Applicability
Overview
The Applicability section determines, per company, whether Regulation (EU) 2025/40 (PPWR) applies. Your activities define your roles (manufacturer, importer, producer), and each role carries binding obligations from 12 August 2026. One packaging placed on the EU market is enough to trigger them. You run a short check per company, and kolum computes the roles and the obligation programme from your answers.
🟢 Why this matters. Everything else in the PPWR module builds on this result. The applicability check turns the regulation's role logic into a concrete list of standing obligations for each of your legal entities, so your team knows what applies before working through individual packaging items. See Regulation (EU) 2025/40.
How this works
The logic follows the regulation's own structure:
- Your activities determine your roles (Art. 3).
- Your roles determine the duty programme (Art. 15/18/19).
- Your countries determine registration and EPR (Art. 44/45).
- Your packaging categories determine which later waves (2028 to 2030) hit you.
Quantities never switch these duties on or off; they only matter for fees and reporting later. The per-packaging work, substances, technical documentation, and the declaration of conformity, lives in the Packaging module.
The PPWR Applicability per Company table
The table lists every company from your master data with three columns:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Company | The legal entity, as maintained under Master Data. |
| PPWR applicable | Yes once a completed check found the company affected, or Not checked while no check has been completed. |
| Obligations | For affected companies, the obligation programme as chips, for example Packaging conformity, Technical documentation, Marking (Art. 15), PFAS limits, Registration FR, Labelling, Empty space (transport/e-commerce), Transport reuse, Recycled content, Recyclability, HORECA reuse (manufacturer), EPR representative FR. |
The action per row depends on its state: Check PPWR relevance starts the check for a company that has not been checked, and View obligations opens the saved result for a company that has.
When to re-check a company
Re-run the check whenever the facts behind your answers change:
- The company starts or stops manufacturing, filling or packing, importing, or selling under its own brand.
- It expands into a new member state or starts selling cross-border directly to end users.
- Its packaging categories change, for example e-commerce packaging is added.
- It starts placing food-contact packaging on the market or begins advertising environmental properties of its packaging.
In this section
- Run an Applicability Check. The check itself: the five sections, the live result, and completing the check.
- Understanding the Applicability Questions. Every question explained, with guidance on what to answer when, and the regulation behind it.
- Reading the Result and Your Obligations. The live result panel, the obligation groups and their statuses, and what to do next.
ℹ️ Regulatory context. The role definitions the check evaluates sit in Article 3 of the regulation (manufacturer 3(1)(13), producer 3(1)(15), importer 3(1)(17)), the operator duties in Chapter IV, and registration and EPR in Articles 44 and 45. See Regulation (EU) 2025/40.