One month into PPWR, every Declaration of Conformity that Adrian Reyes, founder and CEO of Emission Core, has reviewed for clients has been sent back to them for correction or re-issue. In this article, he discusses where the big mistakes are being made and how to avoid them.
In a signed Declaration of Conformity that reached one of our clients in August, the field for heavy metals contained the single word “without”. Surprisingly, there is no laboratory behind it, no method and no report number, and Article 5(4) of Regulation (EU) 2025/40 asks for a measurement against a limit of 100 mg/kg for the four metals combined, which is not what arrived.
Until August the question that came in every week was whether we could show someone a Declaration of Conformity. As odd as it might sound, the problem since 12 August has been whether the document a supplier sent counts as one, and after a month of reading those documents for our clients the answer has been “no”every time, including for the best of them, for reasons that repeat from one company to the next.
The month itself was quiet on the enforcement side, with no inspections that we heard of and no fines, which is how the regulation was intentionally built. Article 68 gives Member States until 12 February 2027 to notify their penalty rules, and the second edition of the Commission’s FAQ, published in the first days of August, asks market surveillance authorities to require correction before they use the prohibition, withdrawal and recall measures in Article 62.
What happened instead is that purchasing departments across Europe sent the same email to their suppliers asking for the PPWR Declaration of Conformity, and then spent the rest of the month reading the paperwork that came back. What came back deserves a closer look. Prepare your cup of coffee because this will get very interesting.
In July I listed the three mistakes I was seeing every week, one declaration for the whole catalogue, a signed declaration with no technical file behind it, and phasing errors in both directions.
All three issues repeated in August as well. Declarations covering a whole catalogue came in, one signed off requirements that do not apply until 2030, another marked Article 5 as not applicable when Article 5 has applied to all packaging since 12 August, and the technical file was missing behind every declaration we opened.
What I had not listed turned out to be the bigger problem, because the answer that came back more often than any other was not a poor declaration but a different document altogether. Suppliers sent folders of REACH, SVHC and heavy-metals letters about the product inside the packaging, well prepared and properly signed.
One of the largest industrial parts distributors in Europe sent a one-page letter that quoted Article 39 and Annex VII correctly, explained what a Declaration of Conformity is, and attached none. Another supplier sent a signed and stamped declaration certifying conformity with a regulation number that is not the PPWR. A third, asked per SKU which role it held for each item, replied with a single sentence saying that it is a distributor, as if the word closed the file.
To be clear, none of these suppliers was evasive. Their regulatory teams have probably answered chemical compliance requests for more than twenty years, and a new request containing the word “compliance” goes to the person who answered the last one, who sends the letters that have always satisfied customers.
That is how an outer box came to be declared while the film, the bags and the foam inside it were not, although each of those is packaging under Article 3 and Annex I and each needs its own declaration from whoever places it on the market. It is also how the heavy-metals section of one declaration came to contain the single word “without”, and the Commission’s FAQ now points to CEN report CR 13695-1 as the method for the measurement that belongs in that field.
Every supplier declaration we reviewed for our clients in the first month had to be re-issued, including the best of them. That one referenced its technical file, carried a revision number and a real signature, and it still declared conformity with “the applicable requirements” without naming one and left out three of the eight points in Annex VIII, among them the identification of the packaging. The gap between that declaration and an acceptable one was a morning’s work, which is more than can be said for the rest.
In every case we looked at, the defective document had already been accepted and filed and the order had gone ahead. Article 18 requires an importer, before it places packaging on the market, to make sure that the manufacturer has carried out the conformity assessment and drawn up the declaration, and the Commission’s FAQ repeats that obligation and dates it 12 August 2026. Receiving a PDF does not discharge it.
Three questions now come up so often that they deserve an answer here. The first is whether a supplier that calls itself a distributor owes its customer a declaration at all, and the answer depends on the packaging rather than the company. A distributor in the sense of Article 3 makes available packaging that someone else has already placed on the Union market, and its duties under Article 19 are due care and verification, not writing the declaration.
The same company is the importer for everything it sources outside the Union, with the checks of Article 18 attached. Article 21 makes it the manufacturer the moment it places packaging on the market under its own name or trademark, or modifies packaging in a way that could affect compliance. The Commission’s updated FAQ adds that unbranded transport packaging belongs to the company that physically makes it, custom-made packaging to the company that orders it, and that one shipment can contain packaging from several manufacturers, each owing its own documentation.
At onboarding we have stopped asking whether a supplier is a distributor and started asking who drew up the declaration for this packaging and whether we can have a copy, because the role comes out of that answer.
The second is whether the extended producer responsibility side can wait for the harmonised registers, and it cannot. The registers do not exist yet because the implementing act that sets their format, which Article 44(14) required by 12 February 2026, was only published for feedback on 6 August 2026, six days before the regulation applied, and the window closed on 10 September.
Several thousand submissions had come in by then, which says something about how many companies expect to fill in that form. Once the act is adopted, Article 44(1) gives Member States 18 months to build the registers, so the harmonised version belongs to 2028. None of that suspends Article 44(4), which makes registration in a Member State a condition for making packaging available there.
The third is whether anything happens before the fines exist, and the answer is that the commercial consequence arrives well before the administrative one. Correction first is a procedure, not a grace period, and the obligations have applied since 12 August.
A buyer who has read Article 18 should not release a shipment against a heavy-metals letter that says “without”, although in August plenty of them still did. Sooner or later one of those shipments gets rejected, and one rejected inbound shipment costs more than the laboratory report that would have prevented it. That arithmetic is moving suppliers faster than any inspector this month.
Brussels was busy in the same month, and little of what it produced can be used yet. The labelling implementing acts that Article 12(6) required by 12 August 2026 were not adopted, which means the harmonised label, due under Article 12(1) from 12 August 2028 or 24 months after those acts enter into force, whichever is later, now has 2028 as its earliest date rather than its planned one.
Three calls for evidence on recycled content opened on 14 August with feedback until 16 September. There is still no harmonised PFAS test method, so total fluorine screening remains the practical starting point for anyone signing for food-contact packaging today. Six Member States tabled a note at the Environment Council on 25 June asking for one consolidated timeline of all the delegated and implementing acts, and they named PFAS testing and labelling as the two areas without clarity.
As far as the Official Journal shows, the only PPWR secondary act in force is the delegated decision from February that exempts pallet wrap and straps from the transport packaging reuse targets. That list explains none of what we found. Not one of the failures in August concerned a missing act, because the declaration model, the technical file, the identification marking in Article 15(5) and 15(6) and the importer’s check in Article 18 need no secondary legislation.
One FAQ clarification is being read more generously than it deserves. Packaging produced before 12 August but not yet placed on the market does not have to be destroyed or relabelled to carry the identification marking in Article 15(5) and 15(6), because an accompanying document can carry that information.
The relief covers the marking and stops there. It does not touch the PFAS limits in Article 5(5), where there is no stock transition, and it changes nothing about the declaration.
The next dates on the calendar are the adoption of the register act, expected later this year, and 12 February 2027, when Member States must have notified their penalty rules, and neither of them changes what a declaration has to contain today. If you sign declarations, sign one per packaging type, name the articles you are declaring against, and put the test report number in the heavy-metals field.
If you receive them, check the eight points of Annex VIII before the document goes into the system, and keep it with the technical file for five years from the placing on the market, ten for reusable packaging, as Articles 15(3) and 18(7) require. The regulation gave everyone eighteen months to prepare this one document. A month of reading them suggests that a good number of companies started on 12 August, and that the buyer who reads the declaration before filing it is still the only check in the chain that works.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.
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