PPWR Packaging Minimisation & the Empty-Space Rule

PPWR Packaging Minimisation: What Article 10, Annex IV and the Empty-Space Rule Mean for Brand Owners

Of the four obligations that switch on together on August 12, 2026 under Regulation (EU) 2025/40 — recyclability assessment, labelling, the Declaration of Conformity and minimisation — the one brand owners consistently underestimate is minimisation. Recyclability feels like a laboratory problem you can hand to a supplier. Minimisation is different: it is a design decision the brand owner made, that the brand owner must now justify, in writing, per packaging unit. Article 10 and Annex IV do not ban heavy packaging outright; they ban packaging that is heavier or bulkier than the product actually needs, and they put the burden of proof on the person who placed it on the market.

This is squarely a brand-owner obligation. You cannot delegate it to the carton plant or the film supplier, because they do not control the whole system — the fitment, the outer case, the void fill, the marketing sleeve, the double wall. This guide sets out what Article 10 actually requires, how the Annex IV performance criteria work, where the Article 24 empty-space ratio bites, and how to build a minimisation file that survives a market-surveillance request.

What Article 10 Actually Says

Article 10 requires that packaging be designed so that its weight and volume are reduced to the minimum necessary to ensure its functionality, taking account of the material and the shape of the packaging. Unnecessary weight and volume must be avoided, and packaging features that serve no function other than to increase the perceived volume of the product — double walls, false bottoms, filler layers, oversized sleeves — are not permitted unless they can be justified against a listed performance criterion. Marketing and consumer perception are explicitly not valid grounds on their own for extra material.

The assessment is documented against Annex IV, which sets out the performance criteria a design may legitimately rely on: protection of the product; the manufacturing and filling process (line speed, seal integrity); logistics, including transport, handling and storage; hygiene and safety; product shelf-life; the avoidance and reduction of substances of concern; and legal or information requirements that the packaging must physically carry. If a design choice adds weight or volume, it has to trace back to one of those criteria. If it cannot, it is a minimisation failure and the packaging is non-conforming from day one of application.

Crucially, minimisation applies to every packaging layer independently — primary (sales), secondary (grouped) and tertiary (transport). A minimised bottle inside an oversized gift carton inside a loosely filled shipper is still three separate minimisation questions, and the brand owner owns all three.

The Article 24 Empty-Space Ratio

Where Article 10 governs the design of each pack, Article 24 governs the air between packs. It sets a maximum empty-space ratio of 50% for grouped packaging, transport packaging and e-commerce packaging — measured as the void volume between the sales packaging (and any protective filling) and the walls of the outer packaging. Air cushions, paper crinkle, foam peanuts, bubble wrap and moulded inserts all count as filling toward the calculation; they do not exempt a box from the ratio, and an oversized box stuffed with void fill is precisely what the article targets.

The empty-space ratio is designed to be measured against a standardised methodology that the Commission is finalising through the secondary-legislation pipeline, and market-surveillance authorities will use the 50% figure as the reference benchmark when they assess whether an operator's packaging is genuinely minimised. For any brand selling direct-to-consumer, this converts right-sizing from a cost-saving nicety into a compliance requirement: cartonisation logic, on-demand box sizing and a rationalised box range are now part of the conformity story, not just the logistics budget. Modelling those scenarios reliably across a portfolio is one of the concrete jobs a dedicated PPWR compliance platform exists to do.

Who Holds the Obligation Across the Chain

Minimisation and the empty-space ratio do not land on a single party. The manufacturer — in PPWR terms, whoever has the packaging manufactured and places it on the market under their own name, which for most consumer goods is the brand owner — carries the Article 10 minimisation duty and the Article 38 conformity assessment for the sales and grouped packaging they put on the market. Importers placing packaged goods from outside the EU must verify that this assessment exists and refuse product that lacks it; they inherit the manufacturer's exposure if they do not. The Article 24 empty-space ratio, by contrast, attaches to the economic operator that actually fills the grouped, transport or e-commerce packaging — often a distributor, retailer or fulfilment operator rather than the brand.

For a brand that sells through marketplaces and third-party logistics, that split matters: your carton design decisions feed an empty-space calculation that someone else is legally responsible for, and they will push non-compliant box specs back to you. Private-label suppliers and retailers face the same question in reverse — the retailer named on the pack is usually the manufacturer for PPWR purposes and owns the minimisation file, even though a contract packer produced it. Getting this allocation written into supply agreements before August 2026 avoids a scramble over who signs the Declaration of Conformity.

Where Brand Owners Get Caught

The same handful of design patterns account for most minimisation exposure, and they cut across cosmetics, food, supplements, electronics and apparel alike.

Minimisation Is a Documentation Obligation, Not Just a Design One

The part brand owners miss most often is that Article 10 does not merely require a minimised design — it requires proof of one. The conformity assessment procedure under Article 38 and the technical documentation set out in Annex VII must contain the minimisation assessment: a description of each packaging component, the performance criteria relied on, and the reasoning that shows the weight and volume could not be reduced further without failing one of those criteria. That assessment then underpins the EU Declaration of Conformity under Article 39 and Annex VIII, which is the document a distributor, importer or authority can demand.

In practice this means every SKU needs a short, defensible minimisation record: the packaging system broken into layers, the dimensions and weights, the Annex IV criteria invoked, and any supporting test data (drop test, compression, seal integrity). A scanned specification sheet will not carry this; the reasoning has to be explicit and retrievable. The same evidence chain that supports minimisation feeds directly into the recyclability assessment and the PPWR Declaration of Conformity, so it pays to capture it once, structured, rather than three times in three formats.

A Practical Action Plan for Brand Owners

1. Inventory every packaging system by SKU and break it into layers. Primary, secondary and tertiary each get their own minimisation question. You cannot assess what you have not itemised.
2. Screen for the obvious offenders first. Double walls, false bottoms, oversized gift cartons, non-functional sleeves and belly bands — flag anything whose only defence is shelf appeal, because that defence does not hold under Annex IV.
3. Map each retained feature to an Annex IV criterion. Protection, filling-line function, logistics, hygiene, shelf-life, substance reduction, or a legal information requirement. If a feature maps to none, it has to go or be redesigned.
4. Run the Article 24 empty-space check on grouped and e-commerce formats. Measure void volume against the 50% reference; where you exceed it, right-size the box or rework the fitment before you look at cushioning.
5. Validate any down-gauging with real test data. Reducing grammage or wall thickness is the cleanest weight saving, but only if drop, compression and seal-integrity testing confirms the product is still protected. Archive the reports.
6. Write the minimisation assessment into Annex VII technical documentation. One structured record per SKU, feeding the Annex VIII Declaration of Conformity. Start with the highest- volume and most obviously over-packaged references — they are the ones an auditor reaches for first.

None of these steps requires waiting for a delegated act. The minimisation duty and the empty-space ratio apply from August 12, 2026; the standardised calculation methodology will refine howyou measure, but not whether the obligation exists. Brands that treat the current guidance as a reason to pause will find themselves reworking artwork, tooling and box ranges under deadline pressure rather than on their own schedule.

How PPWR Connect Helps

Minimisation is where PPWR stops being a supplier problem and becomes a portfolio-management problem: every SKU, every layer, every design justification, held together in a form an authority can inspect. PPWR Connect lets brand owners inventory each packaging system by layer, map every retained feature to its Annex IV performance criterion, model Article 24 empty-space scenarios across the box range, attach drop and compression test evidence, and generate the Annex VII minimisation record that feeds a market-ready Article 39 Declaration of Conformity — alongside the recyclability grade on the same data. You can see exactly which of your references are over-packaged and why on the packaging minimisation workspace, and the fastest way to find out where your own portfolio stands is the free PPWR readiness assessment — it flags your minimisation and empty-space gaps in a few minutes, before August 12, 2026 does it for you.