Does the PPWR Apply to You? Scope, Exemptions, and the Packaging You Forgot

The Tea Bag Is Packaging Now

The tape holding your shipping box shut is packaging. The box is packaging. The air pillows inside are packaging. The sticker that says FRAGILE is packaging. And from 12 August 2026, the tea bag your customer drops into hot water is packaging too.

That last one is new. Under the 1994 Packaging Directive, single-serve beverage units that left the house with the spent product sat on the non-packaging side of the ledger. Regulation (EU) 2025/40 reverses course: Article 3 pulls permeable tea and coffee bags, and single-serve units made for machines, into the definition of packaging when they are used and disposed of together with the product. The stated reason is waste-stream contamination (recital 13). It took EU law three decades and two legislative instruments to settle the tea bag question. The answer is yes.

If the tea bag is in scope, assume your mailer, your pallet wrap, and your branded tissue paper are too. The PPWR's scope is the part of the regulation most businesses skim. It is also the part that decides whether the other 70 articles apply to you.

Scope: All Packaging, All Materials, No Floor

Article 2 is short and total. The PPWR applies to all packaging placed on the EU market, regardless of material, and to all packaging waste, whether it comes from industry, retail, offices, services, or households.

Count the thresholds in that sentence: zero. No minimum turnover. No minimum headcount. No minimum tonnage for the core product requirements. A sole trader shipping 40 parcels a month and a multinational shipping 40 million are reading the same articles.

Three groups regularly assume they are out and are not:

• Non-EU sellers. If your product arrives in the EU in packaging, someone in the chain answers for that packaging. Distance sellers shipping directly to EU consumers answer for it themselves. Our guide for non-EU sellers covers who picks up which obligation.
• Businesses that "don't make packaging." You buy plain boxes and fill them. Filling counts. Placing a packaged product on the market puts you in the chain of economic operators.
• Service businesses. The cup a cafe fills at the counter is service packaging. Empty on the shelf it is a product. Filled with coffee it is packaging. Same cup.

The Three Layers, Plus One for the Internet

The PPWR sorts packaging by function into sales packaging, grouped packaging, and transport packaging. Recital 10 confirms these are the old primary, secondary, and tertiary categories under new names, with no change in substance.

Then Article 3 adds a fourth term the old directive never had: e-commerce packaging, defined as transport packaging used to deliver products sold online or through other distance sales to the end user. The brown box, the poly mailer, the padded envelope. Explicitly named, explicitly regulated, and from 2030 subject to the 50 percent empty-space cap covered in our empty space rules guide.

One shipped product can wear all the layers at once. A bottle (sales), in a six-pack sleeve (grouped), on a stretch-wrapped pallet (transport), repacked into a mailer for the customer who ordered two (e-commerce). Four packaging items. Four entries in your compliance records.

The Packaging You Forgot Counts as Packaging

The definition in Article 3 is functional: an item used for the containment, protection, handling, delivery, or presentation of products. Components and ancillary elements integrated into packaging count as part of that packaging. Which produces a list of things businesses reliably forget:

• Tape. The tape holding the box shut is packaging. The box the tape roll shipped in was also packaging. This is not a koan. It is Article 3.
• Void fill. Air pillows, kraft paper, foam peanuts, molded pulp inserts. All of it.
• Labels and staples. Attached to packaging, they are part of the packaging. The hang tag on the product is packaging in its own right.
• Clothes hangers, conditionally. Sold with the garment: packaging. Sold separately: a product. The same hanger changes legal category depending on the invoice.
• Flower pots, conditionally. Used only for selling and transporting the plant: packaging. Intended to stay with the plant for its life: not packaging.
• The sticky label on an apple. Packaging.
• Tea, coffee, and beverage single-serve units. Permeable bags and machine capsules disposed of with the used product. Packaging, as of this regulation.

A Declaration of Conformity that describes "one cardboard box" while your warehouse adds tape, a label, and two air pillows describes packaging you do not actually ship.

Non-Packaging That Looks Like Packaging

The rule cuts the other way too. An item that is an integral part of the product, needed to contain, support, or preserve it throughout its lifetime, where everything is used, consumed, and disposed of together, is not packaging under Article 3. The wrapping paper sold on a roll in December is a product. The pot your ficus lives in is part of the ficus, commercially speaking. The hanger sold in a ten-pack is homeware.

For everything on the line between the two lists: Annex I of the regulation carries the indicative examples, and the Commission published interpretive guidance in 2026. Annex I is indicative, not exhaustive, so the functional definition still governs. We are not going to freelance a ruling on sausage casings here. When an item is genuinely borderline, check Annex I on EUR-Lex rather than a blog post. Including this one.

What Is Genuinely Exempt or Deferred

The PPWR grants relief per requirement, not per company. Nobody is exempt from the regulation. Specific packaging types are exempt from specific articles, on a schedule:

Requirement	Relief	Who gets it	Until	Legal basis
Recyclability design rules	Deferred	Immediate packaging of medicinal products, contact-sensitive packaging of medical devices and in-vitro diagnostics, contact-sensitive packaging for infant formula and foods for special medical purposes, dangerous-goods transport packaging	1 January 2035	Art 6(11)
Recyclability design rules	Carve-out	Sales packaging of lightweight wood, cork, textile, rubber, ceramic, porcelain, or wax	Subject to review	Art 6
Recycled content minimums	Exempt	The same medical and pharma group, dangerous-goods packaging, compostable plastic packaging, plastic components under 5 percent of the unit's weight	Commission review by 1 January 2028	Art 7(4)
Dangerous-goods transport rules	PPWR applies without prejudice to Directive 2008/68/EC	Packaging for dangerous-goods transport	Standing	Art 2(2)
Declaration of Conformity	None	Nobody	n/a	Arts 38-39

Read the last row twice. A pharma company whose blister packs enjoy the 2035 recyclability deferral still owes documentation from 12 August 2026. Deferral of one article is not exemption from the regulation.

There Is No Small-Company Exemption for the DoC

From 12 August 2026, every packaging type placed on the EU market needs a Declaration of Conformity under Articles 38 and 39. The regulation contains no SME carve-out for this. Not for micro-enterprises, not for sellers under any revenue line, not for anyone who only ships domestically within the EU.

The one size-based nuance worth knowing sits in the definitions, not the exemptions. Where a micro-enterprise (under 10 employees, up to EUR 2 million turnover) has packaging made under its own brand and the packaging supplier sits in the same Member State, the PPWR treats that supplier as the manufacturer. The obligations move up the chain. They do not evaporate, and you will want the paperwork trail proving where they moved. The mechanics are in our Declaration of Conformity guide.

Am I in Scope: The Decision List

Work down the list. Stop at the first yes.

1. Do you manufacture, import, or distribute packaging or packaged products in the EU? In scope.
2. Do you sell under your own brand products someone else packs? In scope. Own-brand counts as manufacturing for PPWR purposes, with the micro-enterprise supplier nuance above.
3. Do you ship to EU customers from outside the EU via distance sales? In scope, and the e-commerce packaging is your problem specifically.
4. Do you fill any packaging at the point of sale? Cups, bags, boxes at a counter: in scope as service packaging.
5. Is the item you are unsure about discarded separately from the product it carried? Almost certainly packaging.
6. Does the item stay with the product for its entire life? Likely an integral part, not packaging. Confirm against Annex I.
7. None of the above? You may genuinely be out of scope. Enjoy it. Most readers of this post are not.

For what in-scope actually requires and when, the compliance checklist covers the obligations and the timeline of every deadline covers the dates.

Or answer six questions and let the tool do the sorting: check whether the PPWR applies to your company. It is faster than reading Annex I. Though somebody at your company should still read Annex I.