For Kieran and Mark
What packaging rules are, why they suddenly matter, what’s going wrong, and what Specloop would do about it. No jargon until we’ve explained it.
Companies now have to pay for the rubbish their packaging becomes, and the bill is bigger if the packaging is hard to recycle. To work out the bill, they need to know exactly what every bit of their packaging is made of, but that information sits with the companies who make the packaging for them. Right now everyone swaps that information by emailing spreadsheets back and forth, and Specloop would be one shared place to keep it instead.
Think about a bag of crisps. You eat the crisps, the empty bag goes in the bin, a lorry takes it away, and it gets recycled or burned. All of that costs money.
Your council collected the bins and paid for it out of council tax. The crisp company paid only a small part.
The company that sells something in packaging now pays the full cost of dealing with that packaging once it’s thrown away. The money goes to councils.
If you throw a party, you pay for the cleaners, not your neighbours. The law calls this extended producer responsibility, or EPR. “Producer” means the company that puts the packaging out into the world.
The government set up a body called PackUK to work out each company’s bill, collect the money and pass it to councils. In the 2026-27 year it expects to collect about £1.56 billion. That’s why companies suddenly care.
Only bigger businesses pay the full bill: roughly, those with over £2 million in sales and over 50 tonnes of packaging a year. Smaller ones just have to register and report.
The bill is basically three things multiplied together:
Try it. The prices per tonne below are made up to keep the maths simple. The red multiplier is the real one for this year.
Flip between red and green, then move the year to 2028-29. The same packaging costs a lot more each year it stays red. That’s the point: the government wants companies to switch to packaging that’s easy to recycle.
PackUK gives every type of packaging a traffic-light rating. The rulebook for this is called the recyclability assessment method, or RAM.
Easy to recycle. A plain cardboard box, a clear plastic bottle, a glass jar. Pays a bit less than normal.
Recyclable, with problems. A card sandwich box with a plastic window glued in. Pays the normal price.
Hard to recycle. A crisp bag made of plastic and foil layers stuck together, or a black plastic ready-meal tray. Pays extra, and the extra grows every year.
Recycling plants sort plastic by shining a light at it and reading what bounces back. Black plastic soaks up the light, so the machines can’t “see” it and it ends up as rubbish. Tiny details like the colour of a tray change the rating.
So to know its rating, a company needs to know every part of every pack: the bag, the label, the glue, the cap, the ink, and how much each weighs.
Here’s the catch. The crisp company doesn’t make its own bags. It buys them from a packaging maker. Only the packaging maker knows exactly what’s in them.
So twice a year, every brand emails every one of its packaging suppliers a spreadsheet: “What’s this made of? How much does each bit weigh?” Every brand uses its own spreadsheet, with different questions in a different order.
A big packaging maker might have 200 customers. That’s 200 different spreadsheets asking roughly the same questions, twice a year. People fill them in by hand, make mistakes, send old versions, or don’t reply.
Imagine every teacher, club and coach at school asked you for your address, date of birth and allergies on their own paper form, every term. You’d wish there was one form everyone could read from. That’s the whole idea.
Real life is much bigger: thousands of brands and thousands of packaging makers. The more companies there are, the worse the spreadsheet mess gets, and the more useful one shared place becomes.
There’s a second, older rule you’ll hear about. Since 1997, big companies have had to prove that a certain amount of packaging got recycled. They do it by buying “tickets” from recycling plants.
In 2026 there weren’t enough tickets to go round, so the price of a plastic ticket roughly doubled, from about £180 to about £370 a tonne. The government is now thinking about changing the system, and it might even be scrapped and folded into EPR.
Specloop isn’t built around tickets. It’s the part of the world everyone moans about, but it could change under our feet, so we keep away from it.
In Ireland there’s a different system. Companies selling packaged goods there join a scheme called Repak and report to it. On top of that, a new EU-wide law called the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) mostly came in on 12 August 2026, with more rules about recycling and labels.
So a Northern Ireland company selling crisps in Belfast and Dublin might have to deal with the UK rules, Repak and the EU law at the same time, all needing the same packaging details in different formats. That’s a smaller but sharper version of the same problem, right on our doorstep.
Specloop would be one shared online library of packaging details, called “specs” (short for specifications).
The nutrition label on food. The manufacturer works out the calories once and prints it, and everyone reads the same label. Specloop is a nutrition label for packaging, kept online and always up to date.
The packaging maker stops filling in 200 spreadsheets. The brand stops chasing them. Everyone works from the same up-to-date facts.
Here’s everything that happens in one year for one crisp brand using Specloop, from signing up to paying the bill. Each row is a person or organisation. Press Next, or click any step.
The reporting deadlines shown (1 October for January to June, 1 April for July to December) are the usual ones for large producers. Check gov.uk before relying on them.
The hard bit: brands won’t pay until the packaging makers are on it, and the makers won’t bother until brands ask. The usual way round it is to let a brand invite its own suppliers.
All of this comes from reading, not from talking to anyone in the industry. Before getting excited we need answers to:
These are exactly the questions to ask Danny.
Because it now pays for the bag’s rubbish, and the price depends on the material and how recyclable it is. Hard-to-recycle bags cost more every year.
It doesn’t make the bag. The packaging maker does, and that information lives in the maker’s systems. So the brand has to ask, usually by spreadsheet.
The maker enters the details once, in one place. Every brand that buys from them reads the same up-to-date details and gets its reports built for it.
No. Tickets are a separate system that might be changed or scrapped. Specloop is about the packaging details that every bill depends on.