PPWR Article 9: Which Packaging Must Be Compostable

PPWR Article 9: Which Packaging Must Be Compostable — and the Brand-Owner Trap Behind It

Most of the PPWR conversation is about recyclability. But Regulation (EU) 2025/40 carves out a small set of packaging formats that must go the other way — they must be compostable, not recyclable. Article 9 names them, and if your brand sells tea, coffee, single-serve beverages, or loose fruit and vegetables, at least one of your packaging components is almost certainly on that list. This is one of the few places in the regulation where the compliant answer is a material change, not a paperwork change — and where doing the wrong thing (marketing an ordinary plastic as "compostable", or letting a compostable component contaminate a recycling stream) creates its own liability.

For brand owners, Article 9 is deceptively narrow in scope but wide in consequence: it forces a material and supplier decision, it interacts with the Article 12 labelling rules, it fragments by Member State, and it still has to be evidenced in your Declaration of Conformity. This is the brand-owner playbook.

What Article 9 Actually Says

Article 9, read together with the definitions in Article 3 and the format list referenced there, requires a specific, closed set of packaging to be compostable in industrially controlled conditions in bio-waste treatment facilities from 12 February 2028. The mandatory formats under Article 9(1) are:

• Permeable tea bags, coffee bags/pods and single-serve units — the soft, permeable units that hold tea, coffee or another beverage and are designed to be used and disposed of together with the product (the filter paper pyramid, the paper coffee pad, the infusion sachet).
• Sticky labels attached directly to fresh fruit and vegetables — the small produce-identification labels (PLU stickers) that end up in the organic-waste stream with the peel.

These must meet the requirements for industrial compostability — in practice, the criteria of EN 13432 (or a standard recognised as equivalent). Importantly, the older reference text of EN 13432:2000 can still be used as design guidance, but the Commission is expected to update the harmonised standard and adopt secondary legislation; the current version will not indefinitely serve as proof of conformity. Brand owners specifying compostable material in 2026–2027 should track the harmonised-standard update so the certificate they collect today is the one market surveillance accepts in 2028.

Article 9 also contains a member-state layer. Until 12 August 2026, Member States decide whether the formats listed in Article 9(1) and Article 9(2)(a) should be compostable in their territory, and under Article 9(2) they may additionally require compostability for non-permeable tea and coffee bags and single-serve units (of non-metal materials), very lightweight plastic carrier bags, lightweight plastic carrier bags, and any packaging a Member State already required to be compostable before 12 August 2026. Home-compostability compatibility is a further optional national requirement. The net effect: the baseline list is EU-wide, but the exact envelope of what must be compostable can differ between France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

The Core Tension: Compostable Is Not Recyclable

The single most important thing for a brand owner to internalise is that Article 9 compostability and Article 6 recyclability are mutually exclusive end-of-life routes. A certified industrially compostable material is engineered to disintegrate in a bio-waste facility; it is a contaminant in a mechanical recycling stream, and it cannot carry the recycled content that Article 7 will require of conventional plastics. That has three direct consequences:

• You cannot solve an Article 9 format by reaching for a "recyclable" mono-material — the regulation specifically wants these formats out of the recycling stream and into bio-waste, because they are small, food-soiled and impossible to separate from the organic fraction.
• Every other packaging component you sell must generally follow the recyclability route under Article 6 and Annex II. Compostability is not a general escape hatch; marketing a non-listed pack as "compostable" to dodge recyclability grading is not permitted and is a labelling risk.
• Because the two routes look similar to a consumer, Article 12 labelling becomes critical — the pack must tell the consumer to route it to bio-waste, not to the recycling bin, or you undermine both streams. If you want to see how the recyclability side is assessed for everything that is not on the Article 9 list, our PPWR recyclability check walks the Annex II logic component by component.

Challenge 1 — EN 13432 Is a Real Test, Not a Claim

EN 13432 is not a marketing badge; it is a laboratory pass/fail with hard thresholds: at least 90% disintegration within 12 weeks, at least 90% biodegradation within 6 months, no adverse effect on compost quality (ecotoxicity), and heavy-metal content below defined limits. A tea-bag filter, the thermoplastic sealing the pyramid, the thread, the tag and the staple (if any) all have to pass as a system. Brand owners routinely discover that the paper is compostable but the heat-seal coating or the closing thread is a conventional polymer that fails the disintegration test. The compliant unit has to be re-engineered as a whole, and the certificate has to cover the finished item, not just the substrate.

Challenge 2 — Bio-Based Does Not Mean Compostable

This is the most common — and most expensive — brand-owner error. A bio-based or "plant-based" material (bio-PE, bio-PET) is chemically identical to its fossil equivalent and is notcompostable. Conversely, some compostable polymers (PBAT, PLA blends) are petroleum-derived. Article 9 cares only about certified compostability under EN 13432, not about carbon origin. Procurement teams that specify "bio" expecting it to satisfy Article 9 will fail; teams that specify "compostable, EN 13432 certified for the finished unit" will pass.

Challenge 3 — Member-State Fragmentation on the Optional Formats

A brand selling the same lightweight carrier bag or the same non-permeable coffee capsule across several markets can face different obligations: compostable-required in one Member State, recyclable- preferred in another. For a multi-market portfolio, that means the packaging specification is no longer one line — it is a market-by-market matrix, and the Declaration of Conformity has to reflect the format actually placed on each market. Building that matrix once, and keeping it current as national transposition lands through 2026–2027, is the practical core of Article 9 compliance for larger brand owners.

Challenge 4 — The Article 12 Labelling Overlap

A compostable pack has to be labelled so the consumer disposes of it correctly. From the harmonised labelling regime under Article 12 (with the pictogram and material-composition rules following the implementing act and applying from 2028), compostable formats must carry an indication that steers them to organic-waste collection and away from recycling. Get this wrong and you create the exact contamination Article 9 was written to prevent — and you expose the brand to a labelling non-conformity on top of a compostability one.

What Still Applies on Top of Compostability

Choosing a compostable material does not exempt the format from the rest of the regulation. The Article 5 restriction on substances of concern and the Annex V heavy-metal limit (Pb, Cd, Hg, Cr(VI) below 100 mg/kg, in force since 1 January 2026) still apply — and EN 13432 itself sets heavy-metal ceilings that are, in some cases, stricter. Article 10 minimisation still applies: the compostable unit must still be minimised in weight and volume. And Article 39 with Annex VIII still applies: every one of these units needs a Declaration of Conformity, with the compostability certificate and the EN 13432 test report filed in the Annex VII technical documentation behind it. Article 9 changes the material; it does not remove the file.

Action Plan for Brand Owners

• Screen your catalogue for Article 9 formats. Flag every permeable tea/coffee/ beverage single-serve unit and every PLU sticker on fresh produce. These are your mandatory- compostable SKUs from 12 February 2028 — treat them as a separate work-stream from your recyclability portfolio.
• Certify the finished unit, not the substrate. Require EN 13432 certification (or a recognised equivalent) covering the complete item — filter, seal, thread, tag, label and adhesive — and demand the actual test report, not a supplier assurance letter.
• Separate "bio-based" from "compostable" in every spec. Rewrite procurement language so the requirement is certified industrial compostability, never carbon origin.
• Build a market-by-market matrix for the optional formats.Track Member-State transposition of Article 9(2) for carrier bags, non-permeable pods and any nationally-required formats, and map each market's obligation to the version of the pack you place there.
• Fix the labelling now.Plan the Article 12 organic-waste disposal indication into artwork for every compostable unit, and make sure no other pack in the portfolio is claiming "compostable" without being in Article 9 scope.
• File the evidence in the technical documentation.Attach the compostability certificate, the EN 13432 report and the Annex V/heavy-metal declarations to each unit's Annex VII file and reference them from the Declaration of Conformity.

How PPWR Connect Helps Brand Owners with Article 9

Article 9 is small enough to be forgotten and consequential enough to fail an audit — a handful of SKUs where the compliant answer is a certified material change, a Member-State matrix and a labelling edit, all evidenced in the same Declaration of Conformity that carries the rest of your portfolio. PPWR Connect lets brand owners inventory every packaging component, automatically flag the formats that fall under Article 9, hold the EN 13432 certificates and test reports against the finished unit, track the market-by-market compostability obligations as national rules land, and generate consistent Annex VIII Declarations with the compostability evidence attached — the same PPWR compliance software that manages your recyclability, minimisation and recycled-content work, so the compostable formats do not fall through the cracks. If you want to know which of your tea, coffee, single-serve or produce SKUs are exposed under Article 9 with the 2028 deadline approaching, start with a free PPWR readiness assessment — it maps your packaging against Articles 5 to 12 and shows exactly where the compostability and labelling evidence is missing.