The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation — formally Regulation (EU) 2025/40 — replaces the Packaging Directive 94/62/EC and applies directly in all EU member states from 12 August 2026, with no national transposition laws. It covers every piece of packaging placed on the EU market: sales, grouped and transport packaging, explicitly including B2B — from the shipping carton and stretch film to the wooden pallet.

At the core of the new obligations: every packaging needs an EU Declaration of Conformity under Art. 39 and Annex VIII, backed by technical documentation kept for five years (single-use) or ten years (reusable). Market surveillance is risk-based — not every packaging will be inspected, but every packaging can be.

The substantive core of the regulation sits in eight articles, and each is mapped to its own check in the module: substance restrictions with heavy-metal limits and the PFAS ban in food-contact packaging (Art. 5), recyclability grades A/B/C — from 2030, grade-C packaging can no longer be placed on the market (Art. 6), minimum recycled content for plastic packaging (Art. 7), certified bio-based content (Art. 8), compostability per EN 13432 (Art. 9), minimisation of weight and volume including the 50 % void-space cap for transport and e-commerce packaging (Art. 10 and 24), requirements for reusable packaging (Art. 11) and harmonised labelling with material code, sorting instructions and QR code (Art. 12).

The PPWR obliges all “economic operators”, each with distinct, non-delegable duties: producers and manufacturers create the technical documentation, run the conformity assessment and issue the DoC. Importers must verify that both exist and that labelling is correct. Distributors carry a duty of care, suppliers an information duty under Art. 16 — via a supplier conformity declaration.

Important for the midmarket: whoever places packaging on the market under their own brand counts as the producer under the PPWR — even without any production of their own. A retail chain buying and reselling private-label shrink film carries full producer responsibility.

PPWR is not a single rule but a stack of design, content, recyclability and labelling requirements that all have to be true at the same time. One click on “Run Compliance Check” runs ten dedicated check modules against the packaging type — from completeness through substance limits, recycled content and recyclability to labelling — and rolls the result into one clear traffic-light status: Green, Yellow, Red or Grey, with a log entry for every check that ran.

The recyclability matrix, PCR quotas and substance limits are maintained with effective dates: when a quota rises on its due date, the module automatically checks against the new value from that day on — no customising required.

A Declaration of Conformity is a legal statement, not a marketing artefact. duveka PPWR only allows a DoC under Art. 39 and Annex VIII when the underlying check results actually justify it — on Red or Grey the button stays locked. The declaration follows a clean lifecycle from Draft through Active to Outdated or Revoked; creating a new one automatically invalidates the old.

When a packaging type changes version, the verification cycle resets, so a stale check from six months ago can never sign off a new design. The native RDLC report prints the document in the Annex VIII structure.

Beyond the DoC, the module covers the two other document flows a PPWR-relevant packaging typically needs: a risk assessment with scores from 0 to 10 per PPWR article, condensed into the risk levels Low, Medium and High — with detail lines per material component or supplier. And the structured supplier conformity declaration under Art. 16 with 13 sections, including a print report.

Uploaded evidence — certificates, test reports, signed supplier declarations — attaches to the packaging type as compliance documents; the module monitors their expiry dates automatically.

Auditors want to see what was checked, when, by whom and against which version. duveka PPWR writes an immutable compliance log for every relevant action — modify, delete and rename are blocked by the system, and that cannot be switched off. On the item and item-variant card, the “PPWR Compliance” tab links the warehouse item to its packaging type, with inheritance from item to variant.

With the optional Packaging Connector, packaging types are created automatically from the duveka packaging configurator: materials and substances are aggregated from the production BOM — users only add what cannot be derived from the BOM.

duveka PPWR is a native Business Central extension — no separate database, no middleware server, no shadow IT. It runs cloud and on-premises from BC 21, ships four RDLC print reports (Declaration of Conformity, compliance overview, risk assessment, supplier declaration) and is bilingual (German/English). Existing master data stays untouched: the PPWR data is self-contained and only referenced from the item. With master data in place, one user maintains 15 to 25 packaging types per day — considerably more with the Packaging Connector.