Vellox powers your PPWR data

The EU packaging regulation – PPWR, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40 – entered into force on 11 February 2025 and began to apply on 12 August 2026. It replaces the old packaging directive from 1994 and applies directly in all member states, without first having to be transposed into national law, as the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency also describes in its PPWR guidance.

The regulation spans the entire life cycle of packaging: requirements on design for recycling, technical documentation and an EU declaration before packaging is placed on the market, limit values for PFAS in food packaging, labelling requirements and clearer responsibilities for importers and distributors. Not all requirements take effect at the same time – the requirements on recycled content in plastic packaging, for example, come later – but reporting is under way now. For Swedish producers, the first reporting under the new rules covers the period 12 August to 31 December 2026. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency summarises what changed in the news item New rules for packaging from 12 August.

On top of that comes eco-modulation: fees under extended producer responsibility are to be differentiated based on how recyclable the packaging is. That means packaging choices are no longer purely a sustainability question, but a cost item that hits the margin per item directly.

Read the requirements closely and almost all of them land in the same place: the item register.

To document, report and calculate the consequences, you need to know, per item and per packaging component:

• which material the component is made of, and whether it is mono-material or multi-layer

• weight per component, not just total packaging weight

• share of recycled material – the PCR content – and where the figure comes from

• which recyclability class the packaging falls into, since this determines the fee

• which markets the item is sold in, since registration and reporting happen per member state

This is exactly the kind of data that, in practice, is rarely structured in one place. Some of it sits in the ERP system, some in the PIM system, some in supplier declarations that arrived as PDFs, and some in an Excel file belonging to whoever happened to get the task last. None of the sources is wrong in itself – the problem is that they never meet.

As long as the data is locked in separate systems, you can answer an individual question, but you can't steer the business. You can't see which items are about to become expensive, you can't show a customer what applies to their particular delivery, and reporting becomes a project every time instead of something that simply falls out.

Our customers use Vellox to visualise their item data in relation to PPWR, at different levels depending on what they need to account for.

Flag risk items. Which items are missing packaging data entirely? Which have material combinations that risk being classed as hard to recycle? Getting the list of gaps on the table is almost always the first step – and that list tends to be longer than you'd think.

Track PCR levels over time. The share of recycled material needs to be tracked per item, per supplier and per product range, not as an average once a year. That makes it possible to see whether things are actually moving in the right direction before the requirements tighten.

Protect the margin after environmental fees. When the fee varies with the recyclability of the packaging, profitability per item changes. Put the fee alongside the contribution margin and it becomes immediately clear which items can carry their packaging and which can't.

Give your customers something to work with. The requirements travel through the supply chain. B2B sellers are increasingly getting the question from their customers – and there's a big difference between compiling an answer manually every time and being able to produce it from the same model as everything else.

Vellox pulls data directly from the ERP system – we work daily with Business Central, Jeeves, Monitor, Pyramid and Visma Business – and loads it into a data warehouse together with the sources sitting alongside it, such as PIM, supplier information and the spreadsheets that in practice serve as master data.

That's where the work that makes the data usable happens: packaging information is linked to the items, missing values are surfaced instead of hidden, and calculations are defined once so that everyone calculates the same way. The result is dashboards that update themselves, instead of a compilation that is out of date the day after it's finished. The same data warehouse is used when several companies need to be followed up together – read more about how we consolidate multiple companies across different ERP systems.

One thing is worth saying plainly: no BI platform creates data that doesn't exist. If no one has ever recorded the weight of a packaging component, we can't visualise it. But that's precisely why the work is worth starting now – the sooner the gaps become visible, the more time is left to fill them before they cost money.

Do you know how your item data stacks up against PPWR? If the answer is "partly", you're in good company.

Book a meeting and we'll look together at what exists in your systems today and what it takes to produce the data you need.