Part 4 | Understanding your compliance obligations

As a producer on the European market, several EPR regulations may apply to your organization that you may not be aware of at this moment. Depending on your product scope, Extended Producer Responsibility obligations can apply to different waste-generating streams:
•    Clothing, Linen & Footwear (CLF)
•    electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE)
•    batteries
•    sports and leisure equipment
•    other nationally regulated product and waste streams

And regardless of the waste stream, all of these categories have one aspect in common: packaging.

When your organization places an item on the market, the items supplied always have some form of packaging attached. Whatever type of packaging that is, an obligation under the PPWR is likely to be triggered.

Why is the PPWR a prominent topic?

The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation is one of the most impactful regulations the European Union has published in recent years. The reason lies in the way the regulation is set up. With a section on Extended Producer Responsibility and a designated section on product compliance, the PPWR changes the packaging that is placed on the market itself.

Because of that impact, the regulation draws on a significant share of your internal resources. Which internal resources are leveraged?

• Product and packaging engineers: focused on the requirements that improve the quality of the packaging attached to your products. How do you reduce empty space in your packaging? Do you have enough recycled content? Do you meet the labeling requirements? And, most importantly, gathering the data that answers those questions and feeds the packaging EPR reporting.
• IT specialists: focused on the data systems that capture and manage the required reporting data at the right level of detail.
• Compliance teams: focused on the compliance roadmap and on translating the legislation into the actions that follow from it.

One important question for the compliance team to ask is: aside from packaging EPR compliance, do we have to meet other requirements?

The answer is yes.

What is the connection between the PPWR and Textile EPR reporting?

At first sight, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation and Textile EPR reporting do not appear to be connected. There is, however, one significant similarity: the level of detail of the data needed to meet your compliance obligations.

The PPWR asks for data at the level of the individual packaging component. Take a box of tea. The regulation does not only ask about the outer cardboard box. It also asks about the filter bag containing the tea, the paper label attached to the bag and the cotton string that connects the two. For each of these components, information such as the color, the material, the component weight, whether the material contains recycled content and the recycled content percentage may be required.

The Waste Framework Directive initiated the CLF EPR framework that is now being implemented throughout the European Union. The national systems that are already active in France, the Netherlands, Hungary and Latvia require a comparable level of data detail. 

In Part 3: which countries have implemented Textile EPR? we explain how far each country has come.

Textile data: why the level of detail matters for the CLF reporting

The examples above were given for packaging EPR compliance, and they return in textile reporting at product level:

• The textile color indicates the level of recyclability and can be requested during reporting.
• The material is one of the key elements of textile reporting. Which material is the textile made of, and are metallic fibers embedded in it?
• The weight matters because textile reporting is often based on weight, which makes the net product weight essential to your CLF EPR reporting.
• Recycled content can lower the reporting fee, depending on the percentage of recycled material your textile is produced with.

CLF reporting requires several additional fields of its own, including the intended gender. Gender is a specific French requirement needed to finalize the declaration. To ease that burden, the commodity code can be used to identify the gender of the textile item, which combines two efforts, as the CN code is a required data field in its own right.

PPWR and EPR compliance

While the level of detail required for Textile EPR is in line with the PPWR, the PPWR is not linked to CLF alone. Packaging is attached to every item that is transported to your customers and the downstream supply chain, offered for sale or distributed free of charge, because the main function of packaging is to protect the product.

That product can be anything: furniture, IT equipment (electrical and electronic equipment), batteries sold separately, toys, mattresses, oils or tires.

All of the waste streams mentioned are unique EPR streams. What they have in common is packaging: every product stream comes with packaging, and therefore with packaging EPR obligations. Beyond that shared packaging layer, the streams are not connected. Unique data aspects are needed to report for each product stream, as the EPR results from different legislations with its own requirements.

Which additional compliance obligations should you prepare for?

Determine your scope → Understand your obligations → Assess your data

To come back to the main question: the obligations that apply differ per organization, per product scope and per downstream supply chain. To determine what applies to you, start here:

1. Determine your scope: identify the relevant products, entities, countries and business flows. Which EPR streams apply to your organization?
2. Understand your obligations: establish your role in the supply chain and the requirements that follow from it.
3. Assess your data: determine which information is available and identify the gaps before reporting starts.

Your next step as a Textile EPR producer

Not sure how your position in the supply chain affects your obligations? In Part 2: Textile EPR producer, when are you considered a producer? we explain how products, business flows, legal entities and markets affect producer responsibility.

Taking these steps early gives your organization the time to address those gaps before they become reporting problems, and to prioritize the data collection that is needed. A complete data set allows you to manage your compliance, complete the Textile EPR reports and reduce the risk of non-compliance.

Data availability and fragmented internal processes are common challenges when implementing Textile EPR. In Part 1: 3 common Textile EPR implementation pitfalls we explain how to address them before they become reporting problems.