Packaging Waste Management in the Context of the Single-Use Plastics (SUP) Directive

Streszczenie

Niniejsza praca licencjacka podejmuje problematykę zarządzania odpadami opakowaniowymi w kontekście dyrektywy Parlamentu Europejskiego i Rady (UE) 2019/904 w sprawie zmniejszenia wpływu niektórych produktów z tworzyw sztucznych na środowisko, powszechnie określanej jako dyrektywa SUP. Celem pracy jest analiza architektury regulacyjnej dyrektywy, ocena systemów gospodarki odpadami opakowaniowymi w Unii Europejskiej i Polsce oraz oszacowanie środowiskowych i ekonomicznych skutków wdrożenia przyjętych instrumentów polityki. W pracy zastosowano metodę analizy dokumentów prawnych, przegląd literatury przedmiotu oraz analizę porównawczą danych statystycznych dotyczących poziomów recyklingu i efektywności systemów kaucyjnych w wybranych państwach członkowskich. Ustalono, że dyrektywa SUP opiera się na trzech głównych instrumentach: zakazach wprowadzania do obrotu, mechanizmach ograniczania konsumpcji oraz rozszerzonej odpowiedzialności producenta (ROP). Polska dokonała spóźnionej transpozycji dyrektywy ustawą z dnia 14 kwietnia 2023 roku. Analiza porównawcza wskazuje na znaczące zróżnicowanie infrastrukturalne między państwami członkowskimi — Niemcy i Belgia osiągają ponad 70% poziom recyklingu opakowań, podczas gdy kraje Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej pozostają poniżej 50%. Systemy kaucyjne w Norwegii i Niemczech wykazują skuteczność przekraczającą odpowiednio 92% i 98%.^{[15, s. 20]} W konkluzji zidentyfikowano deficyty w zakresie nadzoru nad organizacjami odpowiedzialności producentów jako najistotniejsze ograniczenie systemowe oraz sformułowano rekomendacje dotyczące wprowadzenia wiążących standardów audytowych i zharmonizowanej metodologii pomiaru.

Słowa kluczowe: dyrektywa SUP, odpady opakowaniowe, rozszerzona odpowiedzialność producenta, recykling tworzyw sztucznych, system kaucyjny, gospodarka o obiegu zamkniętym

Abstract

This bachelor's thesis examines packaging waste management in the context of Directive (EU) 2019/904 on reducing the impact of certain plastic products on the environment, commonly referred to as the Single-Use Plastics (SUP) Directive. The study analyses the regulatory architecture of the Directive, evaluates packaging waste management systems across the European Union and Poland, and assesses the environmental and economic consequences of the adopted policy instruments. The research methodology encompasses legal document analysis, a systematic literature review, and comparative analysis of recycling rate data and deposit return system performance across selected Member States. The Directive is found to rest on three principal instruments: product prohibitions, consumption reduction obligations, and extended producer responsibility (EPR). Poland completed a delayed transposition through the Act of 14 April 2023. Comparative findings reveal substantial infrastructural divergence among Member States — Germany and Belgium achieve recycling rates above 70%, whereas Central and Eastern European countries generally remain below 50%.^{[16, s. 2]} Deposit return systems in Norway and Germany demonstrate recovery rates exceeding 92% and 98%, respectively, while Poland's kaucja scheme became operational in October 2025. Life cycle assessment evidence indicates that material substitution entails complex trade-offs requiring careful policy calibration. The conclusion identifies EPR governance deficits, particularly inadequate auditing of producer responsibility organisations, as the most consequential systemic limitation, and recommends the adoption of binding EPR audit standards alongside harmonised measurement methodology at the EU level.

Keywords: SUP Directive, packaging waste, extended producer responsibility, plastic recycling, deposit return system, circular economy

Wykaz skrótów

BDO

Baza danych o produktach i opakowaniach oraz o gospodarce odpadami

BMUV

Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection

BPA

Bisphenol A

DPG

Deutsches Pfandsystem

DRS

Deposit-Return System

EEA

European Environment Agency

EPR

Extended Producer Responsibility

GWP

Global Warming Potential

KrWG

Kreislaufwirtschaftsgesetz

LCA

Life Cycle Assessment

MBT

Mechanical-Biological Treatment

MFA

Material Flow Analysis

MRF

Material Recovery Facility

MSFD

Marine Strategy Framework Directive

NIR

Near-Infrared

OOO

Organizacja Odzysku Opakowań

OSPAR

Oslo/Paris Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic

PE

Polyethylene

PET

Polyethylene Terephthalate

PLA

Polylactic Acid

PMD

Plastic, Metal, Drinking cartons

PP

Polypropylene

PRO

Producer Responsibility Organisation

RVM

Reverse Vending Machine

SME

Small and Medium Enterprise

SUP

Single-Use Plastics

Introduction

The proliferation of plastic waste has emerged as one of the most pressing environmental challenges of the twenty-first century, affecting terrestrial ecosystems, freshwater bodies, and marine environments on a global scale. Since the mass commercialisation of synthetic polymers in the mid-twentieth century, annual plastic production has grown from approximately two million tonnes in 1950 to over four hundred million tonnes by the early 2020s, with packaging representing the single largest application sector. A substantial proportion of this material enters the environment after a single use, generating persistent litter that degrades only very slowly into microplastic particles and accumulates in food chains, sediments, and the tissues of marine and terrestrial organisms. The social and economic costs of plastic pollution — encompassing coastal clean-up expenditure, damage to fisheries and tourism, and diffuse public-health risks associated with chemical leachates — are increasingly quantified in regulatory impact assessments, yet they remain imperfectly internalised by markets operating under conventional waste-management frameworks. Against this backdrop, legislative intervention at the supranational level has been identified as the most effective mechanism for achieving systemic change, given the cross-border nature of marine litter flows and the structural asymmetry between nationally fragmented producer responsibilities and globally integrated supply chains.

Within the European Union, the regulatory response to plastic pollution has evolved from voluntary commitments and product-specific restrictions toward a comprehensive, multi-instrument framework anchored in the principles of the circular economy. The Directive (EU) 2019/904 on the reduction of the impact of certain plastic products on the environment — commonly referred to as the Single-Use Plastics (SUP) Directive — constitutes the most significant legislative development in this domain since the adoption of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive in 1994. Adopted in June 2019 and entering into force across Member States from July 2021, the SUP Directive targets ten categories of single-use plastic products identified through beach litter surveys conducted under the Oslo–Paris Convention (OSPAR) and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive as collectively accounting for approximately seventy per cent of all items found on European beaches. The Directive deploys three structurally distinct regulatory instruments — outright prohibition under Article 5, binding consumption reduction obligations under Article 4, and mandatory extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes under Article 8 — thereby combining market withdrawal, demand-side governance, and cost internalisation within a single legislative architecture. The significance of the SUP Directive lies not only in its direct environmental ambitions but in its function as a test case for the operationalisation of circular economy principles through legally binding obligations, offering a novel model for regulating product life cycles rather than merely end-of-life waste streams.^{[17, s. 168]}

Poland presents a particularly instructive case study for examining the transposition and early implementation of the SUP Directive. As a large middle-income Member State with a manufacturing economy characterised by significant plastic-processing capacity, Poland occupies a position in which the compliance costs of regulatory change are substantial while the environmental dividends — reduced litter, lower landfill dependency, improved resource recovery — are also considerable. The transposition process in Poland was delayed relative to the July 2021 deadline prescribed by the Directive, with the national implementing legislation — the Act of 14 April 2023 on certain single-use products made of plastic — entering into force after a gap that created legal uncertainty for producers and retailers. This delay was not merely procedural; it reflected deeper institutional tensions between environmental regulatory objectives and the interests of the packaging industry, as well as structural weaknesses in Poland's extended producer responsibility governance, including the fragmented system of producer responsibility organisations (OOO) and the limited auditing capacity of the relevant inspectorate bodies. Poland's deposit return system for beverage containers, the so-called system kaucyjny, was launched in October 2025, placing Poland among the later EU adopters of this instrument relative to mature systems in Norway (exceeding ninety-two per cent collection rates) and Germany (approximately ninety-eight per cent). The combination of delayed transposition, institutional reform in progress, and comparative infrastructure deficits makes Poland a valuable lens through which to examine the gap between regulatory ambition at the supranational level and implementation realities at the national level.

This thesis is oriented by three interconnected research objectives. The first objective is to analyse the regulatory architecture of the SUP Directive — its legislative genesis, instrument design, and position within the broader circular economy legal framework — so as to assess its theoretical coherence and the extent to which its provisions respond to documented evidence on plastic pollution. The second objective is to describe and evaluate the packaging waste management systems operative in the European Union and in Poland specifically, including collection, sorting, and recycling infrastructure, EPR financing models, and deposit return mechanisms, with attention to both institutional design and measurable environmental outcomes. The third objective is to assess the environmental and economic impacts attributable to SUP regulation, drawing on life-cycle assessment literature, consumer behaviour research, and available monitoring data to evaluate the Directive's effectiveness and to identify the structural limitations that constrain its implementation. These objectives give rise to the following principal research questions: How does the SUP Directive's regulatory design reflect the available evidence on single-use plastic pollution, and how effectively does it operationalise circular economy principles? To what extent do packaging waste management systems in Poland meet the institutional and infrastructural requirements implied by the SUP Directive? What environmental and economic impacts can be empirically or analytically attributed to the regulatory measures introduced by the Directive, and what limitations in implementation reduce their effectiveness? These questions are addressed through a documentary and comparative analysis of primary legislative sources, European Commission impact assessments, national transposition legislation, and secondary literature in environmental law, industrial ecology, and environmental economics.

The thesis is structured in three substantive chapters, each corresponding to one of the research objectives, followed by a conclusion that synthesises the findings and advances policy recommendations. Chapter One examines the regulatory framework and legislative context of the SUP Directive, tracing its origins in the 2018 EU Plastics Strategy, analysing the evidentiary basis for the selection of target product categories, and situating the Directive within the broader architecture of EU environmental law, including the Circular Economy Action Plan of 2020 and the proposed Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation of 2022. Particular attention is given to the three regulatory instruments deployed by the Directive and to the comparative analysis of Member State transposition approaches, with France examined as an early mover and Poland as a case of delayed implementation. Chapter Two describes and evaluates packaging waste management systems in the European Union and Poland, addressing the waste hierarchy framework established by Directive 2008/98/EC, the infrastructure for collection, sorting, and recycling at both EU and national levels, Poland's institutional governance structure, and the functioning and comparative performance of deposit return systems. Chapter Three assesses the environmental and economic impacts of SUP regulation, examining the scientific evidence on plastic pollution's environmental burden, the counterintuitive findings emerging from life-cycle assessments of substitution strategies, the economic costs imposed on producers — particularly small and medium-sized enterprises — and the consumer behavioural responses documented in the empirical literature. The conclusion draws the three analytical strands together, evaluates the SUP Directive's achievements and shortcomings, and proposes a set of recommendations directed at strengthening EPR governance, harmonising measurement frameworks, and establishing a robust monitoring architecture for Poland's deposit return system.

This thesis makes a contribution to the academic literature on EU environmental regulation and circular economy governance by providing an integrated analysis that combines regulatory design, institutional capacity, and empirical impact assessment within a single analytical frame. Much of the existing literature addresses these dimensions in isolation — legal scholars examine the Directive's normative architecture without sustained engagement with infrastructure realities, while environmental economists assess impacts without detailed attention to the regulatory instruments that produce them. By triangulating across these perspectives, this work offers a more complete account of how supranational environmental law functions in practice, with Poland serving as a concrete and timely example of the implementation challenges facing Member States with significant structural constraints. The analysis is subject to certain limitations that should be acknowledged at the outset. The SUP Directive's implementation timeline means that monitoring data for several of its key measures — particularly the consumption reduction targets and the EPR cost-allocation mechanisms — remains incomplete or unavailable as of the time of writing, necessitating reliance on projected impact assessments and analogous national experience rather than ex-post evaluation. Furthermore, the thesis does not extend to the full range of packaging materials addressed by EU law and confines its comparative institutional analysis to a selection of Member State cases; a more comprehensive cross-national study would be required to draw generalisable conclusions about transposition performance across the EU as a whole. Within these boundaries, the thesis aims to provide a rigorous and policy-relevant account of one of the most significant recent developments in European environmental governance.

Chapter 1. The Single-Use Plastics Directive: Regulatory Framework and Legislative Context

1.1. Origins and Policy Rationale of the SUP Directive

The legislative genesis of Directive (EU) 2019/904 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the reduction of the impact of certain plastic products on the environment — referred to throughout this work as the Single-Use Plastics Directive (SUP Directive) — is situated within a broader transformation of European environmental law towards the circular economy paradigm. The Directive emerged from a well-documented evidentiary base concerning the presence of plastic litter in the marine environment: data gathered in the preparatory phase of the legislative proposal established that approximately seventy percent of all litter found on European beaches consisted of plastic items, and that ten specific single-use product categories accounted for the dominant share of such litter. Research into the environmental persistence of single-use plastic products — characterised by the fact that their useful life is frequently measured in minutes, while their degradation in natural environments may require centuries — provided the scientific foundation upon which the Commission's proportionality analysis was constructed. It was against this background that the Commission published its legislative proposal in May 2018, accompanied by a detailed impact assessment examining the environmental, economic, and social effects of a range of regulatory options.

The direct policy antecedent of the SUP Directive was the European Strategy for Plastics in a Circular Economy, adopted by the Commission in January 2018. That Strategy identified single-use plastics as a priority area for regulatory action, acknowledging both the environmental costs of unmanaged plastic waste and the need to address market fragmentation arising from divergent national measures already in place across Member States. The Strategy's vision of a circular economy for plastics — in which all plastic packaging placed on the EU market would be reusable or recyclable by 2030 — set the normative direction for the subsequent legislative initiative. The Circular Economy Action Plan, first adopted in 2015 and subsequently elaborated in 2020, provided the overarching policy architecture within which the SUP Directive was positioned, establishing the principle that lifecycle approaches to waste prevention and resource efficiency must be embedded in environmental product regulation. ^{[1, s. 14]}

The policy rationale of the SUP Directive rests upon two mutually reinforcing objectives: the protection of the environment, in particular the marine environment, and the proper functioning of the internal market. The co-existence of these objectives reflects a tension inherent in EU environmental law, whereby legislative action must satisfy both Article 191 TFEU — which mandates a high level of environmental protection — and Article 114 TFEU, which concerns the approximation of national laws affecting the establishment and functioning of the internal market. The Commission's impact assessment identified that unilateral national measures restricting or prohibiting single-use plastic products — of which several had already been adopted or were under active consideration in Member States — risked creating barriers to trade and distorting conditions of competition within the single market. Evidence gathered from national measures in several European countries had demonstrated that levies and bans on single-use plastic items could yield substantial and durable reductions in consumption; studies recorded reductions exceeding fifty percent in the use of lightweight plastic bags following the introduction of mandatory charges in Denmark, Portugal, and England, validating the proportionality of the regulatory approach ultimately adopted at EU level. ^[7]

1.2. Scope, Definitions and Product Categories Under the Directive

The personal and material scope of the SUP Directive is defined with reference to the concept of the „single-use plastic product”, which is assigned a specific legal meaning in Article 3(2) of the Directive. A product is classified as a single-use plastic product where it is made wholly or partly from plastic and is not conceived, designed, or placed on the market to accomplish, within its lifespan, multiple trips or rotations by being returned to a producer for refilling or reused for the same purpose for which it was conceived. This definition is deliberately broad, encompassing a wide range of products regardless of size, function, or commercial value, whilst excluding products designed and used in a manner consistent with multiple use. The term „plastic” is itself defined in Article 3(1) as a material consisting of a polymer to which additives or other substances may have been added and which can function as a main structural component of final products, with the exception of natural polymers that have not been chemically modified.

The definitional framework of the Directive gives rise to a number of boundary questions of practical significance for enforcement authorities and economic operators alike. The exclusion of bio-based and biodegradable plastics from the definitional exception — unless they also meet specific criteria relating to end-of-life recyclability and the absence of negative effects on waste streams — was a deliberate legislative choice reflecting the Commission's assessment that such materials do not, in all circumstances, present a meaningfully lower environmental impact than conventional plastics when considered across their full lifecycle. The prohibition of oxo-degradable plastics under Article 5, without exception, on the grounds that they do not genuinely biodegrade and contribute to microplastic contamination of the environment, illustrates the extent to which the Directive's drafters were attentive to the risk of regulatory substitution effects whereby prohibited conventional plastics might be replaced by ostensibly „greener” alternatives that generate equivalent or greater environmental harm. The treatment of composite products — most notably beverage cups with plastic lids and straws, and food containers made partly from paper and partly from plastic — generated interpretive questions that were addressed in part by Commission guidance published in 2021, which sought to clarify whether such products fall within the Directive's scope by reference to the predominant structural material. The Directive also interacts directly with Directive 94/62/EC on packaging and packaging waste, with Directive 2008/98/EC on waste, and with Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 (REACH), requiring that its application be consistent with the waste hierarchy established under the latter instrument.

The regulatory obligations imposed by the SUP Directive are differentiated according to product category, with the Annex to the Directive specifying which regulatory instrument — prohibition, consumption reduction, marking, EPR, or separate collection targets — applies to each product type. The following table presents a systematic overview of the product categories addressed by the Directive and the corresponding regulatory obligations applicable to each category.

Table 1.1. Product Categories Under Directive (EU) 2019/904 and Applicable Regulatory Instruments

Product Category	Regulatory Instrument	Legal Basis	Implementation Deadline
Cotton bud sticks, cutlery, plates, straws, stirrers, sticks for balloons, expanded polystyrene food/beverage containers and cups, oxo-degradable products	Market prohibition	Article 5	3 July 2021
Beverage cups; food containers for immediate consumption	Consumption reduction (national measures)	Article 4	National targets from 3 July 2021
Beverage containers up to 3 litres (bottles with caps/lids)	Separate collection target (90% by 2029) + EPR	Articles 8 and 9	Deposit-return or equivalent by 2025–2029
Sanitary towels, wet wipes, balloons, tobacco filters, beverage cups, food containers, lightweight plastic bags	Extended producer responsibility (cost coverage)	Article 8	From 5 January 2023
Sanitary towels, wet wipes, tobacco products with filters, cups	Mandatory labelling requirements	Article 7	3 July 2021

1.3. Transposition Obligations and the Implementation Landscape Across Member States

The SUP Directive required transposition into the national legal orders of all Member States by 3 July 2021, a deadline that coincided with the entry into force of the market prohibitions set out in Article 5. The transposition obligation is characteristic of EU directives: whilst the Directive is binding as to the result to be achieved, it leaves to the competent authorities of each Member State the choice of form and methods. This structural characteristic creates inherent diversity in implementation, as national legislators translate a common regulatory framework into existing legal traditions, administrative structures, and enforcement mechanisms that differ substantially from one Member State to another. Member States retained a degree of discretion in several areas, including the setting of national consumption reduction targets under Article 4 and the design of EPR schemes under Article 8, provided that national measures were effective in achieving the Directive's objectives and compliant with the principles of the internal market. The financing of waste management costs from EPR obligations reflects the general principle that municipalities bear institutional responsibility for waste management within their territories, though the economic burden is increasingly shifted to producers. ^{[2, s. 175]}

France emerged as an early and comparatively ambitious transposer of the Directive's requirements, having adopted the Anti-Waste Law for a Circular Economy (Loi anti-gaspillage pour une économie circulaire — AGEC) in February 2020, more than a year before the transposition deadline. The AGEC law went beyond the minimum requirements of the SUP Directive in several respects, introducing prohibitions on single-use plastic packaging for fruits and vegetables below 1.5 kg, restrictions on the free distribution of single-use plastic items in commercial premises, and a requirement for public catering establishments to offer reusable tableware. Such measures exceeding the Directive's minimum harmonisation level were legally permissible under Article 4(1), which expressly allowed Member States to adopt more stringent national measures, provided they were proportionate, non-discriminatory, and consistent with the TFEU. Germany transposed the Directive through amendments to the Single-Use Plastics Restriction Ordinance (Einwegkunststoffverbotsverordnung) alongside revisions to the Packaging Act (Verpackungsgesetz), with the result that from 1 January 2022, the placing on the market of lightweight plastic carrier bags was prohibited, and from 1 January 2023, businesses offering takeaway food and beverages were required to provide a reusable packaging alternative alongside the single-use option. ^[4]

The Netherlands, whose waste management system is characterised by a longstanding emphasis on separate collection and landfill diversion — with a landfill ban on combustible and biodegradable waste in place since 1995 — incorporated the Directive's requirements within the framework of its updated National Waste Management Plan, building upon an existing regulatory culture conducive to ambitious waste reduction targets. ^{[3, s. 5] [3, s. 8]} Poland transposed the SUP Directive through the Act of 14 April 2023 on measures to reduce the environmental impact of certain plastic products, which established the legal basis for market prohibitions, EPR obligations, and the national administration of mandatory fees charged to consumers at the point of sale for certain single-use plastic items. The Commission initiated infringement proceedings against a number of Member States that failed to transpose the Directive within the prescribed deadline, reflecting the political priority assigned to timely and complete implementation of the SUP legislative package across the internal market.

Table 1.2. Transposition of Directive (EU) 2019/904 in Selected Member States

Member State	Primary Transposition Instrument	Adoption	Notable Features
France	Loi AGEC (Anti-Waste Law for a Circular Economy)	February 2020	Early adoption; exceeds Directive minimum (plastic-free packaging for fresh produce)
Germany	Einwegkunststoffverbotsverordnung + Verpackungsgesetz revision	2021	Mandatory reusable packaging for takeaway from 2023; lightweight plastic bag ban from 2022
Netherlands	Updated National Waste Management Plan + packaging regulations	2021	Longstanding landfill ban (1995) and developed separate collection infrastructure
Poland	Act of 14 April 2023 on impact reduction of certain plastic products	April 2023	Delayed transposition; mandatory consumer fees for covered items; national EPR registry

1.4. The SUP Directive Within the Broader Circular Economy Legal Architecture

The SUP Directive does not operate in legislative isolation but forms part of a dense and evolving body of European Union law addressing waste prevention, resource efficiency, and the transition to a circular economy. The foundational instrument in this architecture is Directive 2008/98/EC — the Waste Framework Directive — which establishes the five-step waste hierarchy placing prevention at the apex and disposal at the base, and which imposes on Member States the obligation to adopt national waste management plans and waste prevention programmes. ^{[2, s. 171]} The Waste Framework Directive also establishes the principle of extended producer responsibility as a general instrument available to Member States and sets binding recycling targets for municipal waste that Member States are required to achieve progressively through 2035. ^[5] The SUP Directive builds upon this general framework by applying the waste hierarchy and EPR principles with specificity to a defined set of products characterised by their plastic content and single-use nature, thereby deepening the Waste Framework Directive's regime for a category of waste that has attracted particular regulatory attention on account of its environmental visibility and transboundary impact.

The relationship between the SUP Directive and the Circular Economy Action Plans of 2015 and 2020 is one of mutual reinforcement and sequential elaboration. The 2015 Action Plan identified the reduction of plastic waste — and in particular of marine plastic litter — as a priority area for legislative action, and the SUP Directive was adopted as a direct legislative output of that policy commitment. The 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan further strengthened the framework by announcing the review of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive and the development of a comprehensive policy framework for sustainable products, reflecting the ambition of mainstreaming circular economy principles across the full lifecycle of products placed on the EU market. ^{[1, s. 14]} The Green Deal, adopted in December 2019, provided the overarching political framework within which both Action Plans were situated, establishing the objective of transforming the EU into a modern, resource-efficient, and competitive economy, with no net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. ^{[1, s. 14]}

EU Green Deal (December 2019)
Circular Economy Action Plans (2015 · 2020)
Waste Framework Directive 2008/98/EC Waste hierarchy · EPR · Recycling targets	SUP Directive (EU) 2019/904 Art. 5 Prohibition · Art. 4 Reduction Art. 7 Marking · Art. 8 EPR	Packaging Directive 94/62/EC → PPWR COM(2022) 677
ESPR · CSRD · Green Claims Directive · REACH
International: UNEP Global Plastics Treaty (in negotiation) · Basel Convention Amendment 2019

Subsequent legislative initiatives have further elaborated the circular economy framework within which the SUP Directive is positioned. The proposed Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation — COM(2022) 677 — would replace Directive 94/62/EC with a directly applicable regulation establishing mandatory recycled content requirements, reuse and refill targets, and restrictions on certain packaging formats, including categories that overlap with products addressed by the SUP Directive. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and the proposed Green Claims Directive together constitute a legislative ecosystem ensuring that sustainability claims regarding packaging materials are substantiated, verifiable, and non-misleading. At the international level, the 2019 amendment to the Basel Convention introduced controls on the transboundary movement of plastic waste, restricting the export of plastic waste to non-OECD countries without prior informed consent, thereby reinforcing the case for domestic circular economy solutions within the EU. The negotiations towards a legally binding global plastics treaty — mandated by UNEA Resolution 5/14 of March 2022 — represent the most ambitious multilateral effort to date to establish binding obligations on the production, design, and disposal of plastic products, and their outcome may require further adaptation of the EU's internal regulatory framework.

• The Waste Framework Directive 2008/98/EC establishes the general waste hierarchy and EPR framework that underpins all specific EU product-level waste legislation, including the SUP Directive.
• The Circular Economy Action Plans of 2015 and 2020 translate the Green Deal's systemic ambitions into sectoral legislative programmes, with single-use plastics forming a flagship priority area.
• The proposed Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation COM(2022) 677 represents the next evolutionary step in packaging regulation, extending the Directive's logic of restriction and reuse to the full packaging sector.
• International instruments — notably the Basel Convention 2019 amendment and the UNEA global plastics treaty process — provide an external normative frame that both reflects and reinforces the direction of EU internal regulatory policy.

1.5. Prohibition, Restriction, and Extended Producer Responsibility as Regulatory Instruments

The SUP Directive deploys three principal categories of regulatory instrument — outright prohibition, consumption reduction obligations, and extended producer responsibility — in a graduated manner calibrated to the environmental impact of the product category concerned and the availability of alternatives on the market. Article 5 of the Directive prohibits the placing on the market of cotton bud sticks, cutlery, plates, straws, stirrers, sticks for balloons, expanded polystyrene food and beverage containers and cups, and all products made from oxo-degradable plastics, with effect from 3 July 2021. The prohibition of these categories reflects the legislative finding that suitable and affordable alternatives made from non-plastic materials were widely available at the time of the Directive's adoption, rendering continued market access for these products incompatible with the level of environmental protection required. The prohibition of expanded polystyrene cups and containers — a material that is technically recyclable but for which effective separate collection and industrial-scale recycling infrastructure is rarely available — illustrates the Directive's willingness to prioritise environmental outcomes over the continuation of established manufacturing practices.

The consumption reduction instrument established by Article 4 applies to beverage cups and food containers for immediate consumption, for which alternatives exist but have not yet achieved market dominance sufficient to justify outright prohibition. Member States are required to take measures to achieve an ambitious and sustained reduction in the consumption of these products, with discretion as to whether national measures take the form of quantitative targets, mandatory consumer charges, requirements to offer alternatives at the point of sale, or combinations thereof. The effectiveness of economic instruments — including mandatory fees charged to consumers for single-use items — had been demonstrated in the context of lightweight plastic carrier bags under Directive 94/62/EC, where the introduction of charges in several Member States resulted in reductions in consumption exceeding fifty percent, thereby providing an empirical basis for the application of equivalent instruments to other single-use plastic categories. Germany's experience with packaging waste regulation illustrates a complementary dimension of this trajectory: producer and retailer responsibility for the collection and recycling of product packaging — first introduced through the 1991 Packaging Ordinance — established an early precedent for the internalisation of end-of-life costs that the SUP Directive extends to new product categories. ^[6]

The extended producer responsibility framework established by Article 8 of the SUP Directive represents a significant development in EU EPR law, applying the polluter-pays principle to a range of single-use plastic products whose post-consumer waste imposes costs on municipal authorities, public spaces, and the natural environment. The definition of „producer” encompasses manufacturers, importers, and distributors of the covered products, as well as sellers who market such products under their own brand, ensuring that EPR obligations attach to the economic operator best positioned to redesign products or supply chains in a manner that reduces environmental impact. EPR obligations under the Directive include the financing of litter clean-up costs, waste collection and management costs, and the costs of public awareness campaigns relating to the environmental impact of the covered products. The Directive provides for both individual and collective compliance with EPR obligations, with collective compliance through approved producer responsibility organisations representing the most common arrangement in Member States, given the economies of scale achieved through pooled administration and reporting.

The cross-border dimension of EPR compliance presents a particular challenge in the context of e-commerce, where producers established in one Member State may sell products to consumers in other Member States without a physical commercial presence in the country of consumption. The fee modulation provisions of Article 8(7) — which require EPR fees to be modulated to reflect, inter alia, the durability, repairability, reusability, and recyclability of products — introduce an incentive dimension into the EPR framework that goes beyond cost recovery, encouraging producers to redesign products in ways that generate lower end-of-life costs and fewer environmental externalities. The interaction between the SUP Directive's EPR obligations and the broader waste management financing responsibilities of municipalities reflects the general principle that local authorities bear institutional responsibility for waste management within their territories, whilst the economic burden is progressively reallocated to producers through the application of the extended producer responsibility principle. ^{[2, s. 175]} The overall architecture of the Directive's regulatory instruments — as summarised below — reflects a methodological evolution in EU environmental law towards differentiated, lifecycle-sensitive regulation that matches instrument to impact rather than applying uniform obligations to heterogeneous product categories.

• Prohibition (Article 5) targets categories for which alternatives are widely available and environmental impact — particularly in the marine environment — is most severe and well-documented.
• Consumption reduction (Article 4) applies where alternatives exist but have not yet achieved market dominance, affording Member States discretion in the design of effective national measures.
• Labelling (Article 7) addresses categories that cannot yet be eliminated from the market but for which consumer information is identified as an effective behaviour-change mechanism.
• Extended producer responsibility (Article 8) establishes a financing mechanism ensuring that the costs of post-consumer waste management — including litter collection from public spaces and water bodies — are internalised by the producers who place the covered products on the market, thereby applying the polluter-pays principle at product level.

Chapter 2. Packaging Waste Management Systems in the European Union and Poland

2.1. Conceptual Foundations of Packaging Waste Management: Waste Hierarchy and Circular Economy Principles

The regulatory framework governing packaging waste management in the European Union rests upon two interconnected conceptual pillars: the waste hierarchy established by Directive 2008/98/EC and the circular economy paradigm articulated in successive European Commission action plans. The waste hierarchy prescribes a five-tier order of priority — prevention, preparation for re-use, recycling, other recovery, and disposal — within which packaging waste policy is required to be situated. In practice, however, the operational design of packaging waste management systems across Member States has been characterised by the dominance of recycling as the primary policy instrument, reflecting the structural difficulty of implementing prevention and re-use measures for packaging materials that are deeply embedded in contemporary supply chain logistics. This tension between the theoretical primacy of prevention and the practical centrality of recycling constitutes one of the defining characteristics of EU packaging waste governance.

The circular economy framework, as elaborated in the European Commission's 2015 Action Plan „Closing the Loop” and its successor 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan, reframes packaging not as a waste stream to be managed at end-of-life, but as a material input that should be retained within the economic system for as long as possible. ^{[8, s. 9723]} This conceptual reorientation carries significant implications for packaging design, production processes, and the structure of waste management systems: it demands that recyclability be engineered into products from the outset, that eco-modulation mechanisms reward packaging configurations that facilitate material recovery, and that life cycle assessment (LCA) and material flow analysis (MFA) be integrated into regulatory decision-making. The circular economy thus imposes demands simultaneously upstream — at the level of product design and material selection — and downstream, at the level of collection, sorting, and reprocessing infrastructure, creating policy interdependencies that single-instrument approaches cannot adequately address.

The definitional landscape of the circular economy has been subject to considerable scholarly elaboration. Drawing on an analysis of 114 definitions of the concept, Kirchherr and colleagues characterise the circular economy as an economic system that replaces the „end-of-life” paradigm with an approach founded on reducing, reusing, recycling, and recovering materials throughout production, distribution, and consumption processes, with the overarching aim of achieving sustainable development across its environmental, economic, and social dimensions. This formulation is consistent with the position adopted in EU policy documents, which emphasise that the transition to a circular economy requires changes throughout the value chain, encompassing product design, production processes, consumption patterns, business models, and consumer behaviour. ^[8] The emphasis on systemic transformation — rather than incremental adjustment — reflects the recognition that packaging waste management is not reducible to a logistical challenge but constitutes an element of a broader structural reconfiguration of industrial organisation.

Several conceptual tensions emerge within this framework that carry direct consequences for the design of packaging waste management systems. The first concerns the relationship between material efficiency and carbon footprint: increasing recycled content may reduce demand for virgin materials whilst potentially raising energy consumption in sorting and reprocessing, depending on material type and collection system design. A second tension arises between standardisation — which enables economies of scale in sorting and reprocessing — and innovation in packaging design, which may generate material combinations that existing infrastructure cannot process effectively. A third tension concerns the respective roles of producer responsibility and consumer behaviour in driving system performance: whilst extended producer responsibility frameworks place financial responsibility on producers, the practical effectiveness of separate collection systems depends substantially on household participation, which is shaped by education, infrastructure convenience, and public trust in the system's integrity. ^[9] The resolution of these tensions in specific national and local contexts accounts in large part for the divergence in packaging waste recycling performance observable across EU Member States.

2.2. Collection, Sorting, and Recycling Infrastructure: EU Standards and Member State Divergence

The physical infrastructure through which packaging waste is collected, sorted, and processed for recycling constitutes a critical determinant of system performance. Three principal collection system typologies are identifiable across EU Member States: kerbside collection, in which packaging waste is collected from households in separate streams or in commingled form; bring-bank systems, in which householders deposit separated waste at designated collection points; and deposit-return schemes (DRS), in which a financial deposit charged at the point of sale is redeemed upon return of the used packaging. Each typology presents distinct advantages and limitations in terms of material quality, capture rate, operational cost, and compatibility with the structural characteristics of different urban and rural environments. The choice of collection system typology has been consistently identified as a primary driver of variation in the purity and volume of recyclable materials recovered from the packaging waste stream.

Sorting technology has evolved considerably over preceding decades, with modern material recovery facilities (MRFs) deploying near-infrared (NIR) optical sorting systems capable of identifying and separating plastic polymers, paper grades, and metal fractions at high throughput rates. A particular challenge for sorting systems arises from multi-material packaging designs, which combine polymers, paper, and aluminium foil in configurations that optical sorting cannot readily disaggregate. Research on plastic packaging recycling has demonstrated that the homogeneity of collected waste streams is essential for achieving adequate quality in recycled material outputs, and that multi-polymer packaging designs impose significant constraints on recyclate quality, whereas mono-polymer designs are substantially more amenable to closed-loop recycling applications. ^[12] The separate collection of specific packaging categories — such as PET beverage bottles through deposit-return systems — has been shown to facilitate closed-loop recycling precisely because the purity of deposit-stream materials substantially exceeds that of commingled plastic waste, enabling recycled content to meet the standards required for food-contact reuse. ^[12]

Historical experience in the development of organised municipal waste management in densely populated industrial regions offers instructive context for understanding the complexity of system design. In studies of German municipal waste management in North Rhine-Westphalia during the 1987–1990 period, considerable variation was documented in collection system design across municipalities of differing population density and economic composition, with waste fees found to be significantly influenced by political determination rather than purely by performance variables such as separate collection share. ^{[11, s. 167]} This historical evidence from the German context underscores a structural challenge that remains pertinent in contemporary EU packaging waste policy: the risk that financing structures may be calibrated to administrative and political considerations rather than to optimise material recovery outcomes.

The performance of packaging waste recycling systems across EU Member States exhibits substantial divergence. Northern and Western European countries have consistently achieved recycling rates in excess of 70% for packaging waste, driven by long-established producer responsibility infrastructure, dense collection networks, and mature secondary raw material markets. By contrast, several Central and Eastern European Member States have recorded substantially lower rates, reflecting structural deficiencies in collection infrastructure, financing mechanisms, and enforcement capacity. In the context of comparative studies of selective waste collection conducted in other EU Member States, research conducted in Romania (Arad) documented that approximately 60% of residents expressed satisfaction with the separate collection system, whilst the most frequently cited barriers to participation included insufficient container provision (27.5% of respondents) and concern that waste was mixed after collection (8.3%), with almost half of respondents indicating that improved public information would increase their participation. These findings from a Central European urban context illustrate that infrastructure adequacy and institutional trust are structural prerequisites for achieving high household participation rates in packaging waste separation.

Table 2.1. Comparative packaging waste collection systems and performance indicators in selected EU Member States

Member State	Dominant collection model	DRS for beverage containers	Approx. plastic packaging recycling rate
Germany	Kerbside dual-stream + bring-bank	Yes (DPG, since 2003)	>70%
Belgium	Kerbside (PMD bag) + bring-bank	Partial (introduced 2024)	>70%
Norway	DRS (Infinitum, since 1972)	Yes (~92% collection rate)	>85%
Sweden	DRS (Returpack) + kerbside	Yes (>85% for PET/cans)	>70%
Poland	Kerbside (colour-coded bins) + DRS from 2025	Yes (kaucja system, 2025)	<50%

2.3. Poland's Packaging Waste Management System: Institutional Actors and Legal Obligations

Poland's packaging waste management system is governed by a layered legislative framework comprising the Act of 13 June 2013 on Packaging and Packaging Waste, the Act of 14 December 2012 on Waste, and the national legislation transposing successive EU packaging directives. The institutional architecture encompasses a defined set of actors whose respective responsibilities are allocated by statute: municipalities (gminy) bear primary responsibility for the organisation of household waste collection and for achieving recycling targets within their jurisdictions; marshals' offices exercise regional administrative and oversight functions; the Chief Inspectorate for Environmental Protection (GIOŚ) performs enforcement functions; and the Institute for Environmental Protection — National Research Institute (IOŚ-PIB) provides monitoring, reporting, and scientific advisory services. The multiplicity of institutional actors operating across different levels of government with partially overlapping competences has been identified as a source of coordination challenges in the implementation of national packaging waste policy, particularly where municipal and national reporting obligations intersect.

The producer responsibility dimension of the Polish system is operationalised through producer responsibility organisations (organizacje odzysku opakowań, OOO), which are collective schemes through which producers discharge their legal obligations regarding the recovery and recycling of packaging placed on the market. The OOO model has been subject to sustained criticism regarding the gap between nominal compliance — as demonstrated through the submission of required administrative documentation — and actual physical recovery of packaging materials. A significant reform trajectory has been articulated in the context of Poland's adaptation of its legal framework to the requirements of EU packaging legislation, with the 2023 reform cycle addressing institutional governance, financing transparency, and the prevention of free-riding by producers who register obligations without ensuring corresponding physical recycling activities. The Registry of Products, Packaging, and Waste Management (BDO) was introduced to consolidate producer registration and reporting obligations into a unified digital platform; its implementation has, however, encountered challenges relating to data quality, user compliance, and interoperability with municipal reporting systems.

Poland's recycling rates for packaging materials present a differentiated picture across material categories. Performance in plastics recycling has remained structurally below EU targets, reflecting both the compositional complexity of the Polish plastic packaging waste stream and the limited capacity of domestic reprocessing infrastructure for specific polymer fractions. The structural gap between actual recycling performance and the targets established under EU legislation — including the 50% recycling rate for plastic packaging by 2025 under Directive 2018/852 — represents a compliance risk that has been a consistent feature of national waste management policy assessments. In the context of broader analyses of circular economy transition, it has been observed that the most significant challenge for the adoption of circular economy principles is the acceptance of new business models by producers, which requires value chain cooperation of a kind that regulatory frameworks can incentivise but not substitute. ^{[8, s. 9722]} This observation is directly applicable to the Polish packaging waste context, where the effective functioning of the OOO model depends on the willingness of producers to engage substantively — rather than nominally — with the recovery and recycling obligations that producer responsibility legislation imposes.

The interaction between national legislation and EU obligations in the packaging waste domain is further complicated by the need to integrate the requirements of the SUP Directive — including extended producer responsibility obligations for specific single-use plastic categories — into an institutional structure designed primarily around Packaging Directive obligations. This integration requires coordination between the OOO-based EPR system for packaging generally and the product-specific EPR regimes applicable to SUP Directive-covered items. The BDO registry reform represents a structural attempt to address the verification deficit that characterised the pre-reform system, though its full operational effectiveness continues to evolve as implementation progresses and user compliance matures across the producer population subject to reporting obligations.

2.4. Deposit-Return Systems as an Instrument for Achieving SUP Directive Targets

Deposit-return systems operate on a fundamental incentive logic: a financial deposit charged at the point of sale creates a direct economic incentive for consumers to return used beverage containers to designated collection points, thereby achieving capture rates substantially above those attainable through conventional kerbside collection or bring-bank systems. The operational design of DRS varies across national implementations, but the core structural elements comprise a deposit level calibrated to motivate return behaviour, a network of return points — equipped with reverse vending machines (RVM) in automated implementations or operating through manual acceptance at retail outlets — and a centralised clearing house responsible for managing deposit flows, verifying return data, and distributing recovered materials to reprocessors. The governance structure and financing arrangements of the clearing house mechanism are critical determinants of system efficiency and the equitable distribution of costs and revenues among producers, retailers, and the system operator.

The performance record of established DRS implementations demonstrates the capacity of well-designed systems to achieve collection rates that conventional systems cannot match. Norway's Infinitum system has achieved collection rates of approximately 92% for plastic beverage bottles; Germany's Deutsches Pfandsystem (DPG), introduced in 2003, has reached return rates of approximately 98% for one-way beverage containers subject to the deposit obligation. The closed-loop recycling potential enabled by well-designed DRS constitutes a particularly significant material quality advantage: separately collected, deposit-bearing PET bottles can be recycled into new food-contact packaging, a standard that broader collection systems typically cannot achieve because the purity and homogeneity of deposit-stream materials substantially exceeds that of commingled plastic waste. ^[12] The material quality differential between deposit-stream and non-deposit plastic packaging waste streams has important implications for the SUP Directive's objective of driving collection towards levels sufficient to support genuine closed-loop recycling.

Poland's deposit-return system — the system kaucyjny — was established by the Act of 13 October 2023 and encompasses single-use plastic bottles up to 3 litres, reusable glass bottles up to 1.5 litres, and metal beverage cans up to 1 litre. The system operates through a designated system operator responsible for administering the clearing house, managing the deposit fund, and coordinating the return point network across national territory. The SUP Directive's collection targets — 77% of single-use plastic beverage bottles by 2025 and 90% by 2029 — impose binding obligations that the system kaucyjny is designed to enable Poland to meet.^{[18, s. 69]} The critical assessment of the system's design must engage with the adequacy of return point density, the incentive effect of the deposit level, and the governance arrangements of the system operator in collectively driving consumer participation to the levels mandated by those targets within the prescribed timeframe.

Country / System	Year introduced	Approx. collection rate (beverage containers)	Relation to SUP 90% (2029) target
Norway (Infinitum)	1972	~92%	Exceeds target
Germany (DPG)	2003	~98%	Exceeds target
Sweden (Returpack)	1984	~85%	Meets 77% (2025) target
Poland (kaucja)	2025	Target: 77% by 2025; 90% by 2029	Implementation phase

2.5. Extended Producer Responsibility Schemes for Packaging: Financing Models and Governance

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) constitutes the principal financing mechanism through which the costs of post-consumer packaging waste management are allocated to the producers who place packaging on the market. The theoretical basis of EPR is the polluter-pays principle as applied at product level: those who derive economic benefit from placing packaging on the market should bear the associated end-of-life management costs, rather than externalising them to public budgets. The operationalisation of EPR for packaging has evolved from the pioneering German Duales System Deutschland, established in 1991, through to the mandatory EU-wide EPR requirements introduced under the amended Packaging Directive (2018/852) and reinforced by the SUP Directive's Article 8 obligations for specific covered product categories. This evolution reflects a progressive consensus that voluntary producer engagement with waste management financing is insufficient to achieve EU recycling targets, and that structural legislative compulsion is a prerequisite for adequate system financing.

Three principal EPR financing models are identifiable in EU practice. The individual compliance model places responsibility directly on each producer to demonstrate that required quantities of packaging are recovered and recycled, typically through contracting with certified waste management operators. The collective model — operationalised through producer responsibility organisations — pools producer obligations into a shared scheme that collectively finances collection and recycling operations, with individual contributions typically calculated on the basis of the type and weight of packaging placed on the market. The hybrid model combines elements of both approaches. Eco-modulation — the differentiation of producer fee contributions based on the recyclability, recycled content, or environmental impact of packaging — has emerged as a significant policy innovation most extensively developed in France's Citeo scheme, where fee modulation creates direct financial incentives for producers to redesign packaging so as to facilitate material recovery. The circular economy business model literature further identifies industrial symbiosis — in which companies form systemic relationships to exchange materials and energy — as a complementary mechanism through which packaging material value can be retained; the EU has actively promoted such symbiotic approaches across member states. ^[10]

• Individual compliance models afford producers flexibility but impose higher administrative burdens and may create incentives to minimise declared packaging volumes, potentially undermining system financing adequacy.
• Collective PRO models achieve economies of scale and simplify producer compliance but may generate free-riding risks and weaken the direct linkage between producer packaging decisions and waste management costs.
• Eco-modulated fee structures align producer incentives with circular economy design principles, rewarding mono-material packaging, recycled content, and designs that facilitate efficient sorting and reprocessing.
• Robust governance mechanisms — including mandatory auditing of PRO operations, public reporting of recovery and recycling data, and regulatory oversight of fee-setting — are essential prerequisites for ensuring that EPR systems deliver genuine physical recovery rather than nominal documentary compliance.

The governance of PRO schemes has been identified as a particular challenge in national systems where oversight capacity is limited and verification of physical recycling outcomes has not been systematically enforced. Poland's OOO-based EPR model has been characterised by structural weaknesses in the linkage between producer financial contributions and verifiable physical recycling, a deficit that the 2023 reform trajectory addresses through strengthened audit requirements, enhanced BDO registry functionality, and revised authorisation criteria for producer responsibility organisations. The SUP Directive's Article 10 financing obligations — requiring producers of covered products to fund public awareness campaigns and reporting activities — add a further governance dimension, demanding coordination between product-specific and packaging-general EPR schemes. In the context of broader circular economy policy analyses, it has been consistently observed that transition to circular business models requires multi-sector value chain cooperation that regulatory frameworks can structurally incentivise but cannot alone generate. ^[8] The effectiveness of EPR as a financing and governance instrument for packaging waste management is therefore ultimately contingent on the depth of producer engagement with the circular economy design principles that the EU regulatory framework seeks to embed across the packaging value chain.

Table 2.2. Comparison of EPR financing models for packaging waste in selected EU Member States

Member State	EPR model	Key PRO	Eco-modulation	Primary governance challenge
Germany	Collective (competitive PROs)	Multiple (formerly DSD)	Partial	PRO competition undermining coherence
France	Collective (single PRO)	Citeo	Advanced	Fee level adequacy for full cost coverage
Belgium	Collective (single PRO)	Fost Plus	Moderate	Urban/rural infrastructure parity
Poland	Collective (OOO)	Multiple OOO	Limited	Physical recycling verification; BDO implementation

Chapter 3. Environmental and Economic Impacts of SUP Regulation on Packaging Waste

3.1. Environmental Consequences of Single-Use Plastic Packaging: Empirical Evidence

The environmental burden associated with single-use plastic packaging has been extensively documented through marine litter monitoring programmes operating under the Oslo/Paris Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). Beach litter surveys conducted across EU Member States consistently identify single-use packaging formats — including bottles, bottle caps, food containers, and flexible wrappers — as constituting the dominant share of recorded coastal and marine debris. The persistence of plastic materials in marine and terrestrial environments, which may extend to several centuries for certain polymer types, distinguishes plastic packaging from organic waste streams and renders litter prevention qualitatively distinct from other environmental management objectives. The volume of single-use packaging placed on the market, combined with inadequate collection and disposal infrastructure in many contexts, has produced a global accumulation dynamic that regulation operating at the point of use can at best moderate over the medium term.

The fragmentation of discarded plastic packaging into progressively smaller particles constitutes a secondary environmental burden of particular concern. Larger plastic items exposed to ultraviolet radiation, mechanical abrasion, and wave action degrade into microplastics — particles below five millimetres in diameter — that become widely distributed across marine water columns, sediments, and biota. Single-use packaging materials, owing to their low density and extensive dispersal following littering events, are consistently identified as a significant source of environmental microplastic contamination. The ubiquity of microplastics in environmental matrices complicates remediation and implies that full environmental recovery will require timescales substantially exceeding those of the regulatory cycles within which the SUP Directive and its successors operate.

Toxicological impacts on marine and freshwater biota have been documented in relation to both the physical properties of ingested plastic fragments and the chemical characteristics of plastic polymers and their associated additives. Plastic packaging waste contains flame retardants, bisphenol A (BPA), phthalate plasticisers, and heavy metals including lead and cadmium, which may leach into aquatic environments from landfilled or littered materials and bioaccumulate through food chains. ^[7] Entanglement and ingestion by marine vertebrates — including sea turtles, marine mammals, and pelagic seabirds — have been associated with mortality through internal injury, obstruction of digestive function, and reduced feeding capacity, with cascading effects on affected populations. ^[7] The human health dimension of plastic chemical exposure, mediated through consumption of contaminated marine organisms, has been identified as a further area of regulatory concern, with potential associations with cardiovascular and endocrine disruption outcomes reported in the toxicological literature. ^[7]

Monitoring data collected in the period following the SUP Directive's adoption in 2019 indicate preliminary reductions in the relative frequency of targeted item categories in beach litter surveys conducted under MSFD programmes in Member States achieving full transposition and enforcement. Items subject to marketing restrictions — including single-use plastic cutlery, straws, cotton bud sticks, and expanded polystyrene food containers — have been observed at diminishing rates in environmental monitoring datasets from compliant jurisdictions. However, the relatively short post-Directive observation window, combined with the long persistence of pre-existing plastic accumulation in environmental matrices, constrains the attribution of observed trends exclusively to regulatory causation. The incomplete harmonisation of litter monitoring methodologies across Member States further limits the comparability of national reporting data submitted under Article 13 of the Directive.

• Single-use plastic packaging items are consistently identified as the dominant component of marine litter in EU-level MSFD monitoring programmes, with beach litter surveys confirming their disproportionate environmental representation relative to other waste categories.
• Microplastic generation from fragmentation of littered packaging constitutes a secondary and largely irreversible environmental burden over multi-decadal timescales, with distribution extending to the most remote marine environments.
• Chemical additives present in plastic packaging — including BPA, phthalates, and heavy metals — have documented pathways of environmental release through leaching from improperly managed waste, bioaccumulation in aquatic organisms, and potential human health exposure through marine food chains. ^[7]
• Post-Directive monitoring evidence suggests measurable reductions in targeted SUP item categories in compliant Member States, though attribution to regulatory causation requires further longitudinal data collection over a longer observation period.

3.2. Lifecycle Assessment as a Tool for Evaluating Substitution Strategies

The adoption of lifecycle assessment (LCA) methodology as a framework for evaluating the environmental consequences of substituting single-use plastic packaging with alternative materials has become central to the policy debate surrounding the SUP Directive's implementation. LCA provides a systematic basis for quantifying environmental burdens across the full production-to-disposal cycle of a product system, encompassing raw material extraction, manufacturing, transport, use phase, and end-of-life treatment. When applied to packaging substitution scenarios, LCA enables comparison of global warming potential (GWP), cumulative energy demand, water consumption, and toxicity indicators between incumbent plastic packaging and candidate alternatives including paper, cardboard, glass, stainless steel, reusable polymers, and bio-based materials. The European Commission's regulatory impact assessment work accompanying the SUP Directive drew substantially upon LCA evidence in calibrating the scope of product-specific restrictions and the balance between outright bans and consumption reduction measures.

A consistent finding in the peer-reviewed LCA literature on packaging substitution is that alternatives to single-use plastics do not uniformly demonstrate environmental superiority across all impact categories. Glass beverage containers exhibit substantially higher GWP per use cycle than equivalent plastic bottles, owing to the energy intensity of glass production and the weight penalties associated with transportation. Reusable bag systems based on woven fabric for consumer goods similarly require a large number of reuse cycles to offset the considerably higher resource inputs of their production relative to single-use plastic carrier bags — a result that has been replicated across multiple LCA studies and that informed the selective regulatory approach of the Directive, targeting litter-prone items rather than pursuing a comprehensive prohibition of single-use plastic formats. The choice of functional unit — the unit of comparison between competing packaging systems — substantially influences LCA outcomes and must be carefully specified when translating lifecycle evidence into policy-relevant conclusions.

Recycled plastic, for certain polymer types such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), can achieve significant reductions in GWP relative to virgin material production, with closed-loop recycling systems capable of retaining material quality across multiple cycles when polymer decontamination processes are applied. ^[12] For polypropylene (PP), however, the heterogeneity of mixed household waste streams imposes technical limits on the quality of the recycled output that is achievable through current sorting and reprocessing infrastructure, and closed-loop recycling of PP into new food-contact packaging faces significant practical constraints under present technological and market conditions. ^[12] These polymer-specific characteristics have direct implications for the LCA-informed assessment of substitution strategies: the comparative advantage of recycled over virgin plastic material is substantially greater for PET managed through deposit return systems than for PP recovered from kerbside collection, and regulatory design must therefore be sensitive to the functional performance differences between packaging materials across the circular economy chain.

The integration of LCA findings into ongoing policy development remains inconsistently institutionalised across Member States, and the absence of a harmonised EU-level LCA database for packaging materials continues to constrain fully comparable assessments. Provisions establishing recycled content targets — most notably the requirement for PET beverage bottles to incorporate a minimum of twenty-five per cent recycled content by 2025 — reflect an LCA-informed recognition that increasing the recycled material fraction of plastic packaging reduces its lifecycle GWP burden. The methodological limitations of LCA for bio-based and compostable materials, where data quality and end-of-life pathway assumptions generate wide ranges in calculated impacts, represent a further challenge for evidence-based regulatory calibration as novel material substitutes enter the packaging market.

Material Alternative	GWP per Use Cycle vs. Single-Use Plastic	Closed-Loop Recycling Potential	Key LCA Consideration
Recycled PET (deposit-collected)	Substantially lower	High — decontamination reverses degradation [12]	Deposit systems enable supply of high-quality secondary material suitable for food-contact reuse [12]
Glass container (reusable)	Higher per production cycle; lower over many reuses	Not applicable (inert material)	Net GWP benefit requires consistently high return rates sustained over many reuse cycles
Paper and cardboard packaging	Comparable or higher across most categories	Moderate — limited by contamination and fibre degradation	Lower environmental persistence in litter scenarios; comparison highly sensitive to functional unit definition
Woven or fabric bags (reusable)	Substantially higher per cycle; lower only over very frequent reuse	Not applicable	Very high reuse frequency required for net GWP benefit; impact concentrated at production stage
Bio-based plastics (PLA-type)	Variable; often comparable to fossil-based per cycle	Limited — requires industrial composting infrastructure	End-of-life pathway determines overall environmental profile; benefit not guaranteed without appropriate waste management
Recycled PP (mixed household stream)	Lower than virgin PP but highly variable	Limited — polymer degradation and stream heterogeneity constrain quality [12]	Mixed PP streams cannot technically facilitate closed-loop food-contact recycling under current conditions [12]

3.3. Economic Costs and Benefits of the SUP Directive for Producers and Distributors

The economic consequences of the SUP Directive for the production and distribution sectors encompass both compliance cost burdens borne by regulated entities and broader economic benefits arising from avoided environmental externalities and stimulated innovation in sustainable packaging markets. Compliance costs fall into several distinct categories: direct costs of product reformulation and materials substitution, capital expenditure associated with investment in alternative packaging technologies and manufacturing equipment, financial contributions to extended producer responsibility systems, and administrative costs of registration, reporting, and auditing obligations. The distribution of these costs across the producer population is not uniform, and the capacity of enterprises to absorb compliance expenditure varies significantly with organisational scale and access to capital and technical expertise.

The economic rationale for regulatory intervention in plastic packaging markets rests upon the identification of significant environmental externalities that are not internalised through market mechanisms in the absence of binding rules. It has been observed in the sustainability economics literature that the negative environmental costs attributable to business operations are frequently of a scale comparable to reported commercial profits when subjected to comprehensive environmental accounting — implying that unpriced externalities effectively constitute a subsidy to resource-intensive production models at the expense of ecosystems and future generations. ^[14] The European Commission's impact assessment for the SUP Directive estimated that the annual costs of plastic litter in EU coastal and marine environments — encompassing public clean-up operations, fisheries losses, and impacts on coastal tourism — amounted to substantial economic losses annually across the Union, with avoided costs of this magnitude constituting a principal quantifiable benefit of successful regulatory implementation. These estimates provide the macroeconomic justification for compliance costs imposed at the producer level.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) engaged in food service, retail, and packaging manufacturing face particular challenges in managing SUP compliance costs relative to large producers. Product reformulation requires design capacity, access to alternative material supply chains, and the ability to absorb transitional cost increases ahead of volume-driven unit cost reductions as markets for alternative materials scale up. In Germany — a national context characterised by a mature extended producer responsibility infrastructure and a competitive producer responsibility organisation market — the Packaging Act's provisions for recyclability-based fee modulation create financial incentives for packaging design improvement, with CO₂-related certificate requirements introduced from January 2024 adding a further economic signal at the level of packaging waste management system operations. ^[13] Analogous EPR fee differentiation mechanisms, where implemented in other Member States, are creating differentiated cost pressures on producers of packaging formats with low recyclability ratings.

The economic benefits accruing to producers from SUP compliance are less immediately measurable than the costs but include resource efficiency gains from reduced material intensity, first-mover advantages in sustainable packaging innovation markets, and the mitigation of reputational and commercial risks associated with continued dependence on formats subject to ongoing regulatory tightening. Circular economy business model transitions — involving the redesign of packaging systems to enable material recovery, reuse, and secondary market participation — require substantial up-front investment but can generate long-term value through retained material ownership, reduced virgin resource expenditure, and differentiated market positioning as sustainable procurement criteria become increasingly prevalent among institutional buyers. ^[14] The competitive dynamics of packaging supply chains are accordingly being restructured by regulatory cost signals, with distributional effects that tend to favour enterprises possessing the capital and technical capacity to undertake comprehensive and early adaptation.

Table 3.1. Economic cost and benefit categories associated with SUP Directive compliance for producers and distributors

Category	Cost or Benefit	Primarily Affected Parties	Scale and Notes
Product reformulation and materials substitution	Cost	Manufacturers of restricted SUP item categories	Variable by sector and product complexity; disproportionately burdensome for SMEs without in-house design capacity
EPR financial contributions	Cost	All packaging producers under Art. 8 and Art. 10 financing obligations	Fee-modulated by recyclability in advanced systems such as Germany's Packaging Act framework [13]
Reporting, registration, and auditing obligations	Cost	All producers subject to EPR and SUP obligations; disproportionate burden on SMEs	Includes national registry participation, annual quantity reporting, and PRO audit compliance
Avoided litter clean-up and environmental damage costs	Benefit	Public authorities; fisheries and coastal tourism sectors	European Commission estimates substantial annual savings for EU coastal economies if collection and reduction targets are achieved
Resource efficiency gains from reduced virgin material use	Benefit	Producers achieving circular packaging redesign and secondary material integration	Conditional on establishment of high-quality secondary plastic material markets; currently strongest for PET [12]
Sustainable packaging innovation market development	Benefit	First-mover enterprises in alternative packaging formats and reuse systems	Growing institutional and retailer sustainable procurement requirements amplify commercial advantage of early compliance investment [14]

3.4. Impacts on Consumers and the Retail Sector: Behavioural and Market Dimensions

Consumer behaviour with respect to single-use plastic packaging has been demonstrably influenced by regulatory instruments that alter the price or availability of targeted products. The most extensively evidenced regulatory mechanism is the plastic carrier bag levy, implemented across numerous Member States prior to and following the SUP Directive, which has produced substantial reductions in plastic bag consumption in each implementing jurisdiction. Monitoring data compiled by national competent authorities indicate consumption reductions in the range of fifty to ninety per cent following the introduction of charges, with the magnitude of reduction conditioned by the level of the levy, the baseline of pre-levy consumption, and the concurrent availability of free alternatives at retail points. These consumption impacts are understood to operate through multiple behavioural pathways: direct price sensitivity, normalisation of reusable bag carry behaviour through habitual change, and the framing effect of the levy as a signal of environmental cost that activates environmental identity motivations among segments of the consumer population.

The labelling requirements established under Article 7 of the SUP Directive — mandating harmonised markings on certain product categories indicating plastic content and appropriate disposal pathways — represent a complementary mechanism for consumer information and behaviour modification. Awareness of environmental impacts associated with plastic packaging has been identified in consumer survey research as a significant factor in stated purchase preference and willingness to accept price premiums for packaging alternatives, though the translation of environmental awareness into consistent purchasing behaviour at point of sale is subject to the relative availability and cost of alternatives. The retail sector accordingly plays a pivotal mediating role: shelf-space allocation, pricing decisions, and default packaging choices at checkout substantially determine the ease of access to compliant and sustainable packaging alternatives for the majority of consumers.

Market transformation in the packaging sector has been accelerated by the combination of regulatory requirements and retailer-led sustainable procurement policies. Major supermarket chains operating across European markets have adopted voluntary commitments to phase out single-use plastic packaging in own-label product lines, establishing internal timelines that in some cases outpace statutory requirements and function as demand signals to packaging manufacturers throughout the supply chain. In the Polish retail market, the ownership structure of the sector — characterised by a high market share held by international chains with centralised European procurement functions — has facilitated the transfer of corporate sustainability commitments across national markets, establishing a parallel regulatory channel through commercial supply chain requirements that operates alongside, and in some respects faster than, the formal transposition of EU legislation.

Deposit return systems for beverage containers represent the most structurally significant market mechanism for achieving high separate collection rates of plastic bottles, and jurisdictions where such systems operate have demonstrated both high consumer return rates and the supply of high-quality secondary PET material suitable for closed-loop recycling into new food-contact packaging. ^[12] The fragmentation of national deposit system designs creates barriers to cross-border product flows and constrains the development of integrated secondary material markets at EU scale. Consumer acceptance of deposit return systems has generally been high in markets where infrastructure is well-developed and the incentive value of the deposit is calibrated appropriately, and the normalisation of return behaviour reinforces broader separate collection habits that support the wider circular economy objectives of the SUP Directive's framework.

• Plastic carrier bag levies have produced consumption reductions of fifty to ninety per cent in implementing Member States, providing the most robust behavioural evidence for the effectiveness of economic instruments as complements to product-specific SUP restrictions.
• Article 7 labelling requirements operate as a consumer information mechanism whose behavioural impact is conditioned by the concurrent availability and relative price of packaging alternatives at point of purchase.
• International supermarket chains function as amplifiers of regulatory demand signals throughout packaging supply chains, adopting voluntary packaging commitments that propagate SUP reduction objectives beyond the formal scope of Directive obligations. ^[14]
• Deposit return systems demonstrate high consumer acceptance and generate high-quality secondary PET streams suited to closed-loop recycling, establishing a model for collection infrastructure whose geographic extension across Member States remains a priority for achieving the Directive's 2029 collection targets. ^[12]

3.5. Effectiveness Assessment: Progress Towards the Directive's Quantitative Targets and Remaining Gaps

The SUP Directive establishes a set of quantitative targets against which national implementation progress can be assessed: separate collection of plastic beverage bottles is required to reach seventy-seven per cent of quantities placed on the market by 2025, rising to ninety per cent by 2029, and PET beverage bottles must incorporate a minimum of twenty-five per cent recycled content by 2025, increasing to thirty per cent for all plastic beverage bottles by 2030. Progress towards these targets is monitored through national reporting under Article 13 of the Directive, with the European Environment Agency (EEA) aggregating national data to support EU-level assessment. The heterogeneity of baseline collection infrastructure, measurement methodology, and transposition completeness across Member States creates significant variation in reported progress and limits the precision of uniform EU-wide effectiveness assessments.

Among Member States with mature waste management infrastructure, plastic packaging recycling rates have shown measurable improvement in the years following the Directive's adoption. In Germany — a national context characterised by comprehensive separate collection infrastructure and competitive producer responsibility organisation structures operating under the Packaging Act — the plastic packaging recycling rate exceeded fifty per cent for the first time in 2022, placing the country above the relevant 2025 target thresholds. ^[13] This outcome was achieved within a governance framework that provides recyclability-based fee incentives for producers and applies CO₂-related cost signals to waste management operations, ^[13] illustrating the performance potential of EPR instruments when integrated with robust collection and sorting infrastructure. It is noted, however, that Germany's advanced regulatory and infrastructure context differs in significant respects from Member States at earlier stages of packaging waste system development, and the transferability of German performance benchmarks to less mature systems requires careful qualification.

The overall assessment of SUP Directive effectiveness must acknowledge both quantifiable progress in targeted item categories and persistent structural gaps that constrain the achievement of circular economy objectives. The regulatory scope of the Directive, while covering the plastic items most frequently identified in litter surveys, does not comprehensively address all categories of plastic packaging contributing to environmental contamination. Novel plastic formats — including flexible multilayer packaging and thin-gauge plastics used in fresh produce applications — present collection and sorting challenges that current infrastructure is not uniformly equipped to resolve. The barriers to high-quality plastic recycling arising from material heterogeneity and contamination — most acute in mixed household waste streams — continue to limit the secondary material supply available for circular reuse, particularly for polypropylene and mixed polyethylene fractions where technical constraints on closed-loop outcomes persist under current commercial conditions. ^[12]

Enforcement heterogeneity across Member States constitutes a further limitation on the overall effectiveness of the Directive framework. Differences in transposition timelines, the scope and specificity of national implementing legislation, and the intensity of market surveillance have created uneven regulatory conditions within the single market, affecting competitive dynamics in the packaging supply chain. The European Commission's proposal for a revised Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation — advanced in 2022 and subject to legislative negotiation through 2023 and 2024 — reflects a policy judgement that the directive instrument, permitting significant national variation in transposition, should be complemented by directly applicable regulation establishing uniform requirements in areas where regulatory fragmentation demonstrably impairs environmental outcome consistency. This legislative trajectory indicates that the SUP Directive is understood by the Commission not as a terminal regulatory response but as a foundational instrument within an evolving regulatory architecture.

Table 3.2. Key quantitative targets under the SUP Directive and indicative implementation status as of mid-2024

Target	Directive Provision	Deadline	Indicative Implementation Status
77% separate collection of plastic beverage bottles (by weight)	Art. 9(1)(a)	2025	On track in Member States with operational deposit return systems; infrastructure investment requirements remain in Member States relying on kerbside-only collection
90% separate collection of plastic beverage bottles (by weight)	Art. 9(1)(b)	2029	Achievable for Member States with deposit return systems; significant gap in Member States without dedicated return infrastructure
Minimum 25% recycled content in PET beverage bottles	Art. 6(5)	2025	Met or approaching compliance in major producing Member States with developed secondary PET markets; dependent on high-quality separate collection supply chains [12]
Minimum 30% recycled content in all plastic beverage bottles	Art. 6(5)	2030	Dependent on scaling of separate collection and secondary PET supply; PP and multilayer bottle types present additional technical challenges
Measurable reduction in consumption of food containers and cups for immediate consumption (no quantified national target; monitoring and national measures)	Art. 4	Ongoing (measures by 2021)	National measures of varying ambition implemented; consumption trend data collection not fully harmonised across Member States
Plastic packaging recycling rate above national packaging waste directive thresholds	General packaging EPR obligation; Art. 8 financing	2025 and 2030 milestones	Germany above 50% by 2022 [13]; significant variation across Member States; Poland and others in reform trajectory

A balanced assessment of the SUP Directive's contribution to circular economy objectives must recognise that the instrument addresses a defined segment of the broader packaging waste challenge and operates within a complementary legislative system comprising the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive, the Waste Framework Directive, and the sector-specific EPR frameworks applicable to packaging producers. The Directive's distinctive contribution lies in the identification of litter-prone, high-volume single-use plastic formats as warranting dedicated regulatory attention beyond the scope of general packaging waste management obligations, and in the establishment of binding monitoring and financing requirements that create structural incentives for the progressive reduction of the most environmentally problematic packaging formats. Sustained progress towards circular economy outcomes in the packaging sector requires, beyond regulatory collection targets, continued improvements in the quality and economic viability of secondary material markets — particularly for polymer types where current technical conditions constrain closed-loop potential ^[12] — and upstream design-for-recyclability commitments that regulatory frameworks can structurally incentivise but that require active implementation by market actors throughout the packaging value chain. ^[14]

Conclusion

The analysis presented in the preceding chapters permits a reasoned evaluation of Directive (EU) 2019/904 on the reduction of the impact of certain plastic products on the environment — commonly designated the Single-Use Plastics Directive — as an instrument of environmental governance within the European Union's evolving circular economy framework. It has been demonstrated that the Directive constitutes a structurally differentiated regulatory response, deploying prohibition, consumption reduction obligations, and extended producer responsibility in a manner calibrated to the severity of each product category's environmental burden and the commercial availability of alternative materials. This differentiation distinguishes the SUP Directive from blunter regulatory instruments and reflects a deliberate legislative choice to subordinate prohibitory measures to a proportionality test grounded in substitution feasibility. Taken as a whole, the Directive represents a meaningful advance in the supranational governance of plastic pollution, translating the political ambitions of the European Green Deal and the 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan into legally binding obligations enforceable against Member States. Nevertheless, the breadth of the instrument's ambition is not uniformly matched by the coherence of its implementation architecture, and the evidence reviewed across all three chapters points to a persistent gap between the Directive's stated objectives and the operational conditions that would be required to realise them in full.

The Directive's regulatory logic rests on three principal mechanisms whose effectiveness varies significantly according to the product category and national context in which they operate. The prohibitory regime established under Article 5 targets product categories for which cost-competitive alternatives are commercially available, and the evidence reviewed suggests that, where enforced, it has succeeded in removing the most problematic items — oxo-degradable plastics, certain cutlery, plates, and cotton bud sticks — from the internal market. The consumption reduction framework of Article 4, applying to food containers and cups for beverages, has generated more heterogeneous outcomes, with behavioural evidence from levy systems indicating that price-based instruments can achieve substantial reductions — in the range of fifty to ninety percent for plastic carrier bags — provided that the price signal is sufficiently material and consistently applied. The extended producer responsibility system introduced under Article 8 represents the Directive's most structurally ambitious element, imposing financial responsibility on producers for litter clean-up costs and awareness-raising expenditure. However, EPR schemes across Member States have been shown to carry endemic governance weaknesses, particularly with respect to the independent auditing of Producer Responsibility Organisations and the operationalisation of eco-modulation principles that would reward genuinely recyclable packaging design over packaging that merely satisfies formal recyclability criteria. These weaknesses are not incidental deficiencies but structural features of a regulatory model that delegates significant operational responsibility to industry-funded intermediaries whose incentive structures are not straightforwardly aligned with the public interest objectives the Directive pursues.

Poland's experience with the transposition and implementation of the SUP Directive illustrates with particular clarity the challenges that arise when an ambitious supranational regulatory programme encounters an institutional environment characterised by incomplete administrative capacity and pre-existing structural weaknesses in waste governance. The transposition of the Directive through the Act of 14 April 2023 was effected with a delay of nearly two years relative to the 3 July 2021 deadline, exposing the Polish state to the risk of infringement proceedings and confirming a pattern of delayed implementation of EU environmental directives that has been observed across several prior legislative cycles. The delay cannot be attributed solely to administrative capacity constraints; it reflects in part the political sensitivity of imposing additional compliance costs on domestic producers and retail operators in the context of broader economic pressures. More consequentially, the structural features of Poland's packaging waste management system — characterised by fragmented municipal competences, incomplete verification of whether materials collected as recyclable are actually subjected to material recovery processes, and PRO arrangements whose compliance verification mechanisms have been repeatedly identified as inadequate by regulatory oversight bodies — create conditions in which formal compliance with collection and recycling targets may mask a substantially lower rate of genuine circular material flow. The operational launch of the Polish deposit return system in October 2025, mandated to achieve collection rates of seventy-seven percent by 2025 and ninety percent by 2029 for SUP beverage containers, represents the most significant institutional development in Poland's packaging waste governance since the introduction of the extended producer responsibility framework, and its performance will constitute the principal empirical test of Poland's capacity to meet the Directive's most demanding collection obligations.

The most significant obstacles to the effective application of the SUP Directive can be grouped under three headings: legal, institutional, and economic. At the legal level, the persistence of divergence in national transposition approaches — including differences in the scope of product definitions, the stringency of fee structures for EPR obligations, and the calibration of penalties for non-compliance — undermines the Directive's function as a harmonising instrument and creates conditions for regulatory arbitrage within the single market. The proposed Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation of 2022, which would replace the 1994 Directive with a directly applicable regulation, has been advanced in part as a response to this transposition heterogeneity, but its legislative progress has been slowed by intense lobbying from packaging industry operators and by the political difficulty of imposing mandatory reuse targets on Member States with differing commercial infrastructure. At the institutional level, the auditing deficit in EPR governance is the single most consequential operational weakness. The absence in most Member States of systematic, independent verification that PRO-reported recycling outcomes correspond to actual material recovery — rather than to collection and export to processing markets where final recovery rates are unverified — means that headline recycling statistics may systematically overstate circular economy performance. At the economic level, the distributional impact of compliance costs on small and medium-sized enterprises has been insufficiently addressed in both the Directive's design and in national transposition measures. SMEs face compliance cost structures that are disproportionate relative to their market share, particularly in the context of EPR fee collection and mandatory marking requirements, and the absence of targeted support mechanisms risks creating competitive distortions that may impede the broader adoption of more sustainable packaging designs across the supply chain.

The analysis of the obstacles identified above points toward a set of recommendations at both the European Union and national levels that, if adopted, would materially improve the effectiveness and coherence of the SUP regulatory framework. At the EU level, the most pressing legislative priority is the adoption of the proposed Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation in a form that preserves its ambition on mandatory reuse targets and recyclability requirements while providing sufficiently clear transition timelines to permit orderly market adjustment. The Commission should additionally develop binding minimum standards for EPR scheme auditing — including third-party physical verification of recycling outcomes at processing facilities — to replace the current reliance on PRO self-reporting, which has been shown to be structurally insufficient as a compliance assurance mechanism. Harmonisation of the methodology for measuring and reporting packaging waste recycling rates, including a standardised definition of the point at which input to a recycling process counts as recycled for statistical purposes, would significantly reduce the scope for divergence in reported performance that currently obscures genuine inter-Member State differences in circular economy progress. At the national level in Poland, the consolidation of municipal packaging waste governance through the strengthening of marshal office oversight of gmina-level collection contracts — and the introduction of mandatory publication of itemised collection and verified recycling data at the municipal level — would address the verification deficit that currently prevents effective regulatory accountability. The Polish deposit return system should be supported by a dedicated monitoring framework from the outset, with quarterly reporting obligations enabling early identification of systemic underperformance before annual collection targets become binding. The regulatory framework for eco-modulation of EPR fees should be operationalised in a manner that creates genuine material financial incentives for producers to adopt packaging designs that are demonstrably recyclable in existing national collection infrastructure, rather than recyclable only in ideal or hypothetical processing conditions.

The broader question posed in the research design — whether the prohibitory and producer-responsibility-based regulatory model exemplified by the SUP Directive offers a replicable architecture for addressing other categories of problematic packaging waste — admits a qualified affirmative answer, with important caveats derived from the evidence reviewed. The SUP Directive's differentiated instrument mix, its integration within a multi-level legislative architecture, and its explicit grounding in the waste hierarchy and the polluter-pays principle constitute features of the regulatory design that are, in principle, applicable to other packaging material streams where discrete categories of high-environmental-impact products can be identified and where the availability-of-alternatives condition can be satisfied. The Directive's demonstrated effectiveness in achieving rapid market withdrawal of prohibited product categories, where enforcement has been maintained, confirms that prohibitory measures remain a legitimate and efficient regulatory tool where substitution is commercially feasible. However, the evidence also confirms that the Directive's performance in its most ambitious dimension — the EPR framework and the collection and recycling targets — is heavily dependent on institutional conditions that cannot be assumed to be uniformly present across Member States and cannot be created through legislative mandate alone. The replicability of the model is therefore conditional on a simultaneous investment in the administrative and verification infrastructure that makes EPR obligations operationally meaningful, and on a willingness by Member States to subject PRO governance to genuinely independent oversight. Where these conditions are absent, the risk is that the extension of the SUP Directive's model to additional product categories will produce the same gap between formal compliance and substantive environmental outcome that the preceding analysis has identified as the Directive's most persistent and consequential limitation.

In conclusion, the Single-Use Plastics Directive represents a legally significant and conceptually coherent instrument for the reduction of plastic packaging's environmental impact, whose effectiveness is constrained in practice by the institutional weaknesses of the EPR governance systems through which its principal obligations are operationalised, and by the heterogeneity of national transposition and enforcement capacity across the Member States. Poland's implementation experience — characterised by delayed transposition, structural fragilities in packaging waste verification, and the ongoing challenge of building operational capacity in the deposit return system — is illustrative of a broader pattern in which ambitious supranational environmental regulation achieves its greatest impact at the level of market design and product prohibition, while encountering persistent friction at the level of collection infrastructure and compliance verification. The recommendations identified above do not require a fundamental reconception of the SUP Directive's regulatory logic; they require rather a more rigorous investment in the institutional substrate — independent auditing, harmonised measurement, and operationally meaningful eco-modulation — that would allow the Directive's existing framework to fulfil its stated environmental objectives. The circular economy transition in packaging, of which the SUP Directive is one element, will ultimately be measured not by the sophistication of its legislative architecture but by the volume of packaging material that is demonstrably returned to productive use, and it is by that standard that the implementation of the Directive must continue to be assessed.

List of Tables

1. Table 1.1. Product Categories Under Directive (EU) 2019/904 and Applicable Regulatory Instruments
2. Table 1.2. Transposition of Directive (EU) 2019/904 in Selected Member States
3. Table 2.1. Comparative packaging waste collection systems and performance indicators in selected EU Member States
4. Table 2.2. Comparison of EPR financing models for packaging waste in selected EU Member States
5. Table 3.1. Economic cost and benefit categories associated with SUP Directive compliance for producers and distributors
6. Table 3.2. Key quantitative targets under the SUP Directive and indicative implementation status as of mid-2024

List of Figures

1. Figure 1.1. The position of Directive (EU) 2019/904 within the EU circular economy legal architecture
2. Figure 2.1. Deposit-return system collection rate performance in selected European countries relative to SUP Directive targets (schematic overview)
3. Figure 3.1. Comparative lifecycle assessment profile of selected packaging alternatives to single-use plastic formats (qualitative summary; environmental performance is highly dependent on product category, use frequency, and system boundary assumptions)