Are you on top of your packaging – and are you registered?

Has your company registered with the DPA? If not, you are not compliant with the new packaging rules

The Danish Producer Responsibility (DPA) administers the rules on producer responsibility for packaging. They have a self-service solution where Danish companies must register themselves if they are one of the approximately 41,000 companies covered by the EU Packaging Directive. It is also possible to get help with registration via a collective scheme.

There are still many companies that have not yet registered. Our Closing Loops value chains are working on waste and CO2 reduction, so they should be frontrunners in this area too. However, many of them are not yet putting products on the market, so they may not be covered by the rules until later – says Conny Hanghøj, Senior Innovation Manager at Food & Bio Cluster Denmark and Closing Loops project manager.

She knows that many companies have doubts about the scope, additional costs and handling of their own packaging.

However, there is no way around it, as the EU Packaging Directive will come into force in Denmark in October 2025, and the affected companies should have registered how much packaging they expect to put on the market by August 31 this year.

Packaging must be collected, reused or recycled

The new rules are based on a goal to reduce the amount of packaging. Packaging must now be collected, reused or recycled, which initially looks like an extra bill for companies.

“Collecting, sorting and recycling packaging is not easy, so companies have a challenge that we need to help them solve,” says Conny Hanghøj, who also believes that the rules speak to the process that the Closing Loops value chains are already working on.

Approximately 41,000 companies are covered by the new packaging rules. All companies that send packaging to the Danish market will be responsible for the packaging throughout its life cycle – even after it has been emptied and sorted by the end user. This can apply even if you do not have producer responsibility for the product in the primary packaging.