters into force; (b) Article 9(1) and (2), for the minimisation requirement in Annex II point 1, first indent, until 31 December 2029; (c) Article 5(2) and (3), Article 6(1)(d) and (e) and Article 6a, until 31 December 2028; and (d) Article 12(3a) to (4) on reporting, until 31 December 2028, except the transmission of data to the Commission, until 31 December 2029.

The 2029 dates matter for planning. EUR-Lex lists 31 December 2028 as the date the Directive will no longer be in force (SPI depth record PR-EU-013), but points (b) and (d) of Article 70(1) run a year longer, and point (a) has no fixed end. SPI analysis: files that rely on the Directive’s minimisation rule should be kept valid to the end of 2029, not 2028. The SPI Ledger on the PPWR after 12 August 2026 covers what applies in each year from the Regulation’s side.