The Packaging Regulation: One Rulebook, 27 Bills

Packaging is now governed by one EU law, but the fees that price it stay national and the criteria that lower them are still unwritten, so brands pay from 2026 before the system that rewards good design exists.

Open any parcel of clothes delivered in Europe and the regulated material is in your hands before the garment is: the polybag around the shirt, the tissue, the hang tag, the swing ticket, the box with room to spare. From 12 August 2026 all of it falls under one law, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, which replaces a packaging directive that governed the field since 1994. The move from a directive to a regulation was sold as harmonisation, one rulebook for the whole single market in place of national versions. In June 2026 the rulebook is real and most of its price tags are blank. Brands owe packaging fees from August, the amount is set country by country, and the design rules that decide whether they owe more or less take effect only in 2030, against criteria the Commission has not yet written. The law tells brands what to do from August and leaves the cost of doing it to be filled in later, in national offices.

What now counts as packaging

The first change is what the law decides to see. Packaging under the regulation is any item used to contain, protect, handle, deliver or present a product, whatever its material, and the definition reaches things the industry rarely counted. The polybag around a folded shirt is packaging. So are the tissue paper, the hang tag, the swing ticket, the dust bag that comes with a handbag, the shoebox, the carton a wholesaler ships in, and the hanger when it is sold with the garment. A textile bag counts the same as a plastic one. An item escapes the definition only when it is integral to the product and needed for its whole life, which a garment bag and a price tag are not. For a brand, things once written off as operating cost now carry reporting, design and fee obligations, and each has to be measured by weight and material before any of those obligations can be met.

One regulation, the articles that carry it

As a regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40 applies directly in every member state without national transposition, which ends the patchwork of national packaging laws that grew under the 1994 directive. It also leaves its own technical detail to be issued later. A handful of articles carry most of the weight. Article 6 requires all packaging to be recyclable. Article 7 sets minimum recycled content for plastic. Article 24 caps empty space. Article 43 sets waste reduction targets, and Articles 44 to 47 build the extended producer responsibility scheme that makes brands pay for the packaging they place on the market. The grades that decide whether packaging is recyclable, the method for measuring empty space, the harmonised producer register, and the modulation of fees are all left to delegated and implementing acts the Commission is still drafting. The text reads like a rulebook whose appendices are published separately and late. One of them, the harmonised reporting format, was due in February 2026 and has not appeared.

The dates that bind and the dates that define

The calendar separates what the law demands from what it still has to define. The demand track is close. The regulation applies from 12 August 2026, and from that date producer responsibility fees are owed on packaging placed on the EU market. The design track lands on 1 January 2030, when packaging must be recyclable by design, carry minimum recycled content, sit within the empty space cap, and be reduced to its minimum weight and volume. Between them sits the definition track, the one that moves. The criteria that sort packaging into recyclability grades are expected around January 2028, and member states then have 18 months to rewrite their fees around them, which places grade-based fees in 2031 at the earliest. The harmonised label is due from August 2028, the rules for reusable packaging from February 2027. Each has to exist before the obligation it governs can be met, and the gap between a demand and its definition is where the cost of compliance now sits.

Who carries the duty

The duty attaches to a role, not a size. Liability falls on the economic operator that first places packaging on the EU market, which can be the manufacturer, the importer, the brand, the distributor, the online marketplace or the fulfilment provider, depending on who puts the packaged product into the market first. A brand selling a jacket in a polybag to a European consumer is that operator. Unlike many EU files, the regulation grants no general exemption for small companies, so a small direct-to-consumer label carries the same core obligations as a multinational. A seller based outside the EU must appoint an authorised representative inside it for each market it enters. Several member states already show where the rest are going. France, Belgium and Italy modulate packaging fees by recyclability today, charging more for harder to recycle formats, which is the discipline the regulation intends to standardise across the bloc.

What the rules will require

The substance of the rules is a set of thresholds, some written and some still to come. Plastic packaging must contain minimum recycled content from 2030: 35% for the non-contact formats that cover most apparel packaging, including polybags, mailers, film and hangers, rising to 65% by 2040, with lower rates for contact-sensitive plastics. Packaging must also be recyclable by design from 2030, graded on a scale the Commission will set from A to E, with anything below grade C treated as non-recyclable and barred from the market, and the bar rising to grade A or B in 2038. From 2030 the empty space in grouped, transport and e-commerce packaging cannot exceed 50%, with fillers such as tissue, air cushions, bubble wrap and foam counted as empty space. The numbers are mostly fixed. The method behind them is not: the criteria that decide a recyclability grade are due around January 2028 and the formula for measuring empty space by February 2028, so a brand redesigning packaging in 2026 is aiming at targets whose measurement rules are still being written.

The bill owed before it can be priced

The most expensive part of the regulation is the one whose price is not yet set. A producer's fee follows a plain formula: the weight of each packaging material placed on a national market, multiplied by that country's base rate per tonne, multiplied by a modulation factor meant to reward recyclable design and penalise the rest. Two of the three factors are out of the brand's hands and not yet settled. The base rate is national, so the same polybag costs one amount in Germany and another in Spain, reported to a different register in each. The modulation factor, the part meant to make better packaging cheaper, depends on recyclability grades that do not exist until around 2028 and that member states have 18 months to apply, which leaves grade-based pricing landing near 2031. A brand is asked to redesign its packaging by 2030 to earn a discount the system cannot calculate until a year after. Until then fees are owed on the old national terms, so the obligation runs ahead of the incentive that is supposed to justify it.

How a fee is reported

The machinery a brand actually touches is registration and reporting, and it runs market by market. To comply, a producer registers in each country where it sells, reports the tonnage of packaging it placed there by material each year, and pays the fee that follows. The regulation promises to thin this out. A harmonised EU producer register and a common reporting format are meant to replace the national systems, so that a brand files once into a single format for the whole market. That single register is the closest thing the regulation offers a multi-market seller to relief, and it is also the piece running behind schedule, with the harmonised reporting format that was due in early 2026 still unpublished. Until it arrives, the harmonised regulation is run through the same national registers it was meant to consolidate, each with its own format, identifiers and deadlines.

What it costs and where it hurts

The visible cost of the regulation is small and the real cost sits behind it. A recyclability label or a printed code is cheap. The expense is in what the rules reach: recycled material that trades at a premium to virgin plastic, packaging redesigned and re-tested against eight minimisation criteria, reverse logistics built to collect and clean reusable formats, and a separate fee paid into every national scheme a brand sells through. For fashion the multiplier is returns. Clothing carries among the highest online return rates of any retail category in Europe, on Statista's 2022 figures, because garments are routinely ordered in several sizes with the surplus sent back. A returned online order is packaged, shipped, returned and repackaged, so the producer fee falls on the packaging at both ends. The waste reduction target the regulation sets, 5% per person by 2030 rising to 15% by 2040 against 2018 levels, is an obligation on member states. It does not cap any single brand's volume, even as e-commerce pushes the underlying number upward. When packaging fails the rules, enforcement returns to the member states, which set their own fines and thresholds, so the penalty for the same breach differs by country and no brand yet knows its number. The figures that would let a brand price all of this, the grades, the modulated fees, the national rates rewritten around them, arrive between 2028 and 2031. Until they do, the regulation is fully in force and only partly costable.

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