What August 12th did to UK Fashion.
A little-noticed EU packaging law has redefined what counts as packaging. Small UK fashion ought to know about it. By Sam Stuart
Photo by Thom Bradley on Unsplash
The 12th of August was a seismic day for swing tags. It was a day on which, in the eyes of European regulators, little cardboard rectangles pinned to clothes across the continent ceased to be unimportant scraps and graduated to classification as “packaging”. It was a similarly seismic day for the safety pins of this world, for hangers and dust bags and sticky labels. The 12th of August marked a movement of the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation 2025/40 (hereafter PPWR) from law-on-paper to law-in-force, its definition of packaging broadening more than most might have grasped. The gist of it: appendages to and wrappers around items sold into the EU all now require a recyclability assessment and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) registration in every EU country they are sold into. This is not a consumer fashion-specific piece of legislation, but its ramifications for the industry –in which packaging might have been previously relying on potentially pollutant plastic-heavy components – are clear.
Regulators, admittedly, took their time getting to this point. PPWR was adopted by the European Parliament in December of 2024 and entered into force the following February - the sort of legislative gestation period during which the vast majority of affected industries are unlikely to devote themselves to compliance. Since the 12th, however, any packaging being placed on the EU market has to meet the regulation’s requirements in full. In practice this unfurls over the coming years rather than all at once: from 2030, packaging will be graded on recyclability - A for material that is at least 95 % recyclable, B for 80 %, C for 70 %. Any packaging made of less than 70 % recyclable material faces higher fees or outright exclusion from the market. Before any of that, manufacturers placing packaging on the EU market already require a formal Declaration of Conformity, backed by technical documentation kept on file for five to ten years. A swing tag, in other words, already has a lengthy paper trail.
The list of what has been swept up under the umbrella of “packaging” is long and meandering. Garment hangers count, provided they are sold with the item rather than separately, as the same object adapts its legal status depending on how it leaves its manufacturer. Dust bags for shoes and handbags count. As do textile carrier bags, cotton totes included, now formally an environmentally scrutinised packaging material rather than the sustainable alternative they are usually marketed as. Tea bags have been redefined too, having sat on the wrong side of the line under the old rules - they were explicitly not packaging until PPWR reclassified them, on the basis that they tend to be binned along with whatever is left in the cup, contaminating recycling and composting streams that were never built to sort mesh from tea leaves.
The scale of this landing on UK businesses is not really in dispute. A survey of two hundred British manufacturers and suppliers across fashion, footwear, homewares and consumer electronics, carried out in the weeks before the August deadline, returned that 93 % expected PPWR to affect their packaging in some form. Only 16 % thought they were already compliant. 32 % were still reviewing what the rules actually meant for them, days before those rules stopped being aspirational. The UK government’s own guidance is clear about the consequence of getting this wrong: non-compliant goods can be turned away at the EU border and sent back at the exporter’s expense, with no review process to appeal to.
Compliance of this kind tends to cost roughly the same regardless of how much one is actually selling, which is a detail more worrying to small labels than large ones. Registering with a scheme and keeping the required paperwork on file for a decade takes a broadly similar amount of administrative effort whether it covers five million units or five hundred. A large fashion house can hire someone to handle it and spread that salary across a vast production run until the cost per garment barely registers. A five-person label selling a few hundred pieces a season into boutiques in Paris or Berlin might have to fill out the same forms, for the same fee, over a fraction of the volume.
And there is a second complication pertinent to British companies: the UK has built its own Extended Producer Responsibility scheme for packaging, pEPR, administered separately through PackUK, applying to any business turning over more than £1 million a year and handling more than 25 tonnes of packaging. Any brand that clears that threshold and also sells into Europe cannot choose between the British scheme and the European one. Such brands must have their boxes and tags and sleeves and pins be judged under two sets of rules. This is because Britain’s departure from the EU in 2020 does not automatically make any of its businesses exempt. PPWR does not concern itself with where a business is incorporated, only with where its goods end up, so an Aberdeen-based label sending one parcel to a customer in Brussels is (as far as PPWR is concerned) deemed to be placing packaging on the EU market in exactly the way a Copenhagen-based label would be. Trade has continued after Brexit even where membership did not, and the paperwork that enables that trade will continue to be revamped.
Whether this changes what a swing tag might look like in five years time is unclear at present – recyclability grading, for example, is not fully effected until 2030 and delegated acts might still reshape the legislation before then. What has now been settled by PPWR is duller and more immediate: a piece of card costing a fraction of a penny, one almost exclusively torn off and binned without second thought, now travels with a fresh compliance file. Somebody at a small British fashion label will have to keep that file.
“It was a day on which, in the eyes of European regulators, little cardboard rectangles pinned to clothes across the continent ceased to be unimportant scraps and graduated to classification as “packaging”.
It was a similarly seismic day for the safety pins of this world, for hangers and dust bags and sticky labels.”