New EU Packaging Regulation: How to Ensure Your Business Complies

The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, or PPWR, applies from 12 August 2026. That date is days away, not years away, and it replaces a 30 year old directive with a single regulation that applies identically across all 27 member states rather than 27 slightly different national versions of the same rules.

Here is what the PPWR requires, what changes on 12 August, the deadlines that follow, and how Truvio PIM fits into getting your packaging data ready.

What is the PPWR?

The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2025/40) was adopted in December 2024 and entered into force on 11 February 2025, replacing the previous Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive. Where the old directive had to be transposed into national law by each member state, the PPWR is a regulation, meaning it applies directly and uniformly across the EU without local variation.

The PPWR covers all packaging and packaging waste, regardless of material or origin, whether industrial, retail, or household. Its core objectives are to:

• Reduce packaging waste, by restricting certain packaging formats and promoting reusable and refillable solutions
• Boost high quality recycling, with a goal of making all packaging on the EU market recyclable in an economically viable way by 2030
• Harmonize the rules, with EU wide standards on labelling, void space, and mandatory recycled content replacing the current patchwork of national requirements

What changes on 12 August 2026

From this date, businesses placing packaging or packaged goods on the EU market, including manufacturers, importers, distributors, and online marketplaces, must be able to document material, weight, function, and responsibility for individual products. Key requirements taking effect include:

• New legal definitions, including who counts as a manufacturer versus an end user
• Technical documentation and conformity assessment requirements
• A mandatory EU declaration of conformity
• Restrictions on certain substances, including PFAS and heavy metals in food contact materials
• New labelling and manufacturer information rules
• Clarity on whether a business acts as manufacturer, importer, distributor, or producer, which determines its specific data and responsibility obligations
• Documentation requirements from suppliers, covering materials, weight, ingredients, certificates, and test data

There is no general exemption for small or medium businesses. The specific obligations a company faces depend on the role it holds for each product, and both EU and non-EU companies placing packaging on the EU market must comply.

PPWR deadlines beyond August 2026

12 August 2026 is the general application date, but not every provision takes effect on that day. Requirements phase in gradually through 2040:

• 2028: Uniform labelling with harmonized recycling symbols
• 2030: All packaging must be recyclable in an economically viable way, and packaging that meets the design for recycling criteria may no longer be landfilled or incinerated
• 2032: Packaging placed on the market between February 2025 and August 2026 must be refurbished to meet the new labelling rules
• Through 2040: Reuse system obligations for industrial and commercial packaging continue to expand

The Commission has continued to publish clarifying guidance as the date approaches, including implementation guidance and FAQs in March 2026 and a further Commission Notice in June 2026 addressing PFAS calculation methodology, recycling and reuse derogations, and proof of compliance. Despite lobbying from both industry and the recycling sector for changes to the timeline, no formal delay has been introduced.

PPWR is a data problem before it is a legal one

The regulation reads as a set of legal obligations, but in practice, meeting it comes down to whether your packaging data actually exists in one place when you need it. Material composition, weight, function, and responsibility need to be documented at the level of the individual product, and for most businesses, that information currently sits scattered across PIM, ERP systems like Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, supplier documentation, and procurement, without being tied together.

That fragmentation is exactly what turns PPWR from a straightforward compliance checkbox into a genuine data and systems project. And because the rules phase in gradually through 2030 and beyond, the structure you put in place now needs to carry the next wave of requirements too, not just the obligations landing in August.

Categories of information typically required include:

• Materials data: composition by material type, such as cardboard, paper, ferrous metals, aluminum, glass, plastic, food and beverage cartons, and wood
• Recyclability data: whether materials are recyclable, the type of recyclability, and which standards they meet
• Sorting and disposal data: whether packaging is destined for recycling, residual waste, or hazardous waste, and whether it ends up as commercial or household waste
• Registration category: whether packaging is classified as primary, secondary, or tertiary
• Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) data: registration in national registers, associated fees, and regular reporting on packaging activities for any business branding or influencing packaging design

Truvio PIM: your PPWR compliance solution

A Product Information Management system is central to meeting PPWR requirements, ensuring the correct data is always available, up to date, safely stored, and effectively distributed to wherever it needs to go, whether that's a national register, a supplier audit, or your own reporting.

Truvio PIM makes it easy to collect packaging data from multiple sources, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, third party data pools, and supplier and partner feeds, and bring it together into a single, structured record per product. That means:

• A shared product model. Packaging data becomes part of your core product model rather than a side project with no clear owner, so materials, weight, function, and responsibility travel with the product record itself.
• Clear data ownership. Workflows and completeness rules make it clear who updates, validates, and owns packaging data as requirements evolve.
• One system, many markets. The same physical product often ships in different packaging depending on market and supplier. Truvio PIM lets you manage these variations at the product and component level, so a change in one market's packaging doesn't mean rebuilding the record from scratch.
• Integration across your systems. Truvio PIM connects to ERP systems including Dynamics 365 Business Central and Finance & Operations, supplier data, and procurement, so packaging documentation doesn't live in a spreadsheet nobody updates.

With the application date arriving in days rather than months, the businesses that get their packaging data structured now will be the ones ready for both the immediate requirements and the deadlines phasing in through 2030 and beyond.