EPR as a condition of market access
What the European regulation, in force since 12 August, changes for Canadian producers
A can of WD-40 does not fall into the same regulatory category from one Canadian province to the next. The product is identical. So is the label. What changes is the box the company placing it on the market has to report it under, and the amount it pays as a result.
Kimi Walker of Canadian Tire gave that example last week at the Château Frontenac, during the Canadian EPR Forum. Her company is registered in more than a hundred extended producer responsibility programmes and goes through more than forty audits a year. She described going back and forth seven times with one supplier, out of five thousand in the chain, to get a single figure right. On the spreadsheets still holding all of this together, she was brief: "Once you start lo
oking at a million combinations of products and eco-fees, the Excel spreadsheet doesn't make it any more."
For three days the forum brought together government departments, producer responsibility organizations, producers, retailers, recyclers, auditors, non-profits and technology companies, from Canada, the United States, Europe and South Africa.
She was not the only one keeping count. Cindy Coutts of Encorp Pacific described deposit return as a business run entirely on data, where every producer enters its information in every programme in the country, then once more in the federal registry. Tammy Giroux of General Motors of Canada reports under 83 programmes, with three to five more added each year and some changing their rules along the way. Jules Foisy Lapointe, now CEO of GoRecycle, remembers producing six hundred declarations a year for two hundred thousand products.
Michelle Saunders, VP sustainability at Food, Health & Consumer Products of Canada, whose members make around 80% of the packaged goods sold in grocery and pharmacy, put it plainly: for most producers, EPR is still "a compliance checkbox and an invoice." Asking for harmonization, she added, is not asking for the lowest common denominator.
Allen Langdon, CEO of Circular Materials, offered a figure that complicates that reading. Around 95% of an EPR system's costs go to collecting, transporting and processing material, against 2.5 to 3% for administration. The invoice a producer receives pays first for trucks and sorting facilities. He also makes simplification a guiding principle, and argues that a proliferation of fee schedules blurs the signal sent to producers rather than sharpening it.
What these numbers measure is the cost of information one company collects several times over. Since 12 August, that information also decides access to the European market.
Why these declarations exist
In 2022, 7,585 kilotonnes of plastic went into new products made for Canadian consumption. Of the 4,274 kilotonnes of plastic waste and scrap disposed of that year, 97.3% was landfilled or incinerated without energy recovery. And 1.4% of everything businesses, institutions and households threw out leaked into the environment. The figures come from Statistics Canada's physical flow account for plastic material, published in March.
We have these orders of magnitude only because somebody, somewhere, counted. At company level, an EPR declaration does the same work: it establishes, material by material, an inventory of what was placed on the market. Without it, a company cannot measure its performance from one year to the next, identify the product costing it most in eco-fees, show an auditor that what it reports matches what it sold, or spot the packaging that needs improving or that fails its customers' health and environmental requirements.
What the European packaging regulation is
The PPWR is Regulation (EU) 2025/40 on packaging and packaging waste, in application since 12 August 2026. Joachim Quoden of EXPRA introduced it at the forum by its dimensions: 124 pages, 71 articles, 13 annexes, some thirty secondary legal acts still to come, and implementation spread over five to ten years.
It replaces the 1994 directive, and the change of instrument is worth pausing on. A directive sets an objective that each member state writes into its own law, which produced twenty-seven separate regimes. A regulation applies directly, in identical terms, across all twenty-seven member states, with no national transposition.
Its objective is simply put: reduce the volume of packaging placed on the market, and make recyclable whatever remains. The targets are dated. Member states must cut packaging waste per inhabitant by 5% by 2030, 10% by 2035 and 15% by 2040, measured against 2018. All packaging must be recyclable by 1 January 2030, with a further requirement of effective recycling from 2035. Plastic packaging must contain a minimum share of recycled material from 2030, rising in 2040. At least 90% of plastic bottles and metal beverage containers must be collected by 2029. Four heavy metals and PFAS will be banned in packaging from 2030.
The regulation covers any company placing a packaged product on the European market, including companies established outside the Union. That company must prepare and keep technical documentation, generally for ten years, issue an EU declaration of conformity, and meet design requirements on recyclability, recycled content and substances of concern. Recyclability thresholds rise at each step, and packaging that fails to meet them can no longer be placed on the market.
A Canadian exporter also has things to submit, not only to keep. It must appoint, by written mandate, an authorised representative for extended producer responsibility in every member state where it first makes its products available. That representative registers it in the national producer register and files its details, their own, identification and tax numbers, the EPR declaration and the PRO certificate. The EU declaration of conformity and the technical documentation stay with the company, available to national authorities on request.
Begoña De Benito of Ecoembes put it in one sentence during the European panel, chaired by Maryse Vermette, CEO of Éco Entreprises Québec: "After PPWR, EPR is about a market access condition." Joachim Quoden described the same shift more bluntly: non-compliant packaging is shut out of the market, not merely fined.
Mariana Cerca of Greenstreets pointed out that national reporting still runs through twenty-seven different frameworks. She cited a plastic hanger, out of scope in one country and in scope in another. For an exporter, that means knowing exactly what role it plays in the packaging supply chain, and documenting materials, dimensions and substances of concern.
Harmonization will not arrive on the date we hope
The word came up in almost every session of the forum, and almost nobody expected it soon. George Gigounas of DLA Piper advises industries to prepare for laws that will stay different. Kate Bailey of the Association of Plastic Recyclers reported a state legislator telling her that "harmonization is a terrible word," because every jurisdiction wants what suits its own population.
In Québec City I talked with Scott Cassel, founder and CEO of the Product Stewardship Institute, about the ruling handed down on 27 August by the federal district court in Oregon. The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors was challenging the Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act, on interstate commerce and due process grounds. The court found for the state on every remaining count, holding that the law's benefits outweighed the burden on interstate commerce. It is the first packaging EPR law to clear that constitutional test.
We talked about how long the process takes and what has to be ready for the stages ahead. His advice to companies is not to wait and see where the states are in five years, but to start now. He notes that packaging engineers have already begun reworking their designs, because redesigning packaging takes time and will eventually save their company a great deal.
The same reasoning applies here, on a closer deadline.
Canada is moving all the same. From the 2027 declaration, containers, packaging and printed matter will be reported under a single list of material categories, common to every province. For an obligated company, two things change: how the declaration is filled in, and the amount of its contribution. The existing packaging portfolio will have to be reclassified into that list.
There is still some way to go. Sabrina Charron of RECYC-QUÉBEC reminded the forum that product sub-categories still differ from one province to the next. Gitane Boivin of Québec's Ministry of the Environment described how hard it is to align the very definition of a producer between civil law and common law, and said Québec is willing to consider harmonization without lowering its requirements.
Daniel Reshef of Nestlé Canada argues for data collected once and reused thereafter; his exact phrase is "collect it once and move it many times." He notes that the Federal Plastics Registry's categories differ sharply from those of provincial reporting. Matthew Lebrun of Environment and Climate Change Canada told the forum the department is looking at better alignment, without announcing a decision. In the meantime, registry reports for the 2025 calendar year remain due on 29 September.
Where accurate data makes progress visible
Dave Thompson of IntegriServ Consulting has been verifying declarations for a dozen years, across ten provinces and the Yukon. The discrepancies he finds almost always come from the same causes: staff turnover, a system change, a programme rule that changed and nobody tracked. Jean-François Richard of SOGHU named what makes them possible: in many companies, only one or two people hold the knowledge. Jessie Singh of the accounting firm HDCPA noted in the same session that most errors found in verification are unintentional.
Documentation kept at component level shows what no aggregated declaration can: which products weigh most in the contribution, which materials block recyclability and in which province, which design decisions are still open at the moment you look at them. Geneviève Dionne of Éco Entreprises Québec sums up the three questions producers keep asking: which material to choose, what to avoid, what is genuinely recyclable. Circular Materials, Éco Entreprises Québec, Recycle BC, SK Recycles and Multi-Material Stewardship Manitoba are jointly developing pan-Canadian eco-design guidelines to increase the recyclability of packaging and printed matter, building on those ÉEQ published in October 2024. The work earned them the Association of Plastic Recyclers' Outstanding Leadership award in February, and is due to be completed in December 2026.
What I do with this in my work
I spent twelve years at METRO, on the producer side, with ten thousand SKUs to classify. I know what a change of nomenclature does to the team that has to carry it, and I can hardly imagine what the standardization of EPR nomenclatures will do to a retailer: identifying the components affected, going back to suppliers for the missing information, changing the structure of the database, and more besides. That is the work my tools were built for, so that it no longer has to be done by hand.
The nomenclature converter automatically reclassifies a packaging portfolio into the single list that becomes common to the provinces in 2027, flags the components with missing information, and shows which supplier or internal team to ask. The EPR Calculator then produces province-by-province declarations from that single base, keeping a record of every mapping and every calculation, so the declaration holds up in front of an auditor, and surfacing eco-design priorities along the way. In use since 2022, it covers 221 categories across nine provinces. Upstream of both, I build the company's packaging database with it, held at component level: material, weight, supplier, associated product, supporting evidence. That base then serves provincial declarations, the federal registry and, for exporters, the PPWR technical documentation. I am currently developing the elements of the Digital Product Passport from it.
One point is worth flagging for Québec companies. Éco Entreprises Québec states that companies reporting under the flat rate are not affected by the category reform, which is correct. I would observe, however, that the flat rate often costs more than a detailed declaration, and the question is worth asking for any company that has never compared the two.
Frequently asked questions
What is the PPWR and since when does it apply?
The PPWR is Regulation (EU) 2025/40 on packaging and packaging waste, adopted on 19 December 2024 and in application since 12 August 2026. It replaces Directive 94/62/EC of 1994 and applies directly across all twenty-seven member states, with no national transposition. Its substantive obligations phase in between 2027 and 2040.
Does the PPWR apply to Canadian companies exporting to Europe?
Yes. It covers any company placing a packaged product on the European market, including companies established outside the Union. Such a company must prepare and keep technical documentation, generally for ten years, issue an EU declaration of conformity, and meet design requirements on recyclability, recycled content and substances of concern. Packaging that fails the applicable thresholds cannot be placed on the European market.
What changes for Canadian EPR reporting in 2027?
From the 2027 declaration, containers, packaging and printed matter will be reported under a single list of material categories, common to every Canadian province. Every packaging item will have to be reclassified into the new categories, which means knowing the composition of each of its components. The contribution amount will change too, since fees will apply to the new categories rather than the old ones.
When is the Federal Plastics Registry reporting deadline?
Reports covering the 2025 calendar year are due on 29 September 2026. Phase 1 covers plastic packaging, filled and unfilled, electrical and electronic equipment, and single-use or disposable plastic products destined for the residential stream. Phases 2 and 3 have been postponed and will be set out in a future notice with its reporting guidance.
Is a Québec company reporting under the flat rate affected by the category harmonization?
Éco Entreprises Québec states that companies reporting under the flat rate are not affected by the reform, which is correct. I would observe, however, that the flat rate often costs more than a detailed declaration. Any company that has never compared the two has an interest in asking the question.
Are there packaging EPR programmes in the United States?
Yes. Seven states have enacted a packaging EPR law: California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington. The timetables differ. Oregon has been running its programme since 1 July 2025, Colorado producers had to join the PRO by the same date, Washington producers must do so in 2026 and California producers by 1 January 2027 at the latest. Covered materials, fee schedules and the very definition of packaging vary considerably from one state to another.
How do you make an EPR declaration defensible under verification?
Jessie Singh of the firm HDCPA described the expected chain at the forum: data, systems and processes, controls, then evidence. Dave Thompson of IntegriServ Consulting notes that discrepancies almost always come from staff turnover, a system change, or a programme rule that changed and nobody tracked. The answer is to document at component level and keep a record of every mapping and every calculation.
What is the Digital Product Passport and should a company prepare for it?
The Digital Product Passport gathers a product's composition and compliance information in electronic form for the European market. Kimi Walker of Canadian Tire pointed out at the forum that the difficulty lies less in the principle than in the cost of collecting the data from suppliers. The cheapest preparation is to build one packaging database that serves provincial declarations, the federal registry and European requirements at once.
Who to contact in Canada to reclassify packaging and automate EPR declarations?
Marie Horodecki-Aymes, CEO of MHA Insights in Montréal, works with producers on automatic material reclassification, province-by-province declaration production, and building their packaging database. She works in collaboration with Marina Pietrosel of Sustainable Strat. Engagements are carried out in French or English. She can be reached on LinkedIn or at mhainsights.com.
Thank you
Thank you to the Canadian Product Stewardship Council team, Sarah Cotton-Elliott, David Lawes , Philippe Cantin and Rachel Morier, for three well-organized and candid days. Thank you to Éco Entreprises Québec, Circular Materials, EPRA, Consignaction, and all the sponsors and exhibitors, as well as the team at the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac. The remarks reported here come from the sessions I attended.
I followed all the recorded sessions of the forum and drew up a detailed synthesis from them, session by session, speaker by speaker. If your team would like to hear it on the subjects that concern them, I run tailored debriefing sessions. Write to me to discuss it.
And if your team is preparing the 29 September report, the reclassification of its materials for 2027, or a first shipment to the European Union, I would be glad to look with you at how your packaging information is organized today, and at what it would let you see.
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