Materials and recyclability
Designing packaging so it can be collected, sorted and reprocessed at scale, and under PPWR a legal requirement graded from A to E.
Design for recycling means treating recyclability as a design constraint rather than an end-of-life hope. In practice it covers material choice, the number of materials in a pack, the separability of components, pigmentation, label and adhesive selection, and closure design.
PPWR converts this into a grading system. Packaging is assessed against design-for-recycling criteria and assigned a performance grade; packaging that falls below the threshold grade may not be placed on the market once the relevant date applies. This is a market-access rule, not a fee adjustment, which distinguishes it from eco-modulation.
The recurring failure modes are consistent across categories: carbon black and dark pigments that defeat near-infrared sorting, PVC or metallised labels on PET, multi-material laminates that cannot be separated, and adhesives that survive fibre repulping.
The EU regulation that replaces the packaging directive with directly applicable rules on recyclability, recycled content, reuse and labelling.
Whether packaging is actually collected, sorted and reprocessed into new material at scale, not merely whether it is theoretically recyclable.
The optical sorting technology used in most material recovery facilities, which cannot detect carbon-black pigmented plastics.
Adjusting EPR fees up or down according to the environmental performance of the packaging, rewarding recyclable design and penalising problem formats.
Packgine resolves your packaging to component level and applies the rules of every market you sell into.