Legal provisions:

According to Article 48(1), ‘Member States shall ensure that systems and infrastructures are set up to provide for the return and separate collection of all packaging waste from the end users, and to facilitate its preparation for re-use and high-quality recycling. Packaging that complies with design for recycling criteria established in delegated acts adopted pursuant to Article 6(4) of this Regulation shall be collected for recycling. Incineration and landfill of such packaging shall be prohibited, with the exception of waste resulting from subsequent treatment operations of separately collected packaging waste for which recycling is not feasible or does not deliver the best environmental outcome’. Article 48(2) establishes that ‘in order to facilitate high-quality recycling, Member States shall ensure that systems and infrastructures for comprehensive collection and sorting are in place to facilitate recycling and to ensure that plastic feedstock is available for recycling’. Article 48(3) states that ‘Member States may derogate from the return and separate waste collection obligation in paragraph 1 of the Article for certain formats of waste, provided that collecting fractions of packaging waste together, or collecting packaging waste or fractions of such packaging waste together with other waste does not affect the capacity of such packaging or fractions of packaging waste to undergo preparing for re-use, recycling or other recovery operations and generates output from those operations which is of comparable quality to that achieved through separate collection’. Article 49: ‘By 1 January 2029, Member States shall set mandatory collection objectives and take the necessary measures to ensure that the collection of the materials listed in Article 52 is consistent with the recycling targets set out in that Article and with the mandatory recycled content targets set out in Article 7’.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-07 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.