§31 End of life treatment of separately collected packaging which is designed for recycling

Legal provisions: According to Article 48(1), ‘Member States shall ensure that systems and infrastructures are set up to provide for the return and separate collection of all packaging waste from the end users, and to facilitate its preparation for re-use and high-quality recycling. Packaging that complies with design for recycling criteria established in delegated acts adopted pursuant to Article 6(4) of this Regulation shall be collected for recycling. Incineration and landfill of such packaging shall be prohibited, with the exception of waste resulting from subsequent treatment operations of separately collected packaging waste for which recycling is not feasible or does not deliver the best environmental outcome’. Article 48(2) establishes that ‘in order to facilitate high-quality recycling, Member States shall ensure that systems and infrastructures for comprehensive collection and sorting are in place to facilitate recycling and to ensure that plastic feedstock is available for recycling’. Article 48(3) states that ‘Member States may derogate from the return and separate waste collection obligation in paragraph 1 of the Article for certain formats of waste, provided that collecting fractions of packaging waste together, or collecting packaging waste or fractions of such packaging waste together with other waste does not affect the capacity of such packaging or fractions of packaging waste to undergo preparing for re-use, recycling or other recovery operations and generates output from those operations which is of comparable quality to that achieved through separate collection’. Article 49: ‘By 1 January 2029, Member States shall set mandatory collection objectives and take the necessary measures to ensure that the collection of the materials listed in Article 52 is consistent with the recycling targets set out in that Article and with the mandatory recycled content targets set out in Article 7’. Commission’s interpretation: According to Article 48(1) of the PPWR, incineration and landfilling of packaging that complies with the Design for Recycling (DfR) criteria under Article 6 is not allowed. As the DfR criteria will be set in delegated acts specified set out in Article 6(4) by 1 January 2028 and apply two years later, the ban will take effect from 1 January 2030. The packaging of the formats and materials that are exempted from the DfR criteria are also exempted from the ban on incineration and landfilling. The exemptions include packaging materials such as lightweight wood, cork, textile, rubber, ceramic, porcelain or wax. There are also exemptions for certain packaging applications, such as medical devices and transport of dangerous goods. The exempted packaging can be collected with the residual waste and be incinerated or landfilled. All other packaging that will have to comply with the design for recycling criteria will have to be separately collected and, in principle, recycled. Packaging designed for recycling will not be allowed to be incinerated or landfilled when it becomes waste, except for the packaging waste, which has been separately collected, sorted and treated, but for which recycling is not feasible or does not deliver the best environmental outcome, as specified in Article 48(1). Member States can decide that packaging waste that is not separately collected, as described above, is sorted prior to energy recovery operations to remove packaging designed for recycling (Article 48(4) PPWR). Article 48(3) allows for a derogation from the separate collection requirements, if, first, such collection does not affect the capacity of packaging waste or fractions of packaging waste to be recycled and if, second, the resulting recycled material is of comparable quality as if it was separately collected. Even if such a derogation is used, the ban on incineration and landfilling still applies to the packaging waste collected by commingling streams of packaging waste. It is the obligation of the Member States to ensure that sufficient systems and infrastructure are set up to provide for separate collection of all packaging waste. To facilitate that the collection of packaging waste is consistent with the binding recycling targets and requirements for recycled content, Member States must also set mandatory collection objectives by 1 January 2029.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-07