May 2025

DE MINIMIS REPORTING UNDER EXTENDED PRODUCER RESPONSIBILIITY

It's important to be aware of the de minimis ruling regarding reporting of tonnages.

Please see the following example as to how the rules would be applied:

A member company who is a large company prints products which are branded i.e. the customer is then a brandowner. If the customer is also a large company then the brandowner will pick up the EPR fees. However, if the customer i.e the brandowner is a small company under the EPR rules then the printer would be obligated as the distributor to:

1) Declare packaging they print branding onto and supply unfilled to the brand owner customer that is a small producer

2) Fulfil the associated recycling/PRN obligation

3) Pay EPR disposal fees for that packaging where it's likely to become household waste

The customer, if i?t is a small producer, would also need to declare the packaging in their single annual report, but they would not incur any PRN or EPR fees for it. In this example where the packaging carries the small brand owner's brand, they would report it as brand owner. If they then supply this packaging to its end user, they would also need to collect and report nation data for this packaging. If the customer is less than £1 million turnover then they are not even a small company under the EPR regulations so they would not even have a reporting obligation.

It's therefore recommended to know what category your customer falls into to ensure that you are reporting correctly. We appreciate that this is an administrative problem in a lot of cases and as such we are lobbying to get the de-minimus rules removing.

To read more about this, click here. Other questions can be directed to Jon Clark.