EPR vs PPWR – two charges, not one. The most common mistake Polish companies make

Key takeaways

• EPR and PPWR are two different things. EPR is a financial mechanism: it decides who pays for the collection and recycling of packaging waste. PPWR is a product regulation: it decides how packaging has to be designed and labelled, and whether it has to be reusable.
• They are not alternatives. PPWR does not abolish EPR. It keeps the EPR obligation and harmonises it across the EU (register of producers in Article 44, contributions in Article 45), and it ties the level of the fee to the recyclability of the packaging (eco-modulation).
• The most common mistake is treating the two regimes as a single line in the budget: “I have paid the fee, so I am compliant.” EPR is settled financially; PPWR is met through the design of the product. Neither is enough without the other.
• “Two charges” is shorthand. EPR is a charge paid outright; PPWR is a set of obligations that also cost money (redesign, recycled content, labelling) and that additionally change the level of your EPR fee.

• Two separate clocks. As a regulation, PPWR applies directly across the EU from 12 August 2026. The Polish EPR is being reshaped by the UC100 draft act, the Polish packaging bill, which is still a draft and not law. Both calendars have to be tracked at once.

   

EPR and PPWR are not the same thing – two different logics

Let us start with the source of the confusion. EPR and PPWR sound like two names for the same EU packaging revolution, so the market instinctively files them under one heading. In reality they are two regulatory orders that answer two different questions.

EPR answers the question: who pays for the waste? Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is the principle that whoever places packaging on the market is responsible for its later collection, sorting and recycling, and that responsibility is not only financial. It also has an organisational, record-keeping and reporting layer: you have to keep records of the packaging you place on the market, report tonnages and the levels achieved, and often organise the collection system itself. It is a mechanism for financing waste management: it shifts the cost from the municipality, and therefore from the taxpayer, to the producer and the importer. EPR does not say what your packaging should look like. It says how much you will pay, and what you have to document, because that packaging reaches the market.

One caveat is easy to lose when both regimes are read at once: the manufacturer of the packaging and the entity that settles EPR are not always the same company. The declaration of conformity is drawn up by the manufacturer of the packaging within the meaning of Article 3, point 13, of the PPWR, while the EPR obligation falls on the producer that places the packaging on a given national market. Sometimes these are two separate entities, and each then answers for its own stretch rather than for both at once.

PPWR answers the question: what packaging may be placed on the market? Regulation (EU) 2025/40 of the European Parliament and of the Council on packaging and packaging waste is a product regulation. It sets out the design and market requirements: recyclability (Article 6), a minimum share of recycled content (Article 7), re-use targets (Article 29), restrictions on substances such as PFAS (Article 5), the empty space ratio (Article 24) and labelling (Article 12). PPWR is not a price list; it is the specification of what may stand on a pallet and sit on a shop shelf in the first place. If you are starting from scratch, we cover the regulation as a whole in the introductory article (PPWR – what it means for companies from 12 August 2026).

At its simplest: EPR is the invoice and the report for the waste, PPWR is the condition for admitting packaging to the market. You can satisfy one and breach the other. You can pay EPR scrupulously and still place packaging that does not comply with PPWR, and the other way round: have packaging designed impeccably for PPWR and still owe the EPR settlement. These are two independent compliance tracks.

The most common mistake: “PPWR will replace EPR” (and why it is not true)

The mistake returns in three variants. Each is worth naming, because each costs differently.

Variant 1: “PPWR will abolish the Polish EPR.” It will not. PPWR does replace the old Packaging Directive 94/62/EC (repealed as of 12 August 2026), but the extended producer responsibility obligation is kept and harmonised across the whole EU: Article 44 establishes the register of producers and the reporting duties, Article 45 covers financial responsibility and contributions. The national fee system does not disappear; what changes is its EU framework.

Variant 2: “I pay EPR, so I am compliant with PPWR.” This confuses funding with product compliance. The EPR fee pays for the handling of the waste; it does not certify that the packaging meets the requirements on recyclability, recycled content or labelling. A contribution that has been paid does not buy off a non-compliant design.

Variant 3: overlooking the point of contact. This is the costliest of the three, because it is invisible at first glance. PPWR and EPR meet in the eco-modulation of fees: the EPR contribution is to be differentiated according to the recyclability classes of packaging defined in PPWR. Packaging that is harder to recycle will mean a higher fee, better designed packaging a lower one. Anyone who plans the old EPR rate in one place and the PPWR costs in another will miss the fact that one steers the other.

There is one conclusion for compliance and finance: this is not a choice between EPR and PPWR. They are two parallel obligations that have to be budgeted separately, and they interlock.

EPR in Poland: what a company pays today – and what UC100 changes

Extended producer responsibility is nothing new in Poland. It operates under the Act of 13 June 2013 on the management of packaging and packaging waste (ustawa o gospodarce opakowaniami i odpadami opakowaniowymi): that act governs recovery and recycling levels, reporting, the product fee (opłata produktowa, payable when the required levels have not been reached) and cooperation with packaging recovery organisations. This is the EPR that Polish companies know, and in its present shape it stays low enough that many of them barely notice it in the budget.

That is about to change. The reform of the national EPR is being prepared as the draft act on packaging and packaging waste (UC100), UC100 being the number under which the bill is listed in the Polish government’s legislative agenda. The direction is a move from today’s underpriced model to a real packaging fee funding the collection and recycling system, with a central operator (in the draft that role goes to NFOŚiGW, the National Fund for Environmental Protection and Water Management). For companies placing packaging on the market this means, above all, materially higher rates rising in stages and new reporting duties, with one crucial caveat: the level of the rates and the pace of the increase are assumptions in the draft, not binding law. The EPR framework is certain; the specific amounts in złoty per kilogram are not.

The scale of the future cost is disputed. Packaging-intensive sectors, agri-food first among them, warn of a marked rise in the cost of putting packaging on the market, but until the act is passed every specific figure remains a forecast.

The main thing to remember is that the status of UC100 is in motion. The draft has been through public consultation and inter-ministerial review and is now with the committees of the Council of Ministers (the latest text in RCL, the Polish government legislation portal, is dated 8 July 2026); as at 11 August 2026 it had been neither adopted by the Council of Ministers nor submitted to the Sejm. The dates of entry into force and the rates should be read as a statement of legislative intent, not as the law in force. We track the mechanics and the current status of the Polish act separately (UC100 – the Polish draft act: status). In this article, EPR is simply the charge for packaging waste, and it is that charge, not PPWR, that will hit the bill of the company placing packaging on the market hardest.

PPWR: what it adds to the bill on the product side

On the other side is PPWR, and here the cost is of a different kind. It is not a contribution settled once a quarter but the cost of adapting the packaging itself to the new requirements: spread over years, and real.

PPWR entered into force on 11 February 2025 and applies from 12 August 2026. As a regulation it binds directly in every member state, with no national transposition. From the cost perspective of a company placing packaging on the market, four areas matter most:

• Recyclability (Article 6). From 1 January 2030 (or 24 months after the delegated acts enter into force, if they come later), only packaging in recyclability class A, B or C may be placed on the market; the thresholds are A ≥ 95%, B ≥ 80% and C ≥ 70% (Table 3 of Annex II). From 1 January 2038, only classes A and B. That is a construction decision outright: the material, a mono-material or multi-material build, and whether the components can be separated.
• Recycled content (Article 7). A minimum share of recycled material in plastic packaging, with thresholds rising towards 2030 and 2040 – a direct material cost.
• Labelling (Article 12). Harmonised markings for composition and sorting, with harmonisation due around 2028 – the cost of redesigning artwork and print.
• Registration and reporting (Article 44). A mandatory register of producers – the administrative layer that ties PPWR to the national EPR.

On top of that come, depending on the type of packaging, the re-use targets for transport packaging (Article 29; we analyse them separately in the article on reusable transport packaging), the restrictions on substances (Article 5) and the empty space limit (Article 24). None of these requirements is a charge. Each is a cost of product compliance, and each can feed into a higher or a lower EPR fee.

The point of contact: eco-modulation, or how PPWR changes the EPR bill

This is the heart of the matter, and it is what misleading summaries lose. EPR and PPWR are not insulated from each other: PPWR steers the level of the EPR fee.

The mechanism is called eco-modulation. Contributions paid under extended producer responsibility (Article 45) are to be differentiated according to the recyclability class of the packaging, as defined in Article 6 of the PPWR. The logic is deliberate: packaging that is easy to recycle means a lower fee, packaging that is hard to recycle a higher one. Eco-modulation is mandatory under Article 6(8) of the PPWR: it will start to apply 18 months after the entry into force of the delegated and implementing acts that set out the recyclability classes (the Commission is to adopt the delegated acts by 1 January 2028), so in practice around 2029–2030.

For a company this means one thing: a design decision taken today under PPWR feeds directly into a recurring EPR fee in the years that follow. The two items cannot be counted in separate drawers. Redesigning packaging for a higher recyclability class is a one-off cost on the PPWR side and a permanently lower EPR contribution. Doing nothing is not only a risk of non-compliance with PPWR but also a higher EPR fee, if the rising national rates assumed in the UC100 draft are confirmed.

An illustrative scenario: what makes up a company’s bill

Illustrative scenario:

A Polish producer places a product on the market in plastic packaging. Today its regulatory packaging cost is mainly the product fee under the 2013 act, an item low enough not to affect decisions. The company assumes that PPWR is the same subject and does not plan for it separately. What happens when both regimes are running at once: 1. The EPR track (the fee). After the national reform (the UC100 draft), the packaging fee is to become a real, recurring cost item calculated from the mass and the type of packaging placed on the market. It comes back every settlement period. The pace and the level of the rates are, for now, assumptions in the draft, not law. 2. The PPWR track (the product). To keep placing the product on the market after 2030, the company has to adapt the packaging: recyclability (Article 6), recycled content (Article 7), labelling (Article 12). These are engineering and material costs, one-off and recurring, independent of the EPR fee. 3. The point of contact (eco-modulation). If the packaging stays in a low recyclability class, the fee from track 1 will be higher. If the company invests in a better design (track 2), the fee will fall. A company that has counted only one fee has underestimated both tracks, and both are running at the same time. Hence the claim in the title: two charges, not one. More precisely: one charge paid outright (EPR) plus a set of costly product obligations (PPWR) that modulate that charge on top.

We give no single magic figure for the combined cost. It depends on the sector, the type of packaging, the tonnages and the pace at which UC100 arrives, and some of the variables (national rates, PPWR implementing acts) are still open. Anyone promising a precise answer today to how much you will pay is selling a simplification.

There is a third thread to this bill. If the company is weighing returnable packaging (RTP) instead of single-use, that is not a one-off expense either: it is the purchase of a fleet, and then its planned replacement, washing and return logistics, all of them recurring costs. The question of the year from which reusable works out cheaper makes sense directionally, as a break-even point, not as a hard payback in months or a promise that you will save X złoty. That directional calculation is what the PPWR cost calculator in our PPWR hub is for, not this article.

How not to confuse the two regimes – an order of work for compliance and finance

A sensible sequence when you want to separate the two tracks in your own organisation:

1. Split the obligations in the budget. Two separate lines: the EPR fee (waste financing, settled nationally) and adaptation to PPWR (a product cost, EU-wide). Do not merge them into a single packaging costs line.
2. Map your packaging. What do you place on the market (types, masses, materials)? That is the basis both for the EPR contribution and for qualifying against the PPWR requirements.
3. Check the recyclability class. This is the parameter that links the two tracks: it decides compliance with PPWR and, through eco-modulation, the level of the EPR fee.
4. Keep two calendars. PPWR: the EU dates are fixed (12 August 2026, the 2030 and 2038 thresholds). EPR and UC100: the national date moves, so follow the legislative process.
5. Do not assume that one settles the other. A paid EPR does not make packaging PPWR-compliant, and PPWR-compliant packaging does not release you from the EPR fee.

If you want to see where your company stands on PPWR first, start with the PPWR knowledge hub and readiness audit. And if you work in a sector that EPR will hit hardest, look at our solutions for food processing and retail and FMCG.

FAQ

What is the difference between EPR and PPWR?

EPR (extended producer responsibility) is a financial mechanism: it sets out who pays, and how much, for the collection and recycling of packaging waste. PPWR (Regulation (EU) 2025/40) is a product regulation: it sets out how packaging has to be designed and labelled, and whether it has to be reusable. They are two different orders, not two names for the same thing.

Will PPWR replace EPR in Poland?

No. PPWR replaces the old Packaging Directive 94/62/EC, but it keeps the EPR obligation and harmonises it across the EU (register of producers in Article 44, contributions in Article 45). The Polish fee system does not disappear; its reform is being prepared as the national draft act UC100.

If I pay the EPR fee, am I compliant with PPWR?

No. The EPR fee pays for the handling of the waste. Compliance with PPWR is a separate matter: it concerns the design of the packaging (recyclability, recycled content, labelling, re-use). You can settle EPR and still place packaging that does not comply with PPWR.

What is eco-modulation of the EPR fee?

It is the differentiation of the EPR contribution according to the recyclability class of the packaging defined in PPWR: packaging that is easier to recycle carries a lower fee, packaging that is harder to recycle a higher one. This is the point at which PPWR directly affects the level of the EPR fee. Under Article 6(8) of the PPWR, mandatory eco-modulation starts 18 months after the delegated and implementing acts on the recyclability classes enter into force (delegated acts by 1 January 2028, so in practice around 2029–2030).

When do EPR and PPWR start to apply?

PPWR applies from 12 August 2026 and binds directly across the EU. The Polish EPR already operates under the Act of 13 June 2013; its reform will come with the UC100 act, which is still a draft with a movable date of entry into force. If you also place packaging on the market in other EU countries, remember that EPR is settled nationally: the rules, rates and reporting deadlines of each of those markets apply there and have to be tracked separately.

What is the most common mistake Polish companies make about EPR and PPWR?

Treating the two regimes as one item in the budget: assuming that PPWR will abolish EPR, or that a paid EPR contribution means compliance with PPWR. In fact they are two parallel obligations that have to be planned separately, and they interlock through eco-modulation.