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Flower and plant pots, including seed trays, qualify as packaging where they are intended to be used for sale or transport, including pots and trays, in which the plant was cultivated at the last stage and in which it is sold to the end user. Conversely, pots and trays used by business operators (such as nurseries and growers) as part of their production cycle are not packaging, as they are mere enables of the manufacturing cycle. This applies except to the last pot or tray that is intended to be sold together with the plant to the end user. While the wording for both ‘packaging’ and ‘non-packaging’ in Annex I includes the element of selling, in practice, flowers and plants are not transplanted into separate ‘transport’ or ‘sales’ pots for marketing purposes. Rather, the same pots in which the plants were grown are used also for transport and sale. The classification of such pots must therefore follow the general definition of packaging, consider their function and intended use, rather than just relying on the indicative wording of Annex I. While the definition of packaging also covers items used in business-to-business relations, flowerpots that merely enable the production process, such as larger growing pots (for example, those exceeding 10 cm in diameter) used throughout the cultivation cycle, should not be regarded as packaging under Article 3(1), point (1).

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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.