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EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation Enters Into Application Across Member States
The European Union’s landmark Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) has officially entered into application across all EU Member States. Establishing a single harmonized legal framework for the EU Single Market, the PPWR replaces fragmented national rules to streamline compliance for cross-border businesses, accelerate waste reduction, and lower reliance on imported virgin raw materials.
A central provision taking effect immediately is a strict restriction on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in food-contact packaging. Food packaging containing PFAS above stringent threshold limits can no longer be placed on the EU market.
Targeted Applications: The ban affects widely used food packaging formats, including fast-food wrappers, takeaway containers, pizza boxes, bakery paper, and microwave popcorn bags that historically utilized PFAS for oil, grease, and water resistance.
Health and Environmental Protection: By curbing consumer exposure to persistent “forever chemicals,” the regulation aims to protect public health while preventing long-term chemical accumulation in soil and water ecosystems.
The rollout of the PPWR follows a phased implementation timeline designed to drive systemic packaging circularity while providing operational certainty for industry stakeholders:
2028 — Harmonized EU Labelling: Introduction of standardized packaging labels across all Member States to simplify consumer sorting, streamline municipal recycling streams, and eliminate multi-billion-euro compliance friction for cross-border operators.
2030 — Waste Reduction & Single-Use Restrictions: Enforceable limits on maximum allowed empty space in packaging, restrictions on specific single-use plastic packaging formats, and mandatory reuse targets for economic operators.
2030 — Circular Design Mandates: Statutory requirements making all packaging placed on the EU market recyclable, alongside mandatory minimum recycled plastic content quotas for new packaging.
“The new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation is an investment in Europe’s future: it will help reduce waste, increase recycling, make food-contact packaging safer for consumers by limiting harmful substances such as PFAS, and reduce our dependence on virgin raw materials. These are essential steps towards a truly circular economy.
At the same time, the Regulation will replace fragmented national rules difficult to navigate for economic operators in the internal market. But new rules also come with adjustment costs, and we have worked intensively with market operators to implement the new rules in a pragmatic and unbureaucratic way.”
— Jessika Roswall, European Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy
The European Commission is actively preparing secondary legislation and technical implementation guidelines in close coordination with national authorities and industry stakeholders to ensure a seamless transition.
The implementation of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), phase-outs of PFAS chemistry in food-contact materials, harmonized digital labeling systems, and mandatory recycled content quotas will be primary focus areas at next year’s Go Circular Summit.
Covestro has officially announced its participation in Kollert, a publicly funded, interdisciplinary research consortium in Germany dedicated to developing recyclable product concepts for automotive lighting, mechatronics, and electronic components.
Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) under the CircularGlowUp framework and supervised by the Karlsruhe Project Management Agency (PTKA), the three-year project runs from June 2026 to May 2029 with a total funding volume of €4.371 million.
A team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has engineered a recyclable yarn made from polyethylene, offering a scalable solution to the global challenge of textile waste. Detailed in ACS Materials Letters, the research was led by Svetlana Boriskina, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, alongside first author SeongHyeon Kim and co-authors Duo Xu, Volodymyr Korolovych, Domingo Flores-Hernandez, Kaniz Moriam, and Daniel Braconnier.
The MIT team demonstrated that garments crafted from the engineered yarn can be melted down at the end of their lifecycle and respun into fresh fiber or molded into solid plastic hardware, such as buttons and belt buckles.
ABB and Swedish textile impact company Syre have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore how automation, electrification, and digital technologies can support the development of Syre’s first industrial-scale textile-to-textile recycling facility in Gia Lai province, Vietnam.
The exploratory collaboration provides a framework to assess how advanced process control, quality optimization, and electrical infrastructure can enable safe, efficient, and scalable production of circular polyester.